Wasteful Waste Disposal?
Hazardous waste cleanup has expanded beyond recognition to those who adopted the $1.5 billion, five-year Superfund that launched it a little over a decade ago.</br></br>Estimates just completed show that expenditures for cleanups will mount to about $750 billion (in undiscounted dollars) over the next 30 years under current practice. That sum could go above $1 trillion if the legacy of contamination is as great as some believe.</br></br>At $750 billion, the cleanup commits the country to three decades of spending amounts equal to about 0.5 percent of present GNP each year. After taking basic personal consumption, capital replacement and core government expenditures out of the total, the proportion is much larger.</br></br>Viewed this way, a series of sometimes little-noticed actions has quietly mortgaged a significant share of both the private and public sectors' future ability to take new initiatives - including new environmental initiatives - over the next three decades. The effects on investment decisions and the drains on scientific and technical manpower magnify the impacts of the expenditures themselves. This is where long-term economic performance is affected.</br></br>The sheer size of this commitment suggests that we should mine the experience of the past decade to seek cost-cutting improvements. Far more important, we need to examine how well the fragmented cleanup effort, taken as a whole, is meeting overall social and environmental goals.