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Vendors
| ETV Program Overview |
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The Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) Program was established by EPA in October 1995 to address the need for credible performance data to help businesses and communities better respond to the environmental technology choices available to them. More rapid and widespread implementation of improved technologies achieves the Agency's primary goal - a cleaner and healthier environment. Because almost all environmental technologies are developed and commercialized in the private sector, however, the need to create a program that combines government assured objectivity and quality with market-based concerns for cost control, speed, and fairness has been understood from the beginning. The challenge of integrating the public policy goals of environmental improvement and sustainability with private sector commercial demands for efficient business practices has defined all of the operational parameters of ETV. For this reason, the program's sole product is objective information on technology testing and performance contained in protocols, testing reports, and verification statements through which comparisons and decisions can be made by the many and diverse participants in the environmental marketplace - not by the government. Participation in ETV is voluntary. No approvals are granted; no standards are certified; no guarantees or recommendations are made. High quality data, responsive to customer need, is the product. ETV seeks to give decision-makers the information they need to create a more sustainable environment.
Since its inception, ETV has produced an outstanding record of accomplishment by partnering with hundreds of public and private sector individuals to bring high quality, objective information to the environmental technology marketplace. EPA research professionals and their verification partners - private sector testing organizations selected through peer-reviewed competition - work with more than 800 stakeholders in 18 separate stakeholder groups to facilitate performance evaluation of innovative, efficient, and cost-effective environmental technologies. The efficient and fully quality assured testing procedures and protocols developed by the program have set an example that has been become the world standard in performance verification in numerous technology categories. Private sector developers, whose technologies face substantial barriers to commercialization, use ETV data to market their products. States use ETV data to more rapidly permit or approve new technologies. Through the use of ETV information, buyers and the consulting engineering community discover innovations about which they are unaware or unsure of performance characteristics. EPA itself uses the information generated by ETV to help it understand the capabilities of available technologies to assist in meeting environmental goals. The entire system of real world environmental protection is helped by the improved technologies that emerge from ETV performance verification.
ETV has become the most comprehensive environmental technology verification program in the world, covering innovations as diverse as alternative fuels and systems for nitrogen oxide reduction; real time field monitors for measuring contaminants in air, water, and soil; microturbines and greenhouse gas leak prevention technologies for natural gas pipelines; Cryptosporidium and arsenic control in small community drinking water systems; urban infrastructure and ship ballast water control technologies; and pollution prevention technologies associated with many industries. ETV-verified technologies are now beginning to be purchased and used.
International interest in ETV has been growing steadily, as reflected by increasing program participation and expressions of interest in verification by foreign vendors, an increasing number of inquiries for training and technology transfer related to environmental technology verification, and a steady rate of non-U.S. visits to the ETV Web Site. Some countries, including India, Thailand, and the Philippines, have started to develop their own environmental technology verification programs, modeled in part on the ETV Program.
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