Environmental Liability: Prevention vs. Cleanup & Fines

Environmental liability comes in three forms — civil damages, administrative fines and, for serious violations, criminal penalties — and all three grow with how much contamination a company let accumulate before being caught. This simulation places factories along a river and lets you set what share of them invest in pollution prevention versus discharging untreated waste. Polluting factories build up local waste that a regulatory audit can catch (triggering a fine plus proportional cleanup cost), while unmanaged contamination that crosses a threshold forces a costly spill-cleanup order across the whole river. Compare the running prevention-spend total against fines and cleanup costs to see when paying to prevent pollution beats paying to remediate it.