Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page
]]]]] SOME WASTE CLEANUP RULES ARE A WASTE OF RESOURCES [[[[[[[
By James Bovard (2/18/89)
From The Wall Street Journal, 15 February 1989, p. A14:3
(Mr. Bovard is an adjunct analyst for the
Competitive Enterprise Institute.)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment observed in
1986: ``In terms of economic efficiency, environmental protection
in the United States appears more costly than in other
industrialized nations. The reason seems to be not merely
greater government regulation but less flexible environmental
regulations in the United States that block effective and more
economical and technologically advanced solutions.'' The
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is perhaps the clearest
example of such wasteful regulation.
RCRA, which is administered by the Environmental Protection
Agency, covers the storage and disposal of hazardous wastes. It
was enacted because other federal environmental laws often did
not apply to the dumping of hazardous wastes directly onto the
land. (Superfund applies to the cleanup of abandoned hazardous
waste sites, or to hazardous waste sites that have been declared
emergencies.)
RCRA was enacted in 1976, but the Carter Administration and
the early Reagan administration did little to implement the law's
provisions. In 1984, frustrated with the administration's
foot-dragging, Congress amended RCRA, mandating far stricter
regulations on hazardous-waste disposal, often with no regard to
the actual health threats from the waste. Congress is scheduled
to reauthorize RCRA this year, and likely will make the law even
worse.
The EPA has already filed more than 17,000 pages of RCRA
regulations and notices in the Federal Register, and more are on
the way -- the EPA is still writing the regulations for the 1984
amendments. The EPA estimates that it will cost a total of $20
billion in compliance costs by the time the regulations are fully
implemented in the 1990s. Former RCRA Administrator Marcia
Williams expects that the actual costs will be significantly
higher.
The heavy costs RCRA imposes on industry might be worth it if
they provided some benefit to human health. But RCRA mandates
that companies clean up their factory grounds not to levels
protective of human health, but to ``background levels'' -- that
is, to levels at which the chemicals occur naturally in the
surrounding environment. Former EPA General Counsel Frank Blake
observes: ``If someone poured a glass of chlorinated tap water
onto the ground at a RCRA cleanup site, then he could be fined
for polluting the environment.''
The EPA sets health-based exposure levels for many chemicals,
and, under regulatory programs other than RCRA, will certify that
a material is no longer hazardous if the material's hazardous
content is below the health threshold. By contrast, RCRA
mandates using ``best developed available technology'' -- the
process that reduces the level of hazardous constituents to their
lowest possible level -- to treat wastes, even when the amount of
chemicals in those wastes is already too small to pose a health
danger.
For example, the maximum level at which the EPA considers
carbon disulfide waste water to be no threat to health is almost
500 times greater than the level for which the EPA under RCRA
requires businesses to treat wastes containing carbon disulfide.
The maximum level for trichlorofluoromethane that the EPA
considers safe is more than 20,000 times higher than the level
for which RCRA requires treatment. The health-exposure danger
level for acetone is 400 times higher than the best available
technology level; for phenol, 600 times higher.
In addition, the EPA proposed new RCRA regulations last month
that it estimates will cost $28 million a year for compliance --
but the regulations are expected to result in only 0.07 life
saved per year [$400 million per life]. By contrast, the
Consumer Product Safety Commission uses a ``value of individual
life'' estimate of $1 million to $2 million for judging
regulations.
In 1986 Wendy Gramm, then-head of the Office of Management and
Budget's regulatory office, criticized proposed RCRA regulations
for presuming ``that the individual receives the maximum exposure
to the substance -- in effect [saying] that he would sink a straw
into groundwater within the disposal facility property boundary
and drink almost half a gallon of this [maximum-contaminated]
water each day for 70 years.'' (Those regulations were not
promulgated; instead the agency decreed even stricter standards.)
According to former RCRA Administrator Williams, RCRA has made
voluntary hazardous waste cleanups by companies far more onerous.
If a company wishes to clean up part of its property that poses a
special threat, then it must clean up its entire site to RCRA's
``cleaner than clean'' specifications. These standards were not
mandated by Congress, but RCRA administrators apparently enjoy
forcing businesses to clean up, regardless of whether it serves a
useful purpose. (By contrast, Superfund cleanups need only
address threats to human health.)
Before beginning such a cleanup, the company must also get a
RCRA permit, which takes two to four years, and the paper work
can easily cost between $500,000 and $1 million, according to
several industry experts. Mobile waste-treatment units are one
of the best hopes for speedy responses to threats from hazardous
wastes; yet, their potential is unfulfilled because of the EPA's
lethargic permitting process.
The quest for statistical purity has other pernicious side
effects as well. Because the EPA, under RCRA guidelines, judges
``best technology'' largely by measuring how much the treatment
process reduces the level of hazardous chemicals, incineration is
routinely required. Unfortunately, public health risks from air
pollution are often neglected. As a May 1988 American Petroleum
Institute brief noted, ``For several of the listed petroleum
wastes, incineration was found to pose a greater risk to the
general population in close to 50% of the instances when it was
compared to land disposal of the untreated waste or surface
impoundment.''
Though RCRA's initial goal was to boost recycling, it is
impeding recycling. Take the case of used oil. The EPA is
expected to rule soon that used oil is a hazardous waste since,
under RCRA's guidelines, the oil contains some slight amounts of
hazardous constituents and therefore is put in the same
regulatory category as pure dioxin.
Gas stations that currently collect used oil for recycling
purposes could be required to formally apply for a EPA hazardous
waste-handling permit and become exposed to unlimited, perpetual
liability. If the used oil is ever involved in an environmental
problem, they could be sued regardless of whether they had any
direct responsibility for the problem.
The likely result is that many, if not most, current handlers
of used oil will cease handling it -- and far more used oil will
end up being dumped by individuals onto the ground or into sewer
systems. By calling such used oil hazardous, EPA will make it
much more dangerous.
The more we spend on cleanliness as a moral idea, the less we
have left to spend on real health threats. In the reauthorization
process this year, Congress should fundamentally re-examine the
RCRA program. There are serious dangers from hazardous wastes,
but it will take more than sweeping, impractical decrees from
Capitol Hill or EPA to solve the problem.
* * *
Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page