Most states implement economic and manufacturing activity that can endanger their environmental equilibrium concerning nature in terms of both the kind and form of environmental and economic damage, including a negative impact on its individual objects due to the ingress of various toxicants into the atmospheric air, water bodies, soil, and the disposal of production and consumption waste. Within the framework of ecological and economic damage, according to which the damage to the environment is assessed, as a rule, real environmental, financial, material, and social losses associated with the loss of natural, labour, and material financial resources, the decline in the social and hygienic living conditions of the population, and the economic and economic stage of the country's development are taken into account. The methods used in the Russian Federation for calculating environmental and economic damage and assessing the amount of damage caused to atmospheric air as a component of the natural environment are based on different approaches and, accordingly, have different financial values. For working large establishments engaged in the food and processing industry when implementing technological processes include enterprises belonging to the I - III categories in terms of negative environmental impact. They are located in the Central Chernozem region, where an assessment of the harm and environmental and economic damage caused by emissions of toxicants into the atmospheric air in masses exceeding certain standards laid down in the environmental and technological documentation of enterprises was carried out. As a result of a comparative assessment, it was found that with the simultaneous presence of anthropogenic toxicants in the atmospheric air of the Central Chernozem region, the amount of damage to the natural environment increases 3.46 times. When determining the contribution of the main atmospheric pollutants, including greenhouse gases and suspended substances, to the assessment of environmental harm, the priority of suspended substances as the most dangerous is noted in terms of ensuring and increasing the greenhouse effect with a share of participation in the assessment up to 76 %, and carbon monoxide up to 7.44 %.