Tagged with 'regulations'

Imagine taking a paintbrush to the broadside of an old barn: Your goal is probably to cover the expanse uniformly with one color. But the result would likely be a lot different if you didn’t consider the number of boards you might have to replace, holes that need patching or nails that need to be driven back into the wood.

If you started blindly painting away without paying attention to each issue, you’d waste time, money and valuable resources.This same principle can be applied to standardized regulations in today’s economy. In an effort to comply with such uniform regulations, businesses waste valuable resources. 

A standardized approach can be more expensive, less effective, and less flexible than other approaches. There are alternatives, though.

There’s no reason why a sandwich shop or an ice cream parlor should be required to use same pretreatment system as a steakhouse … right?

Wastewater regulations today are often prescriptive, which means that one standard method of pretreatment is required for each of the food service establishments, or other commercial kitchens, in a municipality. Wouldn’t it make more sense, though, to create sanitary codes and ask businesses to develop their own methods of compliance?

Performance-based rules might not only do a better job, but could be cheaper in the long run, too.