]]]]] SOME WASTE CLEANUP RULES ARE A WASTE OF RESOURCES [[[[[[[ By James Bovard (2/18/89) From The Wall Street Journal, 15 February 1989, p. A14:3 (Mr. Bovard is an adjunct analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.) [Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC] The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment observed in 1986: ``In terms of economic efficiency, environmental protection in the United States appears more costly than in other industrialized nations. The reason seems to be not merely greater government regulation but less flexible environmental regulations in the United States that block effective and more economical and technologically advanced solutions.'' The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act is perhaps the clearest example of such wasteful regulation. RCRA, which is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, covers the storage and disposal of hazardous wastes. It was enacted because other federal environmental laws often did not apply to the dumping of hazardous wastes directly onto the land. (Superfund applies to the cleanup of abandoned hazardous waste sites, or to hazardous waste sites that have been declared emergencies.) RCRA was enacted in 1976, but the Carter Administration and the early Reagan administration did little to implement the law's provisions. In 1984, frustrated with the administration's foot-dragging, Congress amended RCRA, mandating far stricter regulations on hazardous-waste disposal, often with no regard to the actual health threats from the waste. Congress is scheduled to reauthorize RCRA this year, and likely will make the law even worse. The EPA has already filed more than 17,000 pages of RCRA regulations and notices in the Federal Register, and more are on the way -- the EPA is still writing the regulations for the 1984 amendments. The EPA estimates that it will cost a total of $20 billion in compliance costs by the time the regulations are fully implemented in the 1990s. Former RCRA Administrator Marcia Williams expects that the actual costs will be significantly higher. The heavy costs RCRA imposes on industry might be worth it if they provided some benefit to human health. But RCRA mandates that companies clean up their factory grounds not to levels protective of human health, but to ``background levels'' -- that is, to levels at which the chemicals occur naturally in the surrounding environment. Former EPA General Counsel Frank Blake observes: ``If someone poured a glass of chlorinated tap water onto the ground at a RCRA cleanup site, then he could be fined for polluting the environment.'' The EPA sets health-based exposure levels for many chemicals, and, under regulatory programs other than RCRA, will certify that a material is no longer hazardous if the material's hazardous content is below the health threshold. By contrast, RCRA mandates using ``best developed available technology'' -- the process that reduces the level of hazardous constituents to their lowest possible level -- to treat wastes, even when the amount of chemicals in those wastes is already too small to pose a health danger. For example, the maximum level at which the EPA considers carbon disulfide waste water to be no threat to health is almost 500 times greater than the level for which the EPA under RCRA requires businesses to treat wastes containing carbon disulfide. The maximum level for trichlorofluoromethane that the EPA considers safe is more than 20,000 times higher than the level for which RCRA requires treatment. The health-exposure danger level for acetone is 400 times higher than the best available technology level; for phenol, 600 times higher. In addition, the EPA proposed new RCRA regulations last month that it estimates will cost $28 million a year for compliance -- but the regulations are expected to result in only 0.07 life saved per year [$400 million per life]. By contrast, the Consumer Product Safety Commission uses a ``value of individual life'' estimate of $1 million to $2 million for judging regulations. In 1986 Wendy Gramm, then-head of the Office of Management and Budget's regulatory office, criticized proposed RCRA regulations for presuming ``that the individual receives the maximum exposure to the substance -- in effect [saying] that he would sink a straw into groundwater within the disposal facility property boundary and drink almost half a gallon of this [maximum-contaminated] water each day for 70 years.'' (Those regulations were not promulgated; instead the agency decreed even stricter standards.) According to former RCRA Administrator Williams, RCRA has made voluntary hazardous waste cleanups by companies far more onerous. If a company wishes to clean up part of its property that poses a special threat, then it must clean up its entire site to RCRA's ``cleaner than clean'' specifications. These standards were not mandated by Congress, but RCRA administrators apparently enjoy forcing businesses to clean up, regardless of whether it serves a useful purpose. (By contrast, Superfund cleanups need only address threats to human health.) Before beginning such a cleanup, the company must also get a RCRA permit, which takes two to four years, and the paper work can easily cost between $500,000 and $1 million, according to several industry experts. Mobile waste-treatment units are one of the best hopes for speedy responses to threats from hazardous wastes; yet, their potential is unfulfilled because of the EPA's lethargic permitting process. The quest for statistical purity has other pernicious side effects as well. Because the EPA, under RCRA guidelines, judges ``best technology'' largely by measuring how much the treatment process reduces the level of hazardous chemicals, incineration is routinely required. Unfortunately, public health risks from air pollution are often neglected. As a May 1988 American Petroleum Institute brief noted, ``For several of the listed petroleum wastes, incineration was found to pose a greater risk to the general population in close to 50% of the instances when it was compared to land disposal of the untreated waste or surface impoundment.'' Though RCRA's initial goal was to boost recycling, it is impeding recycling. Take the case of used oil. The EPA is expected to rule soon that used oil is a hazardous waste since, under RCRA's guidelines, the oil contains some slight amounts of hazardous constituents and therefore is put in the same regulatory category as pure dioxin. Gas stations that currently collect used oil for recycling purposes could be required to formally apply for a EPA hazardous waste-handling permit and become exposed to unlimited, perpetual liability. If the used oil is ever involved in an environmental problem, they could be sued regardless of whether they had any direct responsibility for the problem. The likely result is that many, if not most, current handlers of used oil will cease handling it -- and far more used oil will end up being dumped by individuals onto the ground or into sewer systems. By calling such used oil hazardous, EPA will make it much more dangerous. The more we spend on cleanliness as a moral idea, the less we have left to spend on real health threats. In the reauthorization process this year, Congress should fundamentally re-examine the RCRA program. There are serious dangers from hazardous wastes, but it will take more than sweeping, impractical decrees from Capitol Hill or EPA to solve the problem. * * *
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