Hazards: Technology and Fairness (1986)

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FOCUSING PRIVATE-SECTOR ACTION ON PUBLIC HAZARDS 187 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. HAZARDOUS WASTE CLEANUP: THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM In recent years, environmental policymaking has been painfully slow, as evidenced by the number of major federal environmental laws awaiting reauthorization. The Conservation Foundation, in its 1984 State of the Environment report, described the environmental policy debate as "suspended between old problems and new, between progress and retrogression, between cooperation and polarization" (Conservation Foundation, 1984, p. 1). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates (1984, pp. 4– 8 and 4–9) there may be as many as 22,000 potentially hazardous waste sites in the United States, and that about 2,500 of those eventually may require action on Superfund's National Priorities List. The Superfund was created by Congress as a result of growing public concern about the potential threat that abandoned disposal sites pose to public health and the environment. But progress has been slow since the establishment of Superfund in 1980. Federal and state officials involved in this issue report that they are caught in a paradox—that at the same time the public is demanding vigorous Superfund activity, there is significant public opposition to most plans for cleaning up individual sites (see Tschinkel, in this volume). Another impediment to action is the complexity of cleanup regulation, often involving several different layers of government that sometimes do not agree on the nature of the problem or its solution. This situation is paralyzing action at many sites—particularly at multiparty sites and at municipal sites, where there may be scores or even hundreds of potentially responsible parties. CLEAN SITES INC.: GOALS AND ORGANIZATION Clean Sites Inc. is a response to this situation—both to the potential threat to public health and the environment and to the obstacles presented by the process itself. Its mission to accelerate the process by encouraging private party cleanup is based on a premise that is central to the question of equity. The premise is that it is only fair and reasonable that the parties contributing to the problem should contribute to the solution. CSI is designed to address the hazardous waste problem in three ways 1. Settlement support—bringing together potentially responsible parties to resolve differences and allocate costs impartially;