Environmental Consultants

In the United States, people began focusing on the impact of pollution on the environment in the 1960s and early 1970s. The first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) brought environmental issues into the global spotlight, triggering the passing of thousands of environmental laws throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), Clean Water Act (1972), Environmental Pesticide Control Act (1972), and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (1980, commonly known as Superfund). Despite these laws, pollution continued to increase, and environmental disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 caused even stricter environmental regulations to be passed. The public also began to demand that corporations take environmental issues into consideration when creating and distributing their products. Since the 1990s, companies have been taking active steps to address environmental issues in their business operations. Environmental consultants now play a vital role in helping corporations, government agencies, and other organizations improve their green “footprints,” solve environmental problems, and comply with increasingly complicated government regulations (in some countries and U.S. states).