What Pollution Control Permits Regulate
Pollution control permits in Georgia rest on the normative system established by the Law of Georgia on Environmental Protection, which unites environmental protection norms, qualitative norms of the state of the environment, permissible emission limit norms, and the environmental decision — the administrative act without which most pollution generating activities become unlawful. This page explains how that system is constructed, who approves the individual norms, and how it translates into an understandable permitting process for your enterprise.
It is important to realise that a permit in this field is not the name of a single document: it is a combination of normative and administrative mechanisms. First, environmental protection and quality norms are established; then, on the basis of those norms, an emission limit is developed for each source; and finally an environmental decision is issued, which gives all of this its legal form. Understanding the sequence matters, because each stage builds on the previous one and an error at an early stage propagates through the entire permitting chain.
The System of Environmental Protection Norms
The purpose of establishing environmental protection norms is to determine norms for the impact of activities on the environment that ensure the ecological balance of the environment. To this end, the law provides for five groups of norms: qualitative norms of the state of the environment; permissible limit norms for the emission of harmful substances into the environment and for pollution of the environment by microorganisms; norms for the use of chemical agents in the environment; ecological requirements for products; and environmental load norms.
This structure means that pollution control is not confined to air emissions: it covers water and soil, physical impacts, chemical agents, and the ecological requirements attached to products themselves. For an enterprise this implies that compliance must be checked in every direction, not only against the parameters of a single emission. A plant may fully satisfy its air emission limits yet still face obligations arising from noise norms, soil quality norms or ecological requirements for its products.
Qualitative Norms of the State of the Environment
The qualitative norms of the state of the environment are: permissible limit norms for the concentration of substances harmful to human health and the natural environment and for the quantities of microorganisms in atmospheric air, water and soil; permissible limit norms for noise, vibration, electromagnetic fields and other physical impacts; and permissible limit norms for radiation exposure.
These qualitative norms are determined once every five years, by the regulation on qualitative norms of the state of the environment, which is developed and approved by the Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Labour, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia, in agreement with the ministry responsible for environmental protection. The intersection of health and environmental policy is clearly visible here: sanitary hygienic quality requirements and environmental standards are coordinated with each other, and an enterprise must satisfy both simultaneously. For facilities located near residential areas, the physical impact norms — noise, vibration and electromagnetic fields — are frequently the determining factor in permit conditions.