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POLLUTION PREVENTION MULTI-YEAR PLAN
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Description:
Over the last decade, the Agency has increasingly focused on pollution prevention when addressing high-risk human health and environmental problems. A preventive approach requires: (1) innovative design and production techniques that minimize or eliminate adverse environmental impact; (2) holistic approaches that make the most of our air, water, and land resources; and (3) fundamental changes in the ways that goods and services are created and delivered to consumers. As a part of its multi-year plan, EPA has established five long-term goals for pollution prevention and new technologies research. These goals focus on the development of tools, technologies, and sustainable environmental systems approaches and on continuing to prevent and control pollution by targeting sources and sectors that pose the greatest risks to human health and the environment. Within the scope of this MYP the EPA will: 1. Develop new and advanced theories and methods of environmental system analysis, along with decision support tools based on those methods, that can be applied both within and beyond the industrial sector (e.g., municipal, agriculture, transportation, energy). 2. By 2009, complete and document studies in areas such as kinetics, catalysis, reaction engineering, materials, interfaces, separations, and thermodynamics, and applied engineering which will enable regulators and the regulated community to determine how these new concepts can be applied to accelerate the introduction of cleaner processes and materials in specific industries, energy production processes, or consumer products in order to achieve reductions in emissions and resource usage. 3. Provide appropriate and credible performance information about new, commercial-ready environmental technology that influences users to purchase effective environmental technology in the US and abroad. 4. Assemble and deliver to EPA Regions, the Office of Water, and state and local governments a watershed-scale strategy for sustainable environmental systems based on computer based tools and a written manual of suggested management practices to reduce risks to human health and the ecology using combined economics, hydrologic, physical and ecological, land use, legal, and technological methods. 5. Use SBIR incentive funding to develop and commercialize innovative environmental technologies needed by EPA Regions and States and Agency regulatory and compliance programs to protect human health and the environment.