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.

My Contribution to EPA CRT Cullet Discussion

This was my comment to the organizers and regulators in the meeting about CRT Cullet Markets (see agenda at bottom):

We were involved in the sale of CRT cullet from an alleged "pile" in the southwest which was widely speculated to be non-moving.

Cullet from the pile was sold (not through us but using our smelter's same trucking company) to a lead smelter in Mexico, which paid 7 cents per pound.

After the 2010 SEMARNAT border controls on the CRT cullet, the Mexico lead smelter said the material was a "headache".  They changed in 2012 to charging 7 cents per pound instead of paying 7 cents for the exact same material.  That is a change of 14 cents per pound based on nothing but "diligence" which equated (to the mining/primary smelting company) as "risk".

This discussion is inadvertently creating justification for companies which speculate on whole tubes, avoiding the cutting and washing.   EPA needs to clearly distinguish between diligence on whole unprocessed material and companies which have turned that material into saleable commodity.

A shredded toaster (steel pieces) should not carry a label of "toaster waste".  It's ferrous metal.  The CRT glass which has been processed should be treated as leaded silicate, and governed by MSDS and DOT etc. according to its properties, not as a "waste".

When we exaggerate the risks of "waste" (attributing more weight to the risk of human-generated secondary material) compared to the risks of identical or higher-risk "virgin" material, we set up bad regulation.  The regulations we have established for "Cathode Ray Tube" glass penalize a smelter if they try it as a feedstock.

The culprit, ironically, may be the word "Stewardship".

lead mining of yore

When we mine gold, copper, tin, iron, tantalum, silver, etc. from mountainsides and Indonesian coral islands, we do massive damage on several scales.  Endangered species are exposed by access roads.  Children mine coltan to fund warloards.   And the number one and number two sources of mercury in the USA are not mercury mining - they are gold and silver mining.   The mountainsides release radioactive uranium, leaded dust, mercury, etc.   Fourteen of the fifteen largest Superfund Sites in the USA have been hard rock metal mines.   But the mountain is not a "Steward".

We still govern mining based on the General Mining Act of 1872.   How can recycling compete with standards of yore?