=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #102
—November 7, 1988—
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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WHAT WE MUST DO–PART 9: IT’S TIME FOR A TAX ON TOXICS.
Since World War II the synthetic organic chemicals industry has
grown at a steady 6.5% per year, doubling its total output every
11 years.
During the past 35 years, since 1950, the industry has grown by a
factor of 10, from an annual output of 50 billion pounds to an
annual output of 500 billion pounds. During that same period, the
industry has been responsible for the creation of some 20,000
Superfund sites that we know of, and countless other dumps that
have not yet come to light as problems. (Some officials within
EPA guess that there may actually be as many as 200,000 places in
America where toxics have been buried.) Although Congress has
allocated upwards of $10 billion for cleanup of old dumps, no one
pretends that this is sufficient to do the job. It may clean up
the first 1000 sites, though even this is doubtful. Before it is
over, cleanup will cost hundreds of billions of dollars if,
indeed, it can be done at all. Furthermore, we are still creating
new Superfund sites each year. These are pits, ponds, lagoons and
landfills allowed under the Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act (RCRA) subtitles C and D (which legalize chemical landfills
and municipal solid waste landfills).
In an attempt to control the problem during the past 25 years, we
have passed 10 major pollution laws and have published 8,000
pages of regulations in the Federal Register. We are currently
spending about $10 million annually for each page of regulations
(total: $80 billion per year spent on end-of-pipe pollution
control).
Unfortunately, it will be obvious to anyone who thinks about it
that we are losing the battle. The earth’s protective ozone layer
is disappearing, the planet is heating up, the world’s oceans are
turning into sewers, acid rain is killing lakes and forests, the
nation’s groundwater is becoming unsafe to drink, half the
planet’s living species will become extinct in the next 50
years. This is only a partial list. The catalog of horrors is
growing year by year. Only a few captains of industry and their
indentured savants will argue that our present course makes any
sense.
To the technical experts who are wrapped up in maintaining their
credibility and impressing their peers with their analytic
detachment, the situation seems paralyzingly complex. But to the
general public, the situation has become rather clear: with the
chemical industry doubling in size every 11 years, we are
saturating the air, water and soil with toxic contaminants, and
each year the situation grows worse. An old adage recommends,
“Don’t shit where you eat,” but that’s exactly what we’ve been
doing. If asked, most people would agree, it is time for new
departures.
There are at least three new approaches that we can try. One is
to ban certain toxic materials entirely. A second is to ban the
mining of certain materials (for example, lead and cadmium), thus
requiring recycle of existing stocks because new stocks will no
longer be legally available. A third is to tax toxics.
Today we’ll examine taxes on toxics. In the past when this
approach has been suggested, it has been attacked as a “license
to pollute.” However, in the past the toxics tax has been
suggested as an alternative to the current regulatory system. We,
on the other hand, are not suggesting that the nation abandon any
of its existing pollution control programs. We merely suggest
toxics taxes in addition to all existing pollution control
programs.
We favor two taxes: one on the discharge of toxics into the
environment, and another on the use of toxics in products that
will, themselves, eventually be discarded into the environment.
Let’s look at the two taxes separately.
The toxics discharge tax is fairly simple. A tax rate is set on
each pound of toxics discharged into the environment. A pound of
cyanide might be $1.00; a pound of sulfur might be 30 cents. The
dischargers would have responsibility for measuring their own
discharges, filing tax returns, computing the tax, and mailing a
check. There would be heavy penalties, including stiff jail
terms, for cheating.
The discharge tax would apply to anyone discharging toxics into
the environment, not just chemical firms. Anyone, including
manufacturers, users, government agencies and waste haulers,
would pay for the privilege of degrading the earth’s air, water
or soil if they chose to discharge toxic materials in any form.
This plan has the advantage of causing the Internal Revenue
Service–the pit bulls of government–to care about the
quantities of toxics entering the environment. Clearly the EPA
does not really care. The more the EPA knows about toxic
discharges, the bigger and more difficult its job becomes; so for
15 years the EPA has consistently underestimated the size of the
toxics problem, and other agencies (the Office of Management and
Budget and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment)
have repeatedly had to embarrass the EPA into revising its
numbers upward. The EPA is not enthusiastic about measuring
contaminants because the numbers reveal the agency’s continuing
failure to stem the tide of toxics. Getting the IRS into the act
would rather quickly provide us with more reliable facts on the
amounts of toxics being used by industry because the IRS would
collect a tax for each pound measured. The IRS enjoys collecting
taxes.
The discharge tax has other advantages as well. It gives industry
a continuing incentive to reduce its use of toxics. When today’s
regulations have been met, industry can relax. But with a tax on
toxics, industry would be reminded every April 15 that they are
throwing away profits by discharging toxics. This is a message
industry will hear and will respond to.
The third advantage of the toxics tax is that it provides
revenue. The government could use this money (a) to enforce the
toxics tax, doing spot checks on industry to catch cheaters; and
(b) to do the necessary research to establish a rational basis
for the second tax–the tax on commercial products which contain
toxics that will harm the environment when the products are
discarded. (Even with maximum recycling, all items will
eventually be discarded, so we should tax items that will
eventually degrade the environment, creating an incentive for
those products to disappear from our markets.) Research will be
needed to decide what chemical compounds in what commercial
products are worthy of a tax. The program can begin with the
obvious ones: plastics can be taxed. Any item that contains lead,
cadmium, arsenic or mercury can be taxed. As time passes and our
understanding improves, new products can be taxed.
Such taxes should be instituted at the federal level, but they
could also be imposed by states, or even by counties and
municipalities having taxing authority.
Both taxes can be adjusted up or down as we see results. We note
that industry does not favor this approach. They know it would
work; it would force new ways of doing business and even new ways
of thinking. We’ve got little to lose by giving it a try. It
couldn’t be less effective than what we’ve got now.
The discharge tax has been discussed in several books; one of the
best is Allen Kneese and Charles Schultze, POLLUTION, PRICES AND
PUBLIC POLICY (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1975).
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: taxation; regulation; discharge tax; pollution
tax; chemical industry statistics; growth; global environmental
problems; internal revenue service; irs; epa; superfund;