=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #293
—July 8, 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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WHEN IS A HAZARD NOT A HAZARD?
To shore up his flagging support among corporate leaders,
President Bush has begun a major campaign to roll back
environmental regulations. Nothing like it has been seen in
Washington since Ronald Reagan hired Anne Gorsuch to throttle the
EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] back in 1980. Mr.
Bush’s campaign seems to be based on a belief that dumping
massive quantities of poisons into the environment will create
jobs and stimulate the economy.
In recent days the NEW YORK TIMES and others have detailed some
of the ways Mr. Bush has labored to scuttle the Clean Air
Act–the only piece of environmental legislation that slipped
through Congress on his watch. On June 25th EPA issued a key rule
under the Act, a rule allowing each corporate polluter to
increase its toxic air emissions by 245 tons (490,000 pounds) per
year without public notice or public hearings.[1] A corporation
simply has to file for an emission increase, stating that the
requested increase is needed because of a change in production
methods. The polluter can increase emissions immediately upon
filing. U.S. EPA then has 45 days to review the application and
state governments have 90 days to approve or disapprove. However,
without public notice, pollution-control officials will lack a
key element they often require before they can stand up to
polluters: public outcry.
According to the NEW YORK TIMES, EPA chief William Reilly battled
it out with Vice-President Dan Quayle over the emission-increase
rule. Mr. Reilly favored allowing polluters to increase their
emissions by only 5 tons per year. In May it became clear that
Vice-President Quayle and his secret Council on Competitiveness
(see RHWN #251) favored larger increases; according to rumor, Mr.
Quayle favored 40 tons per year. The TIMES says President Bush
then weighed in personally on the side of Mr. Quayle, and when
the final proposal was published, 245 tons per year had been
written in. A 245-ton increase is significant even when measured
against the large releases of toxins and carcinogens that are
routine for oil refineries, chemical plants, and pharmaceutical
firms. In polluted corridors like the Kanawha Valley of West
Virginia or “cancer alley” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans,
Louisiana, the 245-ton rule will allow enormous increases in
airborne toxins when several firms take advantage of it
simultaneously, thus significantly degrading environments that
are already dangerous to life.
The administration’s sabotage of the Clean Air Act has been
heavily publicized, but the mass media have so far ignored a much
more far-reaching proposal by Messrs. Bush and Quayle, to
reclassify most of the nation’s hazardous waste as
“non-hazardous” and thus allow it to be dumped into ordinary
municipal landfills. The proposal would put waste regulation back
to where it was prior to 1975, thus rolling back 16 years of work
by a broad coalition of environmentalists.
On May 20th, 1992, the EPA published a notice in the FEDERAL
REGISTER (pg. 21450) proposing to redefine “hazardous waste.” By
EPA’s own estimate, the new rule would exempt 66% of
presently-defined hazardous wastes from RCRA [Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act], the nation’s “cradle to grave”
hazardous waste control law.[2]
Members of the hazardous waste industry, among others, are
shocked and outraged by the latest EPA proposal. According to an
analysis by the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council, a trade
association for incinerator operators, the EPA proposal would:
** Exempt 86.9 to 88.9 million tons of wastes from RCRA
regulation;
** Contaminate one out of every seven drinking water wells within
a mile of a landfill receiving exempt waste, which is EPA’s own
estimate;
** Pollute the drinking water of at least 13,200 individuals
getting their water from wells near landfills that accept exempt
wastes;
** Create as many as 1681 new “Superfund” sites, which would
require cleanup as a result of receiving exempt wastes, according
to calculations by the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council. The
Superfund list today only contains 1211 sites requiring cleanup,
so adding 1681 new landfills to the list would more than double
the size of the officially-acknowledged cleanup problem.
The opportunity to re-write the hazardous waste rules arose Dec.
6, 1991 when the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided a
12-year-old lawsuit (Shell Oil vs. EPA), saying EPA had made a
procedural error by not giving industry enough time to comment on
rules promulgated in 1980. Thus on procedural (not substantive)
grounds, the court threw out two key parts of the nation’s
hazardous waste laws: the “mixture rule” and the “derived from”
rule. The mixture rule said, if you mix a hazardous waste with a
non-hazardous waste, the result is by definition a hazardous
waste. The point was to prevent companies from merely diluting
their wastes to avoid regulation. The “derived from” rule said
any waste derived from treatment of a hazardous waste is, itself,
a hazardous waste. The point was to prevent “sham recyclers” from
processing wastes in ways that did nothing to detoxify them,
merely to avoid regulation.
The administration’s new proposal “reinstates” the mixture rule
and the derived-from rule, but the two rules are unrecognizable
in their new form.
EPA’s new proposal actually encourages polluters to dilute their
wastes. Any waste containing toxins below certain concentrations
will be exempt from regulation. To get the concentration down,
dilute. The problem with this approach has always been that
toxins have a bad habit of getting into food chains and
reconcentrating. What is dilute in water today is concentrated
in lettuce and grass and cows tomorrow. This is why dilution can
never be an adequate solution to pollution.
A second key feature of the new EPA proposal is that any company
can declare its wastes exempt (because of low concentration)
without producing any laboratory analyses or data to support the
claim. Industrial polluters will be bound only by an “honor
system” not to cheat.
EPA supports its new proposals with elaborate risk assessments
that claim to show that only 13,200 people would have their
drinking water supplies contaminated by the proposal.
The Hazardous Waste Treatment Council has published a long
analysis of EPA’s risk assessments, trying to prove that risks to
human health from the new proposal are much worse than EPA’s
scientists say they are. But the new proposal, and the risk
assessments that support it, really represent a triumph of an
approach that William Reilly has been pushing since he arrived at
EPA four years ago and which the Hazardous Waste Treatment
Council and its allies have never opposed: use risk assessment to
decide priorities. Polluters love this approach because there is
so little available data about health risks from pollutants, and
the data that do exist are so controversial that a
carefully-crafted risk assessment can support any claim anyone
wants to make.
The problem is illustrated by an EPA study of the composition of
leachate from 13 of the nation’s 17 hazardous waste landfills.
Only 4 percent of the total organic carbon in the leachate was
analyzed, but in this four percent, EPA chemists identified 42
organic acids, 43 oxygenated and heteroaromatic hydrocarbons, 39
halogenated hydrocarbons, 26 organic bases, 32 aromatic
hydrocarbons, 8 alkanes, and 13 metals. The unidentified 96
percent of organic carbon is of unknown toxicity. As the National
Academy of Sciences said in reporting this data, “Overall, the
number of compounds found in the four percent of the leachate
studied is large, and yet this represents only a fraction of the
overall organic contribution.”[3] The unknowns are much larger
than what is known. This is par for the course in any problem
involving complex toxicity.
In short, risk assessment is a “flexible” technique that allows
you to reach any conclusion you set out to reach. The National
Academy of Sciences put it politely when it said, “Risk
assessment techniques are highly speculative, and almost all rely
on multiple assumptions of fact–some of which are entirely
untestable.”[4] Claims that can’t be tested can’t be refuted, so
risk assessors can claim anything they like. You can’t refute a
fairy tale, even one wrapped in the trappings of science. As Dr.
David Ozonoff of Boston University said recently, “Risk
assessment is: you shoot an arrow, then draw a target around it.”
This is the system Mr. Reilly has worked tirelessly to embed
within EPA. He dignifies it with the title, “science-based
decision-making,” but–as EPA’s latest proposal makes clear–it
really means “establish your goals politically, then pepper your
conclusion with numbers and call it science-based
decision-making.” It is the most enduring disservice a chief of
EPA has ever inflicted upon the agency.
You don’t need risk assessment to tell you that controlling the
discharge of toxic chemicals into air and water is good for human
health and the environment; you need common sense. Zero discharge
is the right goal, not “acceptable risk.”
As for Mr. Bush’s notion that pumping poisons into the
environment creates jobs and stimulates the economy, it is hard
to find an economist who believes it. On the contrary, as a
writer in the WALL STREET JOURNAL said recently, “Laws and
regulations that force polluters to spend money on cleaning up
the environment do not diminish the wealth of a nation. They
transfer this wealth from polluters to polluter-cleaner-uppers
and lay a foundation for greater future wealth…. What [Mr.
Bush’s regulation-relaxation policies] do is temporarily insulate
inefficient producers from the need to innovate and invest in new
equipment… temporarily shielding ossified entrenched interests
from the dictates of a changing world economic order.”[5]
SEND MR. REILLY YOUR IDEAS ON HIS LATEST PROPOSAL BY THE JULY 20
DEADLINE: C/O EPA, WASHINGTON, DC 20460.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
[4] Miller, cited above, pg. 45.
Descriptor terms: bush; clean air act; william reilly; dan
quayle; rcra; incineration; hazadous waste treatment council;
mixture rule; derived from rule; risk assesment; bush
administration;