METHODOLOGICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL OPTIONS - ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CHEMICALS AS A BASIS FOR POLLUTANTS POLICY

The economy-environmental relationship, the central issue in scientifi c discussions on environmental problems and their solution, can be app roached from many angles. In this article, the angle is that of the co ncept of industrial metabolism: the economy--environment analogy on a material level. One of the instruments related to this concept is the study of the flow of materials in a society's economic system. The app roach presented here builds on the results of several materials balanc e studies. From these studies, it appeared that certain pollution abat ement measures are useful for one chemical, but sometimes surprisingly useless or even counterproductive for another. This has led to the id ea that, in analogy to the environmental behaviour of substances, a su bstance-specific economic behaviour can be detected. The physical/chem ical properties of a chemical, in the context of the surrounding envir onment, determine its environmental behaviour. In this article, it is argued that the same properties, in the context of the ''economic surr oundings'', are responsible for its economic behaviour. If general rul es could thus be discovered for the behaviour of chemicals in the econ omy, it would then become possible to generate recommendations for the management of such chemicals in a relatively simple way. Apparently s trange phenomena may then be explained as a matter of course. Not only exceptional cases, however, but also ''regular'' ones of measures wor king out as expected-that also might vary per substance-may be capture d in those general rules. This would offer fewer new outcomes for alre ady existing pollutant management strategies, but it would create poss ibilities for a profound ''streamlining'' of pollution policy in gener al. This article contains a first exploration of this idea by distingu ishing a set of economic characteristics to explain and predict a subs tance's reaction to certain policy measures.