Environmental protection beyond the smokestack: Addressing the impact of the service economy

Abstract

When our pollution control statutes were drafted in 1970s, smokestack sources sat squarely in these laws' regulatory cross hairs. Over the past few decades, however, manufacturing's relative importance has declines while the service sector has ascended to the point where services now dominate America's economy, comprising seventy-five percent of GNP and eighty percent of employment. Yet consideration of services remains almost entirely absent from environmental law and policy scholarship. This article addresses the implications for environmental protection of the service sector's absent. In this article, James Salzman considers how best to reduce the environmental impacts of specific services, delineating two categories of services with distinct implications for law and policy — “smokestack services” and “cumulative services.” A further category—“leverage services”—employs a fundamentally different type of approach, focusing not on the impact of the services themselves but on their ability to reduce environmental impacts throughout product lifecycles. While not necessarily causing significant environmental impact in their immediate activities, leverage services' commercial links provide a uniquely effective fulcrum to leverage environmental improvements upstream and downstream in the lifecycle. Salzman presents a novel vision of environmental protection-from a narrow focus on production and disposal to energizing the web of commercial relationships.