Evaluation of location and stack height of polluting units in industrial areas

Depending upon the prevailing meteorological conditions and the way urban population is distributed around an industrial area small variations in the site or other technical characteristics (for example stack height) of polluting units operating in it may cause significant changes in the pollution burden of the surrounding population. Accordingly, the cost a firm may pay for complying with environmental standards (the authors call it environmental cost) sometimes varies significantly among the various sites of an industrial area. In this paper they analyze the variations of pollution burden suffered by urban populations. The corresponding distribution of environmental cost with respect to variations both in the location of polluting units operating inside industrial areas and their stack heights is analyzed. The proposed methodology is applied in the case of the Industrial Area of Xanthi, a city of northeastern Greece.