Browsing by Subject "environmental decision"

The purpose of this thesis is to conduct research on the licensing of industrial projects and related requirements in Finland. The thesis will take a closer look at ten projects which have happened in Finland and the related environmental decisions. These environmental decisions set requirements by authorities which the companies have to adhere to in order to resume their practices and avoid sanctions. The thesis will have a closer look at these requirements from the viewpoint of the company and will further assess whether some of these requirements are too strict or futuristic and by that set too much responsibility on the company. At the beginning of the thesis the environmental impact analysis procedure will be described as the consequent report is the basis for which environmental decisions are given on by the authorities of the relevant ELY Centres. After the procedure has been explained the thesis will describe the main requirements set in the ten different environmental decisions which have been assessed. When assessing the requirements clear groupings could be found that reoccurred in the decisions. These were noise, waste, water, animal kingdom, emissions and reporting. Some of the requirements in these groups were very similar of nature and it could therefore be concluded that they were part of the norm in environmental requirements. However, while conducting my research it became evident that a number of requirements did not manifest them in all the decisions but stood out easily. This is partly due to the fact that each decision has to be done on its own merits based on the location of the project site and the type of project. Different requirements sometimes had extremely similar justification which led to the question: is the justification of these requirements up to par, as one justification could be used for a number of different requirements. It became apparent that the environmental decisions included requirements that could not necessarily be justified and therefore were setting too much responsibility on the companies. The companies have to take care of the environment but the reason for a requirement cannot be to set the company in a situation where they have to come up with new research methods and processes. In the end, the research topic was extremely difficult as the comparison of the environmental decisions turned out to be problematic due to the different nature of the projects. This has led to the fact that no decisive answer can be given to the question of corporate responsibility but this thesis may function as the foundation of further discussions and research with narrowed down subject matter.