Study On PRTR System And Its Enlightment To China

Pollutant Release and Transfer Registry (PRTR) is produced in the context of frequent fatal accident of hazardous chemicals. In 1984, Methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited plant in Bhopal, several thousands of people died from this accident. The Bhopal event had a great impact on the United States of America, in 1986, the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) was established in USA as the first PRTR in the world. The TRI program has achieved a great success in the control and reduction of toxic chemical emissions. The Rio conference in 1992 put the pollutant emission inventory into Agenda 21. In 1993, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recommended its members to implement their own PRTR programs using TRI as a model. Since then, Japan, EU and other developed countries and regions have established and implemented their own PRTR systems. A PRTR system is an environmental management system which calls for firms to report periodically on their releases and transfers of pollutants, and then makes this information publicly accessible. A PRTR not only provides comprehensive environmental information for the environmental management, but also makes the firms’environmental performance under public supervision.The success of PRTR system lies in the pressure from environmental groups and the public, the comparison between peers behavior which prompt the enterprise to reduce emissions. The powers of the public and the market incentive enterprises continue to reduce environmental risks, and thus PRTR can not only greatly save the administrative resources, but also encourage companies to control those chemicals which are not subjected to the administrative regulation. Moreover, the PRTR system, to some extent, has overcome the problem of fragmentation produced by traditional environmental regulation. Traditional environmental regulation has too focused on the environment management of the media, ignoring the integrity of the environment problem, and therefore it is not contribute to the improvement of the environment overall quality, but also wastes a lot of social resources. In order to improve the efficiency of environmental regulation, the designer of PRTR system considered the integrity of regulation. In terms of environmental information collection, the data from PRTR system involve a variety of environmental medias and economic activities, these data can help to present the overall picture of environment risks, and thus facilitate the government grasp the competing priorities of environmental regulation, allocate the administrative resources to the most productive areas, and reduce the environmental risk level as a whole in the end.At present, China has entered the stage of frequent chemical pollution accidents, but the existing environmental management systems fail to effectively control environmental pollution. The lag of China’s pollution registry system, the defects of environmental information disclosure system, and the lack of chemicals environmental management system, have greatly affected the effect.of environment pollution control. China needs to establish and implement the PRTR system in order to protect the public right to know, promote pollution reduction, and carry out international obligations. This article first explores and compares the legislative background and implementation process of the United States, Japan, the European Union’s PRTR systems, then sums up the common characteristics of these PRTR. Research on PRTR systems of developed foreign countries provides a variety of path selection for the construction of our own PRTR system, through the comparison and analysis of existing environmental management system in our country, the author finds that the path of Japan PRTR system in legislation is more worthy of reference. This article finally attempts to explore the construction of China’s PRTR system, and proposes several recommendations on how to establish PRTR in chemicals legislation, how to improve or in combination with other existing environmental management system.