🚀 go-pugleaf

The Reason Foundation has just published two new recycling studies by me. 
Here's the executive summary of the second one; the first one appeared in
another message.  Both are parts of a series of papers called "Recycling
and Deregulation: Opportunities for Market Development"; the description
of the series follows in yet a third message.  If you're interested, call
the Reason Foundation at 310-391-2245 to find out how to get these papers. 

Reason Foundation
Policy Study No. 197

RECYCLING HAZARDOUS WASTE
How RCRA has Recyclers Running Around in CERCLAs

(Part 2 of a Series on Recycling and Deregulation: Opportunities for 
Market Development)

by Alexander Volokh

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Each year, about 100,000 to 1 million tons of hazardous waste are 
recycled in the United States.  Another 13 million tons are dumped into 
hazardous waste landfills.  The amount recycled is only about 0.8 percent 
to 7.7 percent of the amount dumped.

The two main federal laws regulating hazardous waste -- the Resource 
Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and Superfund -- may be reauthorized 
in the 104th Congress.  This makes hazardous waste a hot topic in the 
environmental world.  Recycling is also high on many people's 
environmental checklists.  But the two issues -- hazardous waste and 
recycling -- are rarely thought of together.

Still less frequently is hazardous waste recycling thought of favorably.  
Hazardous waste recycling's bad reputation stems from a number of 
environmental misconceptions.  When thinking about hazardous waste 
recycling, one must keep in mind that:

- Calling something hazardous doesn't make it so.
- Calling something a waste doesn't make it bad.
- A hazardous ingredient needn't produce an unsafe product.

We don't want *too much* recycling of hazardous waste -- not if it wastes 
more resources than it saves.  But we don't want to artificially 
discourage it either by needlessly making recycling more expensive than 
landfilling.  Yet the federal government is doing exactly that -- even 
while it's trying to encourage recycling in general, it's discouraging 
the recycling of hazardous waste.

- Hazardous waste law is confusing.  The terms "solid waste" and
  "hazardous waste" are difficult to understand.  This is a big problem 
  when a regulatory scheme hinges on the definitions, and it has led to
  uncertainty and litigation. 

- The EPA's risk assessment is unnecessarily conservative.  The impact of
  improper disposal is small compared to other risks that the public
  willingly accepts.  The risks posed by hazardous waste are also lower
  than most of the risks currently addressed by environmental regulation. 

- RCRA's requirements are expensive.  The total cost of complying with 
  RCRA is estimated at over $40 billion.

- Recycling is treated differently than the manufacture of the same 
  products out of virgin materials.  RCRA often considers that substances
  intended for recycling are in fact "discarded."  Many perfectly
  acceptable and reusable (and regulated) raw materials become RCRA
  hazardous wastes the moment they are "discarded," whatever that means,
  which virtually guarantees that few people will recycle them. 

In short, hazardous waste law is expensive, irrational, and confusing.  
The only way to get around these requirements for certain products is by 
case-by-case exemptions.  Lead acid batteries are exempted from hazardous 
waste law until they reach the recycler, so battery recycling is high 
despite the industry's costly regulation.  RCRA regulation has 
discouraged the recycling of spent aluminum potliner, which is only now 
slowly starting up again.  And state hazardous waste provisions in 
California and some New England states have discouraged the recycling of 
used motor oil.

Other aspects of hazardous waste law also do their part to discourage 
recycling.  The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), for instance, requires 
that companies report how much of certain "toxic chemicals" they use.  
There have been proposals to expand the list of industries subject to the 
TRI to include scrap metal recyclers and waste management facilities.  
This sounds like a good idea, but in fact it would discourage the 
recycling of copper, zinc, and other metals.  These metals are hazardous 
in certain forms (for instance, when they're dissolved and discharged 
into water), but not when they're recycled; making scrap metal recyclers 
subject to the TRI would give people the impression that scrap recyclers 
are heavy polluters because of the amounts of metals they accept.  Also, 
waste management facilities only receive wastes from elsewhere, and 
making them subject to the TRI would impose costly bookkeeping burdens on 
them without adding to health or safety.

And then there's Superfund, which provides for the cleanup of hazardous 
sites.  If a hazardous substance is found at a Superfund site, whoever 
arranged for the treatment or disposal of the substance at that site can 
potentially be made to pay for the cleanup of the *entire* site.  The 
problem here is that selling metal to a scrap metal recycler can be 
considered "arranging for disposal" if that recycler eventually goes 
bankrupt and his property becomes a Superfund site -- and so everyone who 
ever sold anything to the scrap metal recycler can be stuck with huge 
cleanup costs for "contamination" they weren't even responsible for.  
This discourages the recycling of scrap metal and other products, like 
nickel-cadmium batteries, contaning substances that are considered hazardous.

Superfund should be amended so that recycling isn't considered "treatment 
or disposal."  RCRA should be overhauled so that it is based *solely on 
realistic risks of actual harms*.  Whether or not something is a waste is 
irrelevant to the risk it poses.  At the very least, RCRA should be 
amended to exclude recyclable materials.

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