Bosses resist bid to make industry clean up

Date: 18/03/1999

By Simon Coss

AT first glance, it seems a fairly straightforward idea: if you make a mess, you clean it up.

But Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard's efforts to translate this apparently self-evident principle into European law have been fraught with difficulties.

In recent years, Bjerregaard has been trying to ensure that the 'polluter pays' principle is incorporated into many of the European Commission's legislative proposals. This essentially means that the costs of cleaning up environmental damage within the Union should be borne by those responsible for creating it. In reality, this nearly always means industry or farmers.

At present, the clean-up bills for major environmental disasters - such as chemical spills into rivers - often end up being settled by national governments with taxpayers' money.

Bjerregaard's latest effort to change this is a planned White Paper on Civil responsibility which aims to set out industry's responsibility in the event of an ecological catastrophe.

However, the environment supremo's proposals have not been widely welcomed and they have still not been officially unveiled, ten months after they were originally due to be approved by the full Commission.

Within the institution, Bjerregaard's proposals have been heavily criticised by Industry Commissioner Martin Bangemann and his colleague Franz Fischler, who is responsible for agricultural policy. Both are concerned their sectors would be hit unnecessarily hard by Bjerregaard's proposals.

The aspect of her plan which is causing most concern is the so-called 'strict liability' principle, based on the idea that a polluter can be held liable for environmental damage even if it has complied with national laws designed to prevent pollution.

EU employers federation UNICE argues many firms may find it difficult to insure themselves against the risk of enormous bills for repairing environmental damage.

Green campaigners, however, reject this. “If an activity is so dangerous that a company cannot be insured for it, then perhaps it should not be doing it at all,” said Christian Hey of the European Environmental Bureau.