A Liability Crisis Cities Can’t Throw Away

Congress came to a sobering conclusion late last month: If we do not control the use and the disposal of hazardous materials soon, we will lose the battle against toxic waste.

The solution cannot lie alone in attempts to clean up the Stringfellow pits and the Love Canals that plague the countryside. The wisdom of this congressional assessment veils an even more ominous ghost of practices past that will soon haunt the nation’s cities--for the backyard garbage pail is a toxic time bomb.

Recent technical studies demonstrate that the residential garbage can is brimming with all the ingredients for a home-brewed carcinogenic soup: the methylene chloride, tuluene, benzene, 1-1-2 tricholoroethylene and other unsavory chemicals commonly found in household disinfectants, laundry products, oven cleaners, paint removers, pesticides, car waxes, glues, insecticides and even shampoos. These hazardous compounds are chemically identical to those of industrial polluters. This mix leaching from household garbage at refuse landfills will have frightening and unforeseen consequences for the average taxpayer and city governments.

Many of this country’s 600,000 landfills accept both municipal trash and hazardous industrial waste. Until now, the Environmental Protection Agency assumed that municipal trash is “sanitary,” with no toxic consequence. When poisoned water supplies are discovered surrounding these dumps, under EPA protocol it is the private industrial waste contributors who bear the entire cost of cleanup and often the costs of lawsuits alleging injury to neighbors. Towns until now could dump and run.

This enchanted life of legal immunity for humble backyard trash is about to change. The scientific fact that household refuse is hazardous has profound legal and financial consequences. Private companies that share the use of contaminated dumps with municipal dumping services are now demanding that municipalities be given equal treatment.

For example, take the case of the 70-acre Charles George dump site in Tyngsborough, Mass. The EPA asked industrial companies, which together contributed less than 0.1% of the total estimated volume of decaying waste, to pay for the entire projected $30-million cost of cleanup. The remaining 99.9% of the waste volume at Charles George is ordinary residential and commercial garbage. The private companies involved want the cities that dumped garbage to pay a proportional share of remediation costs. The free ride of the garbage truck could come to a screeching halt.

Legally, the private companies appear to be on solid ground. While the EPA usually elects not to pursue municipalities regarding wastes dumped at private sites, there is no basis in the Superfund law for the agency’s position. To the contrary, this statute requires cities that dump any material which is or becomes hazardous to be treated no differently than private industrial concerns that contribute hazardous wastes. All responsible parties at a contaminated site must share liability.

The cost can run into the tens of millions of dollars per location. If, as the studies now demonstrate, municipal garbage is hazardous, revolution is about to occur on the toxic hit list.

Cities and towns from Peoria to Los Angeles will inherit strict liability to share in the cleanup of what the congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates as perhaps as many as 50,000 hazardous waste dumps nationwide. The financial responsibility will stagger even the largest municipality. According to OTA estimates: “The costs . . . could easily be . . . several hundred billion dollars--and a sensibly paced effort could take up to 50 years to clean 10,000 sites.” Few will be immune.

The only successful long-term course is to invest in processes to dramatically reduce the output of toxic waste at the tap. But even the most ambitious prophylactic measures will not diminish the ticking toxic time bomb in the garbage buried by cities and towns over the years.

Decades of benign neglect will cost future generations of taxpayers sums heretofore unimagined, as the cost of toxic cleanup switches from the private sector to the taxpayer. Cities that either isolate and collect hazardous wastes separately from their ordinary trash, or which convert all their trash to energy through advanced gasification technologies, may escape this liability in the future. Otherwise this grim legacy may now be unavoidable.