Hazardous wastes come from a variety of sources, among them factories or even our homes. These toxic materials are now viewed as signs of unsustainable practices.
Love Canal: The Awakening
Love Canal was a hazardous-waste disposal site in Niagara Falls, New York, similar to many others around the world. Leakage from the site caused serious health problems in residents living near it. The incident alerted the public and government officials to the problem of improper hazardous-waste disposal.
The Dimensions of the Problem
The problem with hazardous wastes is twofold. First, tens of thousands of hazardouswaste sites are in need of cleanup in the United States and other countries. These sites contaminate groundwater and can affect the health of people who live nearby and consume the water. Cleaning them up will cost many billions of dollars. Second, factories continue to generate millions of tons of hazardous waste each year.
LUST – It’s Not What You Think
Hundreds of thousands of underground storage tanks have been installed in industrial nations and are used to store many potentially toxic substances such as gasoline, diesel fuel, hazardous waste, and heating oil. Over time, steel tanks corrode and begin to leak, contaminating groundwater used for cooking food, drinking, and bathing.
Addressing the issue of hazardous waste requires both plans to clean up contaminated sites and preventive actions to greatly reduce or eliminate hazardous-waste production in the first place.
The Superfund Act: Cleaning Up Past Mistakes
The Superfund Act provides money to clean up hazardous waste dumps and other contaminated sites. This money comes from a tax on oil and petrochemicals and is replenished by fees charged to those responsible for the contamination, including the owners and operators of waste sites and the companies that paid to have their waste disposed of in them.
The cleanup of hazardous-waste sites under the Superfund Act has proven extremely slow, costly, and litigious. Much of the money spent has gone to legal fees. The
Superfund Act has been criticized because it provides money for cleaning up property but no compensation for health damage. Many of the cleanups are considered inadequate.

Rather than spending millions of dollars to identify responsible parties, the Superfund program might work better with a no-fault policy – one that provides funds to clean up sites regardless of who is liable.
What to Do with Today’s Waste: Preventing Future Problems
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act established a nationwide reporting system to monitor hazardous wastes from their production until their disposal. This provision seeks to eliminate illegal and improper hazardous-waste disposal. Recent amendments call for an elimination of land disposal of hazardous wastes and regulations to prevent leaking underground storage tanks.
Additional steps may be needed to further reduce environmental contamination by hazardous wastes, among them broadening the definition of what is hazardous so that municipal waste, sewage, pesticides, and mine waste are included. Passing a law to protect the environment does not always result in immediate or expected gains for a number of reasons, notably a lack of funds or personnel to carry out the work.
Tighter regulations for the disposal of hazardous wastes in the United States and other nations have led to commendable efforts to reduce waste production by some companies, but to illegal dumping by less scrupulous ones. Some companies export hazardous wastes to less developed nations with little or no oversight of such practices. Although many less developed nations ban such activities, many still accept wastes.
Dealing with Today’s Wastes: A Variety of Options
Many options exist for getting rid of waste. The most sustainable approaches involve steps that reduce or eliminate hazardous-waste output. You don’t have waste if you don’t make it.
Changes in manufacturing processes such as substitution and process manipulation are often the simplest and most cost-effective means of reducing or eliminating hazardous wastes. Waste output can also be dramatically reduced by recycling and reusing wastes.
Hazardous wastes can be converted to nontoxic or less toxic substances by chemical, physical, and biological means, such as neutralization, combustion, low-temperature thermal decomposition, and bacterial decay. Such measures, while effective, present some problems and are clearly not as desirable as preventive measures.
Not all waste can be eliminated by prevention, recycling, or detoxification. Perpetual storage remains the final, yet least sustainable, option.
Disposing of Radioactive Wastes
Disposing of radioactive waste will be a problem for a long time, even though nuclear power and nuclear weapons production are on the decline. Safe, permanent repositories are needed to store huge amounts of waste produced by power plants and other facilities.

Some Obstacles to Sustainable Hazardous-Waste Management
Hazardous waste production appears to be on the decline, but companies still release large quantities into the air, water, and land.
Individual Actions Count
Individuals can help reduce the hazardous-waste threat by properly disposing of hazardous materials, avoiding their use whenever possible, using nontoxic alternatives, and cutting down on nonessential consumption – because the production of goods often results in the generation of hazardous waste at factories.
More developed nations produce enormous amounts of solid waste each year, much of which is burned or landfilled, squandering precious resources and creating an enormous and costly waste disposal problem in urban areas. Waste production is increasing in many countries such as the United States; recovery rates (recycling and composting) are growing much faster, a trend that bodes well for the future.
Solid waste management strategies fall into one of three categories: those that deal with waste after it has been produced, those that divert waste back into the productionconsumption cycle, and those that prevent waste generation in the first place.
The Traditional Strategy: The Output Approach
Worldwide, most trash is still dumped in landfills.
Open garbage dumps have been replaced by sanitary landfills, pits into which garbage is dumped and then covered daily with a thin layer of dirt to eliminate odors and pests.
Although sanitary landfills are unsustainable, they can be made more environmentally acceptable by locating them away from groundwater supplies, collecting and treating toxic leachate, capturing methane gas, and other steps.
Oceans have long been viewed as a huge waste dump site for a variety of wastes, including radioactive materials. This practice is no longer legal in the United States, but it continues in other countries.
Garbage can be burned in incinerators, which greatly reduces trash. This option, however, even when linked to energy production, is viewed by many as an unsustainable way of dealing with municipal solid waste.
Sustainable Options: The Input Approach
Source reduction techniques reduce the amount of waste entering the waste stream and represent the most sustainable waste management strategy.

Higher quality, more durable goods last longer and consequently reduce the amount of waste. Manufacturers and consumers can play significant roles by making and buying more durable products.
Efforts to make products smaller and more compact can significantly reduce resource demand.
One of the most effective means of reducing solid waste is to reduce consumption – buy what you need.
The Throughput Approach: Reuse, Recycling, and Composting
The throughput approach diverts waste from the waste stream for recycling and reuse.
Reusing materials and products cuts down on resource demand and offers many other economic and environmental benefits. Citizens can participate in two ways, by donating used products and buying used goods.
Many products can be returned to recycling facilities, where they are shipped to factories to be used to make new products – a process that offers many social, economic, and environmental benefits. Although recycling is on the rise, most countries have barely tapped the full potential of recycling.
Many states now recycle 30% or more of their municipal solid waste.
Recycling programs generally involve drop-off sites or curbside pickup, which may be run by private industry or by city and town governments.
Although recycling is a promising strategy for waste management, many obstacles hinder its full implementation. Some of the most important are federal laws and subsidies that give the raw materials industry an unfair economic advantage over recycling.
Expanding the amount of garbage that is recycled will require removal of some of the legal and economic barriers and subsidies that give benefits to companies that use virgin materials rather than recycled ones. Commitment on the part of citizens is also vital to making recycling a success.
One of the most important boosts to recycling is purchasing products made from recycled materials, an activity in which governments, businesses, and individuals can all engage.
Governments can help strengthen the markets by providing incentives to companies that use recycled materials or by requiring them to use a certain percentage of recycled content in their products.
Composting is a way of returning the nutrients contained in organic matter such as yard waste and food scraps to the soil. This strategy not only reduces the need for landfilling, it helps nourish soils, creating a more closed-loop system.

Recycling is not only good for the environment, it often costs less than other strategies and creates many jobs.