This book presents both general and comprehensive observations of unsuccessful and successful experiences in water pollution trading programs within the U.S. These experiences help in understanding the major environmental, economic and regulatory barriers that prevent the application of pollution trading in water media to become successful. This work combines background information with real experience.

Water-quality trading is a market-based approach that allows a facility to meet its regulatory obligations by using the pollutant reductions created by another facility capable of doing it at a much lower cost. This resource is a practical guide for wastewater treatment plants to use in evaluating the potential for water-quality trading and provides the framework for designing and implementing the trade.

Explores how both governments and the private sector can expand the role of markets to allocate water used by all sectors and to get agricultural producers to account for the pollution that their sector generates.

Nutrient trading and water quality : hearing before the Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, United States Senate, One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, first session, May 22, 2013.

Water pollution control has been a top environmental policy priority of the world’s most developed countries for decades, and the focus of significant regulation and public and private spending. Yet, significant water quality problems remain, and trends for some pollutants are in the wrong direction. This book addresses the economics of water pollution control and water pollution control policy in agriculture, with an aim towards providing students, environmental policy analysts, and other environmental professionals with economic concepts and tools essential to understanding the problem and crafting solutions that can be effective and efficient. The book will also examine existing policies and proposed reforms in the developed world. Although this book addresses and has a general applicability to major water pollutants from agriculture (e.g., pesticides, pharmaceuticals, sediments, nutrients), it will focus on the sediment and nutrient pollution problem. The economic and scientific foundations for pollution management are best developed for these pollutants, and they are currently the top priorities of policy makers. Accordingly, the authors provide both highly salient and informative cases for developing concepts and methods of general applicability, with high profile examples such as the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone in the US; the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe; and Lake Taupo in New Zealand.