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.