Pollution Prevention

The Louis Berger Group (Berger) has a longstanding commitment to furthering the goals and objectives of pollution prevention. Pollution prevention employs methods to reduce or eliminate the generation or discharge of waste and/or fugitive contaminants. Additionally, pollution prevention considers the interaction between land, air and water to provide an integrated solution to waste management that does not simply transfer the waste from one media to another. The avoidance of waste generation and discharge not only saves the direct costs of disposal and remediation, but also achieves substantial savings in costs associated with permitting, reporting, compliance and liability.

Throughout Berger's history and especially with regard to our multidisciplinary environmental and engineering services, source reduction and elimination have been fundamental to our management approach to achieve "Green" solutions and designs." This concept of pollution prevention in our solutions and designs results in projects that are energy efficient, use less toxic materials, conserve water, air and other resources, and maximize in-process reuse. In some cases, however, we must deal with waste that has already been generated or discharged leaving little or no opportunity for source reduction. In these cases, Berger looks to recycling, reclamation and reuse as the primary waste minimization and management tools.

Recycling, reclamation and reuse are routinely employed in Berger's environmental, hazardous waste, and facilities design and maintenance projects to avoid or at least reduce the quantity of waste materials destined for disposal, to recover metals or other contaminants for their economic value, and to reuse treated materials on-site to eliminate costs associated with transportation, disposal and replacement of excavated materials. For projects involving contaminants that are not recoverable or recyclable, Berger engineers are skilled in designing treatment systems which are used not only to reduce quantities of material destined for disposal, but often to render material suitable for reuse.

Specific pollution prevention services and solutions include:

• Environmental Compliance, Material, Process and Waste Audits
• Material Inventory Management
• Waste Reduction Through Production Process Modifications, Volume Reduction, and/or Material Recovery/Recycling (on-site or off-site)
• Operation and Maintenance Improvements and Planning (including stormwater pollution and spill prevention planning)
• Equipment Modifications or Upgrades
• Material Substitution (i.e., use less hazardous materials where viable)
• Waste Segregation or Consolidation (site-specific and/or regional)

Signature Project

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