Abstract
ABSTRACT
The U.S. Congress, State legislatures, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are considering the ban of hazardous materials from land disposal facilities. These proposals are motivated by scientific information that current land disposal regulations may not prevent the migration of hazardous waste constituents and by-products into the environment and thus may not prevent all risks from land disposal.
This paper discusses some of the issues involved in determining whether to ban the land disposal of hazardous materials. Its purpose is not to answer the question but rather to lay out an agenda for study. The issues identified in the paper are the characteristics of the waste and the land disposal option, the location of the land disposal facility, the relative risks of alternative disposal options, the cost-effectiveness of these alternatives, and the possibility of detecting and cleaning up or mitigating the contamination if hazardous material were to migrate into the environment. Cleanup and mitigation options include restraining the spread of the toxic plume, removing tainted water from the aquifer, restoring the aquifer to its pre-contaminated level, treating the water before it is used, and closing contaminated wells and switching to a different water source.
Because it is often overlooked in discussions of land disposal bans, the possibility of detection and cleanup is emphasized in this paper. We provide some empirical estimates to illustrate that detection and cleanup may be a cheaper method of protecting against groundwater risks than either stringent standards for land disposal or a ban on land disposal. Thus we recommend that the alternative of detection and cleanup be incorporated in a full analysis of banning the land disposal of hazardous wastes. The paper includes a discussion of some caveats and additional questions that are raised when detection and cleanup are evaluated as an alternative.
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