Garbage Wars

We live in an era of waste imperialism.

Unwanted or hazardous waste is dumped on unwilling or unsuspecting communities. States aren't struggling to reduce waste, but rather are battling for the right to call their garbage "commerce" and ship it out of state. New York City dumps its unwanted waste in Virginia -- as much as 18,000 tons a week. Computers shipped to Asia for recycling wreak havoc to public health and the environment. Waste incinerator ash from Philadelphia -- originally dumped in 1986 on a Haitian beach -- floats on storage barges off the coast of Florida still awaiting a final resting spot.

The waste wars are not new. In the mid 1980s, San Francisco tried to toss its trash over the mountains in Yolo County. The county refused. During that same decade, Essex County, N.J., wanted to send 4,000 50-gallon drums of radium-contaminated soil to Nevada. Then Gov. Richard H. Bryan angrily declared that his state is "not going to be a nuclear dumping ground for the country." A federal judge in Boston held that city liable for polluting Boston Harbor with 70 tons of sludge a day. The Massachusetts Water Resource Authority applied for a permit to dispose of its highly toxic sludge off the coast of New Jersey. Rep. James J. Florio (D-N.J.) ironically echoed Gov. Bryan, arguing that his state's coastline should not become "the dumping ground for every state in the region."

In 1986, Philadelphia was dumping its waste incinerator ash in Ohio, but local opposition forced the city to terminate that arrangement. That year, the City of Brotherly Love dumped 4,000 tons of incinerator ash on a Haitian beach, where it sat for more than 10 years polluting the local environment and causing myriad public health problems. A year later, the infamous garbage barge from Islip, Long Island in New York, sailed down the east coast looking for a site to unload.

Our highways are becoming clogged with vehicles carrying increasingly deadly wastes. One study estimated that more than 1.5 billion tons of hazardous wastes are moved each year, more than half by truck.

The increasing monopolization and economic hegemony of the trash handling industry is another aspect of waste imperialism. During the last three decades, the waste hauling and disposal industry has undergone considerable consolidation. When competition disappears, the consolidators will raise prices, gouging local government agencies and businesses. In fact, just one year after merging with a competitor, Waste Management Inc., one of the country's two controlling waste industry interests, increased its landfill tip fees 40% to 138%.

No amount of subsidies, exemptions from hazardous waste regulations, mandatory purchase of electricity, put or pay contracts, tax credits or court rulings can sustain such financially and environmentally outlandish technology.

Waste imperialism diminishes democratic local ownership and control of valuable discarded materials. Unchecked waste exportation and corporate mergers are hampering recycling and waste reduction progress, promoting the interstate transportation of waste, tightening already slim municipal budgets, and sounding the death knell for recycling-based community development and localism in the solid waste sector. At the same time, judicial and regulatory decisions (e.g., application of the constitutional commerce clause in the Carbone case) are restricting local authority and eroding citizen participation in waste management decisions.

Communities that seek legal relief from waste imperialism meet with little success. The right of localities to protect their citizens, the courts have maintained, is outweighed by the constitutional right of commerce to move freely across state boundaries. West Virginia tried to charge higher fees for waste dumped from other states. Pennsylvania tried to require that no more than 30% of waste landfilled could be from another state. Wisconsin tried to have all waste flowing into the state meet its state recycling requirements. All these state laws have been struck down by higher courts. The U.S. Congress has the power to act. Federal judges have consistently ruled that based on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, Congress has exclusive power over the interstate trash business.

Waste wars stem from our refusal to take responsibility for our own wastes. They will end when we force ourselves to take that responsibility. No longer would we spend considerable financial, political and scientific resources to discover safe ways to move our wastes far away. Instead, we would first look for ways to reduce waste and recycle the ones we must produce into useful products.But innovative solutions will never be implemented if we can pursue the easier path of shipping our problems to someone else's backyard.

Even the best landfills will eventually leak toxic waste, and eventually contaminate groundwater. Incinerators are potentially even more polluting. Thirty percent by weight of trash entering incinerators exits as ash, a waste product that may contain high levels of toxic residues. Moreover, incinerators emit organic compounds, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and other acid gases that landfills do not. - http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/wasteimperialism.html

Every single chemical can be converted into a whole class of similar or even remotely related molecules. A gas can be converted to a solid and vice versa. A colored compound into a colorless one. Toxicity is not a property that is necessarily preserved when chemicals react.

The economics of recycling must be manipulated to insure that recycling is profitable. The more valuable an item is, the more easily it is to recycle. Toxic materials and articles are prime candidates for easy and early recycling. - Paul Palmer, Ph.D