HAZARDOUS WASTE

HAZARDOUS WASTE is a by-product, usually of manufacturing, medical and scientific research, and consumer detritus (disintegrating materials), that is dangerous to human health and wildlife. The substances defined as hazardous received their initial analysis in the industrial hygiene movement between 1900 and 1930, which focused on substances in the workplace. The movement's concern with hazardous industrial substances seldom extended beyond the factory walls. Although public health authorities in the late nineteenth century considered industrial pollution a major problem, the focus shifted after the acceptance of the germ theory of disease. Public health officers and sanitary engineers focused on bacterial wastes as the primary threat to human health. When they considered industrial wastes, they concentrated on their non-pathogenic effects. It was only after World War II that professionals began to pay greater attention to health and the environment.

The first federal legislation regarding hazardous waste was the 1970 Solid Waste Disposal Act. Section 212 required that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigate the storage and disposal of hazardous wastes. The resulting 1974 report to Congress on the disposal of hazardous wastes led to the passage in 1976 of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which defined hazardous wastes that can cause illness or pose a hazard to health and to the environment when improperly stored, transported, or managed. In 1980, the EPA announced regulations implementing cradle-to-grave controls for handling hazardous wastes.

RCRA did not touch on the dangers of wastes buried in industrial and municipal landfills. For decades, industries had disposed of hazardous materials in landfills. Land disposal of wastes increased in the post-World War II period, as states put limits on water disposal. These older sites, in many cases abandoned or closed, posed a threat to groundwater supplies. The case of Love Canal, a chemical waste dump formed by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, and from which toxic chemical wastes migrated to endanger neighboring residential areas, focused public and govern-mental attention on the problem in the late 1970s.

Congress responded to the perceived danger of these sites in 1980 by approving the Comprehensive Environ-mental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), or Superfund, which provided $1.6 billion for the cleanup of toxic wastes. Under CERCLA, the EPA established procedures of site-specific risk assessments to determine whether the hazardous wastes were a threat to human health. The Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act in 1986 increased the fund to $9.6 billion. The Superfund Act and its amendments sought to cover the costs of cleanup by requiring retrospective liability. That is, it made those people and companies responsible for creating hazardous waste sites liable for the costs of cleanup. The amendments also required that firms that imported, processed, or produced more than 50,000 pounds per year of any of the EPA's listed chemicals and compounds, register them in the EPA's annual Toxics Release Inventory. The slow pace of cleanups, however, as well as cumbersome procedures, convinced many experts that Superfund was not only underfunded but imposed unreasonable standards of cleanliness, given future site uses.

One of Superfund's main tools was a trust fund that contained money contributed by corporations that were taxed to help pay for cleanup operations at Superfund sites. In 1995, that legislation expired. In the following years, Democratic President Bill Clinton annually attempted to renew the legislation, but the Republican-controlled legislature consistently blocked his efforts. Once Republican President George W. Bush came into office, the White House ceased to agitate for renewal. Many critics see the Superfund program as fundamentally flawed because it spends too much money in court battles to determine who is responsible for cleaning up hazardous sites. Furthermore, they argue that taxing the chemical and petrochemical industries to clean up sites that they did not pollute is unfair. In 2001, $860 million was available for Superfund cleanup, but that amount was projected to fall to $28 million by 2003.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Terry L., ed. Political Environmentalism: Going Behind the Green Curtain. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000.

Barnett, Harold C. Toxic Debts and the Superfund Dilemma. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Hird, John A. Superfund: The Political Economy of Environmental Risk. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Mazur, Allan. A Hazardous Inquiry: The Rashomon Effect at Love Canal. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Switzer, Jacqueline Vaughn. Environmental Politics: Domestic and Global Dimensions. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994; 1998.

Joel A.Tarr/a. e.

See alsoEnergy, Department of ; Energy Industry ; Environ-mental Business ; Environmental Protection Agency ; Times Beach ; Waste Disposal ; Water Pollution .