U.S., Mexico to Disclose Waste Facility Plans

The United States and Mexico will have to tell each other where they plan to build or expand disposal sites for hazardous or radioactive waste along the border, under a binational agreement announced Wednesday by U.S. officials.

The agreement, signed Dec. 1 by officials of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Mexico’s National Ecology Institute, requires each nation to disclose plans for waste facilities, including recycling and treatment centers and incinerators, within 60 miles of the border.

The placement of waste sites has been a source of tension between the two nations. The agreement was negotiated after an outcry in Mexico over a proposed low-level nuclear waste dump near the border at Sierra Blanca, Texas. The proposed dump, which would have been located 90 miles east of El Paso, met strong opposition on both sides of the border and was denied a license in 1998 by Texas environmental regulators.

California environmentalists have pressured Mexico to release the data on hazardous materials produced in the hundreds of foreign-owned assembly plants, called maquiladoras, in Baja California. Hazardous wastes made in those plants from raw materials trucked from the United States are supposed to be returned north, but many fear that is not done.

Groups in San Diego and Tijuana have also pressed for the cleanup of an abandoned battery smelter in Tijuana under provisions of a side agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The petition, made to representatives from the United States, Mexico and Canada, has not been acted upon.

Officials from both countries hailed the waste agreement announced Wednesday. A Mexican Embassy spokesman in Washington said it “allowed both governments to move forward in responding to the sensitivities of populations living on both sides of our border.”

Felicia Marcus, who heads the EPA’s regional office in San Francisco, said it would provide unprecedented “cross-border access to information about hazardous waste facilities.”

Though it requires notification, the accord leaves it up to each country to decide for itself where it will build waste facilities.

California sites are licensed by the state and detailed information about which toxic materials are kept on those sites or transported elsewhere is already available to the public on the EPA Web site, said EPA spokesman Dave Schmidt.

Schmidt said little information is available for Mexican dumps. “You can have a hazardous site built on the Mexican side of the border and no one on the U.S. side would know about it.”

There are 42 waste facilities in the six Mexican border states--nine in Baja California, according to a report on border waste issues by the Texas Center for Policy Studies in Austin. The report did not judge how well those facilities operated.

But as worrisome as the location of sanctioned disposal sites is suspected illegal dumping of toxic wastes produced in the maquiladoras, said Tina Faulkner, a border issues researcher at the Interhemispheric Resource Center in Silver City, N.M. While Mexico has strict antipollution laws, it lacks the extent of public disclosure required in the United States and is short on inspectors and other enforcement personnel.