Word: epa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spreading realization that there is no easy way simply to bury the toxic-waste problem has fed the ever present NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome. "Something's got to give," protests Christopher Daggett, EPA administrator for New York and New Jersey. "Either we aren't going to have cleanups, or someone's going to bite the bullet and start accepting wastes. But Lord knows, no one wants to be first." Daggett and his boss, EPA Director Thomas, contend that there is no ready technology that can promptly solve the disposal problem. "We can't wait around until we have...
Critics accuse EPA of being too cautious in failing to rely more heavily on such destruction technologies as high-temperature incineration and in failing to back innovative approaches for detoxifying chemical wastes (see box). EPA has projects under way in these fields, but the pace is slow, the funding inadequate, and there is little sense of urgency. Barbara Vecchiarelli, a citizens'-group leader in Marlboro Township, N.J., admires Daggett's dedication to his work but, nonetheless, complains about EPA in general: "They don't have the technology to handle chemical pollution. The problem is bigger than they are, and they...
Part of the problem with EPA's management of the Superfund over the past five years stems from Reagan's initial choice of top officials who were ill- prepared to handle the difficult mandate. Anne Burford, a Colorado lawyer and Republican Party fund raiser, was tapped in 1981 to head EPA; at White House urging, she approved the selection of Rita Lavelle, a California publicist who had worked for a chemical company (Aerojet General Corp.), to direct the Superfund start-up. In the mismanagement that followed, Lavelle was convicted of perjury for denying any involvement in EPA's dealings with...
...that receive waste from steel-processing plants. New fiber-glass liners are being placed inside the cylinders. In the past, such wastes were merely poured into noxious surface lagoons. (In other ways, Waste Management is no ideal disposer. It agreed to pay $2.5 million last April to settle an EPA charge that it had illegally disposed of toxic chemicals in Ohio...
...public clamor for quicker, more effective action in the war on toxic wastes is fully justified, the expectation of easy or fast fixes is not. Some 66,000 chemicals are being used in the U.S.; EPA has classified 60,000 of them as potentially, if not definitely, hazardous to human health. They have been dumped or buried for years on the plausible but, as it turned out, ! tragically wrong theory that they would lose their toxicity during the decades it would take them to drift through layers of soil and rock into deep water supplies. There...