=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #268
—January 15, 1992—
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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EPA’S NEW LANDFILL RULES PROTECT ONLY THE LARGEST GARBAGE HAULERS
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] issued new solid waste
landfill regulations (FEDERAL REGISTER October 9, 1991, pgs.
50978-51119), requiring the nation’s 6500 municipal garbage dumps
to install liners and leachate collection systems within two
years, or shut down. This means most communities will have to
close their local landfill and will not be able to afford to
build a new one because the liners and leachate collection
systems simply cost too much. A landfill in compliance with the
new law will cost $10 million or more.
This means instead of 6500 local dumps, the nation will develop
about 1000 large regional dumps, owned and operated not by local
people but by huge waste hauling companies like Waste Management,
Inc., Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI) and Chambers Development.
Communities will face a difficult choice: either host a regional
dump and put up with the truck traffic and the fear of
contamination, or pay a high price to have their garbage trucked
to a remote regional landfill.
“A little county like ours can’t afford to build a new dump, so
we have to have a [waste-hauling] company do it for us,” Dwight
Faulk told the NEW YORK TIMES January 6, 1992 (pg. 1). Mr. Faulk
is chairman of the County Commission in Crenshaw County, Alabama.
“These laws were set up for big business to monopolize an
industry,” he said.
“The new regulations are proving to be a bonanza to the nation’s
largest garbage companies,” said the TIMES. “Rarely have
environmental regulations produced as many political distractions
for the communities they are written to protect, or meant as much
to the bottom line of the industry they are intended to
regulate…. In effect the Government may be helping to establish
regional monopolies, and that worries some officials,” the TIMES
said.
“It’s not difficult to project a situation in the future where
very few firms could have regional or statewide control on the
management of public wastes,” said Thomas C. Jorling, the
Commissioner of Environmental Conservation of New York. The TIMES
then quotes waste industry executives who argue that it won’t be
a monopoly situation–communities can choose other alternatives
like recycling and incineration. But the TIMES points out
correctly, most garbage will still be buried in the ground. “The
big money in garbage, nevertheless, still remains in dumping it,”
the TIMES says. Whoever owns the landfill controls the prices
charged to anyone dumping there–so the company that owns the
dump has a big advantage over competitive haulers.
Managing garbage is now a $30 billion per year industry, and it
is expected to double in the next five years as large companies
gain control over fewer and fewer dumps. They will be in a
position to dictate the price of garbage disposal–an essential
public service, as anyone knows who has experienced a garbage
strike when tons of stinking garbage pile up on street corners.
Profits in the garbage business can run 25% to 50% on investment
for a shrewd operator able to monopolize markets and dictate
prices.
Even waste industry executives admitted to the TIMES that EPA’s
new landfill regulations will give them a natural monopoly over
this costly and essential public service: “There are only a
handful of companies that have the capabilities to provide the
type of environmentally sound facilities that the public is
demanding,” said John C. Shirvinsky, vice president of public
affairs for Chambers Development, a Pittsburgh-based garbage
company that operates 14 huge landfills around the country.
The great irony in all of this is that no one–certainly not the
garbage haulers, and least of all the EPA, which made the new
rules–believes that landfills with liners and leachate
collection systems are environmentally sound, or will protect
public health and safety. Everyone who has ever looked into the
matter agrees that all landfills will eventually leak when their
liners degrade. “Eventually liners will either degrade, tear, or
crack and will allow liquids to migrate out of the unit [the
landfill],” says EPA’s official handbook on landfill liners,
known as SW-870 [1, pg. 1].
A landfill is a bathtub in the ground. When fluids, such as rain,
get into the bathtub and combine with the wastes they produce a
toxic soup that, sooner or later, will contaminate the local
environment. If the bottom liner fails, leakage occurs through
the bottom. If the bottom liner doesn’t fail, fluids fill the
bathtub and it spills over the top of its sides. To forestall
this inevitability, EPA has developed what the agency calls its
“Liquids Management Strategy” [2, pg. 1], a fancy name for
keeping the rain out. A plastic liner forms the bottom of the
landfill and, when the landfill is full, a plastic cover over the
top acts like an umbrella.
Thus the dangerous wastes in municipal garbage–oven cleaner,
paint thinner, rat poison, and so on–are held inside a huge
plastic baggie to protect the local environment. This is the
essence of a modern landfill. No one believes it will protect the
local environment for very long. EPA’s textbook on the design and
construction of landfills says, “EPA realizes that even with a
good construction quality assurance program, flexible membrane
liners (FMLs) will allow some liquid transmission either through
water vapor permeation, or through small pinholes or tears in a
slightly flawed FML.” [2, pg. 121]
The protective parts of landfills–the liners and leachate
collections systems–are only INTENDED to last 30 to 100 years
[2, pg. 113]. The manufacturers of liners only GUARANTEE their
products for 20 years. EPA’s own regulations only require
landfill operators to try to protect the environment for 30 years
after a dump is filled and closed. If they meet their design
potential, modern landfills will protect the environment only
until our grandchildren start paying taxes. If they don’t meet
their design potential–and experience tells us many won’t–they
will pollute the land and water of our children.
Why, then, has EPA passed regulations that will cost the public
an estimated $330 million, will end local control over garbage
hauling, will wipe out small competitors in the garbage business,
and won’t protect the environment? Three reasons.
First, to a distracted public it can be sold as action by the
“environmental President” to solve the garbage crisis. Only when
you look into the details do you realize landfills won’t protect
the environment, and how many members of the public will ever
look into the details of landfills?
Second, the waste business is now one of the largest and
fastest-growing businesses in America. Waste haulers make really
good money, and they kick some of it back into the political
process. Politicians therefore curry favor with the waste
industry. For example, when George Bush announced appointments to
the President’s Commission on Environmental Quality, the waste
industry had three representatives out of 25: Browning Ferris
Industries, or BFI, has William Ruckelshaus; and Waste
Management, Inc. has two members from its board of directors:
Dean Buntrock and Kathryn S. Fuller (a WMI board member but
presently “on leave”). (NY TIMES 7/24/91, pg. A14.) No other
industry comes close in terms of representation. The waste
industry is among the most politically powerful, and politically
favored, in America.
The third reason why George Bush’s EPA issues make-believe
landfill regulations is that real environmental protection would
require fundamental changes in the way we do business. Real
environmental protection is not a plastic baggie in the ground
filled with toxins waiting to poison our children. Real
environmental protection will require us to make our products
compatible with the environment, starting with the DESIGN of
products. From the extraction and transportation of raw
materials, the energy required to process them, the manufacturing
method itself, the use of products in our homes and businesses,
and the disposal of products (when they are returned to the
environment)–each of these steps must be thought out in terms of
environmental compatibility and human health. This concept is
called “clean production” and it will limit the freedom companies
now have to make any product they wish to, using any materials
and processes they like, no matter what the consequences to the
environment or public health. Real environmental protection will
require companies to be accountable to the public for their
decisions.
Clean production will change the way we make decisions. Anything
less–including expensive regulations requiring us to wrap our
toxics in silly plastic baggies–prolongs the myth that “business
as usual” is sustainable, and thus hastens the destruction of the
planet as a place suitable for human habitation.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: epa; landfilling; regulations; wmi; chambers
development; bfi; msw; landfill liners; leachate collection
systems; rcra; subtitle d; clean production;