The Danish regulations are equally comprised of regulations implementing EC regulations and of purely national regulations, i.e regulations relating to subjects that are not regulated by the EC. To put it another way, there are twice as many Danish regulations as there are EC regulations. The total number of regulations is therefore considerable.
Information concerning the impact of Danish environmental regulations is to be found in non-systematic form in the local and central environmental administration. More systematic investigations are to some extent available for recent years, but the quality of the material varies considerably. I have therefore stuck to sources that in my experience are reasonably reliable.
I have decided to focus on the main principles of Danish environmental administration. By this I mean those aspects of the regulations that have great practical significance, either because they affect a large number of individual cases or because they affect individual cases of great environmental significance.
Of course it is a matter of opinion what one selects as the main
principles of an extremely extensive set of regulations. However, I have chosen to follow
the same headings that I used in my 1992 book Miljøret- Miljøbeskyttelse (Environmental
legislation - Environmental protection), a selection which has not met with criticism in
the Danish environmental protection sector.