Study of Volatile Organic Compound Emissions from Consumer and CommercialProducts. Economic Incentives to Reduce VOC Emissions from Consumer and Commercial Products

摘要

The report presents a preliminary assessment of the feasibility and desirabilityof employing Federal economic incentive programs to reduce volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from the use of consumer and commercial products. The principal tasks of the study are to examine alternative economic incentives and to compare them to a hypothetical command-and-control program, VOC content standards, which would consist of product-specific limitations on maximum VOC content (grams of VOC per unit of product). It is the basis of comparison because the ultimate purpose of this investigation is to search for the most desirable instrument in the set of potential instruments, which obviously would include instruments based on command-and-control. The purposes of comparison are to determine how well the instruments accomplish certain policy objectives and to appraise their ability to cope with the complexities inherent in the task of environmental regulation.