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).

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

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

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