=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #205
—October 31, 1990—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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HAZARDOUS WASTE INCINERATION–PART 2: THE HEART OF A GREAT STRUGGLE.
The American people are engaged in a great struggle. From the
available evidence it is clear that we cannot go on as we have
been. The way we conduct our business must change. Thoughtful
people everywhere recognize that this is true.
Yet for the most part, thoughtful people do not make–or even
affect directly–the decisions that create the problems. Those
decisions are made privately by small groups of narrowly-focused
individuals of enormous wealth and power, power that is exercised
behind closed doors. These decisionmakers are motivated chiefly
by the need to return quick profits to investors; all other
considerations are strictly secondary. Such decisions have very
farreaching, public consequences but they are not in any sense
public decisions. For example, the decision to market
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the chemicals that are progressively
destroying the earth’s ozone shield, was made by executives of a
single company–DuPont.[1] The decision to market PCBs–the
potent toxins that have now polluted the farthest corners of the
planet, from fish at the bottom of the deepest oceans to polar
bears in the most remote reaches of the arctic–was made by
executives of one company–Monsanto.[2] With 1000 new chemicals
being introduced each year into commercial channels, the next
chemical crisis is undoubtedly abuilding now, unbeknownst to
anyone save for a handful of executives who made the latest (and
so far unrevealed) disastrous decision. We have in place no
mechanisms for discovering what that next disaster may be until
it is too late, until it manifests itself in dreadful
proportions. We have no way to affect the marketing of such
chemicals except after a catastrophe has become apparent. We have
no mechanism for requiring that private decision-makers consider
the distant and delayed consequences of their decisions; in fact,
we have no way to assure that any kinds of consequences besides
the monetary will be considered at all. We have no mechanisms for
bringing to justice the irresponsible decision-makers of
companies like DuPont and Monsanto who have wrought global-scale
mayhem; they have escaped justice entirely, and will no doubt
continue to do so. For all practical purposes, we the people are
powerless.
Yet despite our powerlessness to affect industrial decisions of
awesome consequence, there is still great reason for hope because
there is visible across America a remarkable movement of citizens
at the grass-roots, local level. And they are being effective,
forcing great changes indirectly.
None of us can directly affect the decision to make a new,
disastrous chemical. But any of us-all of us–can send a strong
message to the companies who do make these things: “Make whatever
you want. We can’t stop that (yet). But if you make toxic wastes
in the process, you can’t dump those on us. Those we know how to
stop today.”
There are only five basic options for toxic byproducts: (a) Hide
them somewhere (landfill, deep well injection, ocean dumping, and
so forth). (b) Burn them somewhere (in a hazardous waste
incinerator, a cement kiln, etc.). (c) Detoxify them, break them
down, by some almost-certainly-expensive chemical process. (d)
Use them as a raw material in a new process (recycle them). (e)
Don’t make them in the first place.
Option (c) is almost never used because it means establishing a
factory, with workers, that produces no useful products and
therefore produces no income. Who will pay the workers? Option
(d) is rarely used because chemical byproducts (wastes) are
rarely pure and most industrial processes require raw materials
that are purer than most wastes. This leaves only (a), (b), and
(e). These options lie at the heart of the nation’s great
struggle today.
Option (e), everyone agrees, is what we need. The head of the EPA
(U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) says so;[3] the EPA’s
distinguished Science Advisory Board says so;[4] even the
Congress from time to time says so. Everyone important in
Washington says so.
Unfortunately, this option requires American industry to do
almost everything differently from they way they are doing things
now. It means admitting error; it means confessing that it has
been a mistake over the past two decades to create the “waste
management” industry that now gobbles up $90 billion each year.
It means going back to square one and re-engineering enormously
complex and interrelated systems–thus destabilizing a
manufacturing system which, although it is demonstrably
destroying the planet, at least returns decent profits to most
participants every quarter. It means spending money today that
will not pay rewards for a decade or more, and those who are
driven by the need to deliver profits to investors every three
months cannot even contemplate such a proposition. It is
literally unthinkable. No, pollution prevention is right and good
and necessary, everyone agrees, but, for the most part, no one
does anything about it. (There are exceptions, of course, but so
far, we suspect, pollution prevention has guided far less than 1%
of the industrial decisions made each year.)
Therefore, industry’s only real choices today are options (a) and
(b). Option (a)–land disposal–is a loser, everyone agrees.
Organized crime still likes it, and those who dispose of their
wastes by handing them to organized criminals, then averting
their eyes, still like it. There is even a cadre of holdout
enthusiasts hidden within the EPA itself; these are the
candidates for the “revolving door” who plan to retire one day on
the largesse of the organized criminals. But thoughtful people
everywhere recognize that land disposal is dead. As the EPA’s own
Science Advisory Board said recently, “landfills are no longer an
option for hazardous waste disposal.”[5]
This leaves only one remaining disposal option–incineration.
Given that powerful industrial decisionmakers are unable (for
whatever reasons) to embrace pollution prevention, and given that
no one in their right mind would bury dangerous wastes in the
ground (except at midnight in New Jersey), the incineration of
hazardous wastes is the only remaining option. The question is,
does this last option make sense from the viewpoint of thoughtful
people? Or should thoughtful people do the nation a favor and
kill this option the way they’ve killed land disposal, thus
forcing industry to embrace pollution prevention before we all
drown in toxic soup? This is a question worth exploring in some
detail, which we intend to do.
William Reilly’s EPA has clearly decided that the nation must
have more and more incinerators. While the boss is off giving
blue sky speeches about the virtues of pollution prevention,[3]
EPA’s troops in the trenches are busy making sure that any
johnny-come-lately who wants to set up an incinerator and start
cashing in can do so with minimum interference from the locals
and from government. In the April 27, 1990, FEDERAL REGISTER
(pgs. 17862-17921), Mr. Reilly’s minions proposed a set of
hazardous waste incinerator regulations containing loopholes for
polluters so large they make DuPont’s global ozone hole (this
year 12 million square miles in size) seem like a pin hole by
comparison.
[More detailed analyses will follow.]
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
===============
[1] Sharon L. Roan, OZONE CRISIS; THE 15-YEAR EVOLUTION OF A
SUDDEN GLOBAL CRISIS (NY: Wiley, 1989).
[5] Raymond Loehr and others, cited above, pg. 22..”
Descriptor terms: hazardous waste incineration; waste treatment
technologies; cfcs; dupont; bcbs; monsanto; policies; chemical
industry; waste disposal industry; landfilling; pcbs; william
reilly; epa;