Tesis Guía Para Las Obligaciones Ambientales

The development of chemical industry has been beneficial to the

economy and the society by meeting the increasing demands in

materials, but it has also generated increasingly serious health and

environmental safety problems. Over last four to five decades, some

developed countries started to address the safety issues by developing

policies and legislations to enable them to promote safe

chemical management practices (Commission of the European

Communities, 1967; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2006a).

Significant progress has been made in these developed countries

through the amendments to those regulations based on supporting

documents and scientific research evidence, and the adaptation

of new concepts and tools related to chemical management. The

regulations and practices in environmental chemical management

are advanced in some of the developed countries, and are gradually

evolving into a prevention-oriented chemical risk management

system (EC, 2006).

*

Corresponding author.

E-mail address: wanghong@craes.org.cn (H. Wang).

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Environmental Pollution

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envpol

0269-7491/$ e see front matter
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2011.12.008

Environmental Pollution 165 (2012) 174e181

a

2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The industrialization process in China is now entering its latemiddle

phase. The annual growth rate of China’schemicalindustry

far exceeds that in the United States (US), the European Union (EU)

and Japan, becoming the world’s third largest chemical market and

importer (Jian et al., 2007). However, the structure and layout

of China’s chemical industries are still disorganized, and the environmental

problems caused by chemicals are very prominent.

With rising frequency of chemical-related accidents, environmental

protection has become an important issue in China. In addition, with

China’s entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the pressure

to improve the environmental management of industrial

chemicals has been intensified, and the tasks of implementation of

international conventions are heavy (Mao and Chang, 2008). Foreign

enterprises have been transferring their chemical production lines to

China, further aggravating environmental pollution in the country. In

order to meet these challenges and gradually conform to international

practices of industrial chemical management, the Chinese

government has issued its departmental regulations since 1994 on

the environmental management of toxic

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