Universal Waste and the Fallacy of Failure

 Had a long and frustrating conversation with a pal of mine who is presenting to a council on CERCLA - the law enacted to clean up pollution disasters. CERCLA, or Superfund, is backward looking. It is not a seat belt or an air bag, it's a law to clean up the highway accidents by assigning cleanup costs to those who drove the car or fueled the tank.

First, here is the photojournalist take of a large failed warehouse.

Landlord warehouse in Columbus OH, courtesy of Resource Recycling magazine.

The pal called to present his recent takeaway from Closed Loop Refining and Recovery failure, an abandonment of CRTs and CRT glass at facilities CLRR rented in Arizona and Ohio. That highway accident was perhaps the biggest blemish on Electronics Recycling Programs across the country. Or perhaps, it's not. But owing to the landlord's use of CERCLA (Superfund Law) language to go after clients of the CRT Recycling company, CLRR certainly made the news, and elevated what was not the largest of CRT glass markets to become emblematic of the CRT recycling industry.

Cars driving the speed limit on the highway don't make the news. CRT recyclers who continually processed CRT glass, under the conditions of the EPA CRT Rule, were able to move far more material than CLRR - because they were moving it.

CLRR was driving twice the speed limit day after day by the end of the third quarter 2013. And by speed limit, I'm referring to limits on the conditional exemption to hazardous waste law - rules against speculative accumulation, and processing deadlines to produce "furnace ready cullet".

The consulting pal said that the root cause of the failures was the EPA CRT Rule - which I helped write in 1999. He said that had the EPA instead classified the CRTs as "Universal (Hazardous) Waste", that CLRR would not have happened.

This thinking is typical of CERCLA, which only focuses on disasters. People can make up whatever they want about coulda-shoulda-woulda, and the disaster appears to be the evidence that if "mistakes were made", that the wording of the laws in place that didn't prevent this accident must be to blame.

This is like a call to lower the highway speed limit from 70 to 50 MPH, when CLRR was driving 140. The fact is that if any regulator, certifying body, landlord doubling rented space, or supplier doing normal due diligence on CLRR had examined the requirements of the existing CRT Rule, and mass balance records from CLRR, they could only draw one conclusion by the end of 2013. I know, because I did the diligence, and cut off shipments to CLRR in 2013 until and unless the company corrected the expired and exceeded requirements of my diligence.  And I cut them off despite them lowering their fees to my company, and despite it being the beginning of the worst year in the history of my company - the Vermont Opt Out Plan settlement of 2014.

State Hate #1: "Secret Science Reform Act" vs. EPA

"Secret Science Reform Act": When Any "State-Hate" Reform Will Do?

I've been writing about my headaches with Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.  All nice people.  I wish they knew the 30 people at GPR were nice people.  It would be nice if they would have visited Good Point Recycling during the past 36 months.   That may have made it easier for them to explain why a Vermont company with a lower bid, 30 employees, R2-certified, no landfilling of CRT glass, and $488,000 less expensive, warranted a change in procurement.

For the record, while the state's selection of Casella is something we object to, competition is not.  We simply want to run an Independent Opt-Out plan, so that if Vermont districts and entities WANT to use Good Point, they can. 

However, Cathy Jamieson and her 2 staff are tilting the playing field AFTER they chose Casella Waste Systems, to make sure the horse (CWST) they bet on wins.  Whether or not the bidder selection was proper, the state is cheating against the Manufacturer Independent Plan.

Among citizens and recycling clients, there's a lot of fatigue with the story.  "I'm e-wasted out", a client told me. Vermonters tend to be strong and well educated environmentalists.  VPIRG is well funded.  The "Green Mountain State" is a Green mountain state.  Most people will attribute an angry regulated business owner to some kind of Republican Fox News related profit-motivated decision to expose the environment to risk.You know, risk perception.  Here's a link:   

Oscillatory Brain Activity Correlates with Risk Perception and Predicts Social Decisions

Pablo Billeke,  Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD), Facultad De Gobierno, Faculty Member

In social interactions, the perception of how risky our decisions are depends on how we anticipate other people's behaviors. We used electroencephalography to study the neurobiology of perception of social risk, in subjects playing the role of proposers in an iterated ultimatum game in pairs. Based on statistical modeling, we used the previous behaviors of both players to separate high-risk [HR] offers from low-risk [LR] offers. The HR offers present higher rejection probability and higher entropy (variability of possible outcome) than the LR offers. Rejections of LR offers elicited both a stronger mediofrontal negativity and a higher prefrontal theta activity than rejections of HR offers. Moreover, prior to feedback, HR offers generated a drop in alpha activity in an extended network. Interestingly, trial-by-trial variation in alpha activity in the medial prefrontal, posterior temporal, and inferior pariental cortex was specifically modulated by risk and, together with theta activity in the prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex, predicted the proposer's subsequent behavior. Our results provide evidence that alpha and theta oscillations are sensitive to social risk and underlie a fine-tuning regulation of social decisions.

(Wow, how's that for a dollup of obfuscation?  If you can't follow it, however, you cannot understand or defuse "state hate")

Risk is a statistic, a perception, something to be weighed in scientific method.  It's also deeply rooted in our hippocampus, mitigated by the reasoning in the cerebral cortex.  How regulators (who tend to be risk averse) interact with entrepreneurs (with the opposite tendencies, relatively speaking) offers a case study for how democracy is breaking down,how libertarians and social conservatives and liberals are getting whipped around in circles.  Here is a national news story (Fox News) on a law proposed by GOP

Republican lawmakers in the House are pushing legislation that would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from proposing new regulations based on science that is not transparent or not reproducible.  The Secret Science Reform Act, introduced Thursday by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., would bar the agency from proposing or finalizing rules without first disclosing all "scientific and technical information" relied on to support its proposed action.