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Land, Waste and Emergency Management Innovations Basic Information
The need for new environmental innovations is driven by increasingly complex environmental problems, such as improving the rate of recycled municipal waste and reused industrial materials, cleaning up and revitalizing contaminated lands, responding to an increasing number of natural disaster, and global climate change. Other factors driving environmental innovation include the need to measure and show results, budgetary constraints that require agencies to do more with less, and a set of single media environmental laws that do not account for the synergistic effects that occur in nature.
EPA is continually searching for new ways to protect human health and the environment. The development of new approaches, practices, and technologies can make environmental protection more practical, more effective, and less costly. The Innovations Program in EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) uses funding to support promising new policies, approaches, and/or technologies with the hope of turning promising ideas into practical realities. In the past, we have used grants as a tool to fund opportunities. More recently, we have also explored funding through contractor technical assistance. Descriptions of the projects that we have supported and their results can be found in this Web area.