Achieving environmental standards with stochastic discharges

The inherent stochastic nature of the levels and composition of environmental waste discharges are well known to environmental control agencies, who recognize that realistically environmental quality constraints must be formulated in probabilistic terms. Given the specification of environmental constraints in such terms, it is shown that the set of activity vectors which satisfy the constraint will, in general, be nonconvex. This militates against the determination of an efficient solution. A means of avoiding the potentially high computational and informational costs associated with the determination of an efficient solution in such cases is proposed.