The Midnight Dumpers
While the legitimate dumping practices of chemical companies may have been less than desirable in years gone by, a far greater problem may be found by illegal, secret dumping in just any old dump site, even roadsides or near-by ponds!
A New Jersey businessman, since convicted of illegal dumping, claims that 80 percent of waste is illegally dumped. Perhaps he was overestimating to make himself look less guilty. Even so, the EPA has said there is a virtual "army" of trucks that cruise country roads at night looking for places to dispose of unwanted waste. Often they dump their cargos into the nearest sewer, stream, lake, ditch or field.
Part of the problem stems from the high cost of disposing of waste properly, which can be as much as $500 a barrel. Many businessmen faced with a choice between going out of business and laying off their workers, or illegal dumping, chose dumping. Moreover, in the words of one city attorney, "there's no way to police a dump." City dumps never intended to serve as chemical waste disposal sites become easy targets for the midnight dumpers.
Even organized crime has seen the enormous amounts of money to be made in illegal dumping. Operating as supposedly legitimate disposal firms, organized crime charges high prices, supposedly to bury the waste properly, and then turns around and dumps the stuff on the nearest vacant lot, city dump or ditch beside a country road.
"It's so easy to mix toxic wastes with ordinary garbage," one informer told a congressional committee.
Probably the worst example of illegal dumping occurred in North Carolina. A Raleigh transformer company paid a midnight dumper to dump oil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The dumper sprayed the oil along 210 miles of rural roads. One resident living near to those roads had a stillborn child and another child was born with massive heart defects. Physicians in the area reportedly have noticed an upsurge in birth defects in the year after the spraying.
Roadside dumping would seem to be a common practice among illegal dumpers. Chemical wastes have even been dumped along the New Jersey Turnpike.
Solutions Now?
Much of the chemical dumping practiced over the past four decades was probably legal. ("Probably," because lawyers can argue forever about these things) Yet as of 1979, only a mere 10 percent of hazardous wastes was treated in ways that would be legal under laws that went into effect in 1980.
The 1980 laws require an impermeable barrier between waste and groundwater. They require monitoring of the dump site, as well as fencing of the site. They require a system for capturing escaping discharges. Violators face $25,000-a-day fine and jail sentences.
Yet the laws exempt the toxic wastes of small businesses, such as dry cleaners and gasoline stations, and there are few licensed waste-disposal sites available. Moreover, in an ironic twist, the new laws may have prompted an increase in illegal, on-land dumping, as producers of waste hurried to beat the deadline by dumping waste secretly.
Thus there is serious question about the possibility, much less the practicality, of proper waste disposal. Theoretically, as one state government wanted one manufacturer to do, you could dig out everything already in a dump, plus the surrounding contaminated soil, install 10-foot clay vaults on the site, and then put back the waste (most of it in barrels) and soil. Obviously this would be incredibly expensive, and only the largest and most visible manufacturers would have the money to do it.
High temperature incineration is another way to dispose of waste, a method that some of the larger companies have used for 40 years. Preferably this is done in ships out in the middle of the ocean. This incineration itself results in air pollution!
But there are those who believe that there is no satisfactory answer to waste dumping. An EPA official, Gary N. Dietrich, has said: "There's no completely safe land disposal. Anytime you put hazardous waste on the ground, it will eventually leak into drinking water." At any rate, the future expense of careful chemical waste dumping will entail dreadful cost, be it in higher prices, lost jobs, fallen production or a "poorer" economy.
Man Apart from God
Chemical waste dumping confronts this world with hard choices. People want plastics, synthetic materials, and insecticide-protected food. Were the various chemical and manufacturing companies that produce waste to stop producing the stuff tomorrow, we would all be immensely poorer.
Asbestos, for example, is deadly stuff. It is highly cancer-causing. Yet it is the only effective material for brake linings. Shall we do without cars? Most of us could not without losing our homes or our jobs or both.
DDT also causes cancer. Yet its use has saved millions of people from malaria.
If all American farms were to stop using pesticides, herbicides and fungicides tomorrow, food output would be cut in half. Countless millions who depend on U.S. food exports would face famine.
Any semblance of civilized life for millions of people depends on an industrial base that produces horrendous, toxic wastes.
Why is it that, in this world, material abundance seems to create horrible pollution? Why can't we have cars and chemical goods without smog and toxic waste? Why are efforts to clean up pollution so costly — often causing either workers to lose their jobs or the price of products to skyrocket? We have, probably, overlooked how these human troubles began.
When the first man, Adam, chose to eat of the forbidden tree in the garden of Eden thereby signifying his desire to live apart from God, humankind cut itself off from the ultimate source of true knowledge and also, consequently, came under certain physical limits. After Adam's sin every advance that mankind has made, it seems, is paid for in some kind of hardship. Chemicals make life easier — but they also threaten life itself. Since Adam's sin, every good thing exacts a high cost.
Whenever we escape from labor, whether it be in plastic products, fossil fuels for our cars or modern power to run our refrigerators, limitations pop up in a new form: hazardous waste, air pollution or dangerous radiation. Wisdom to solve our problems has escaped the ingenuity of man.
Where There Is No Vision the Water Is Polluted
The Bible sets forth ecological laws for life in this world today. The basic principle of properly disposing of organic waste is found in Deuteronomy 23:12-13, a reference to the disposal of human waste. The principle, of course, is isolation of wastes from human contact. Thus, in extending the principle, it condemns open pit, roadside dumping or dumping into rivers, lakes or wells.
Another basic ecological principle is that "without vision, the people perish" (Prov. 29:18). The idea is that you should try to foresee the long-range effects of your own actions. Putting acidic sludge into a barrel and sealing it may not be a good idea if, years down the road, the sludge eats through the barrel and finds its way into the ground and water system.
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But notice — because man has had limits set on him, he may be unable to know, today, that other-wise proper disposal methods won't work. It may be years, for example, before he knows that the barrel will leak!
Compounding the problem is mankind's basically selfish human nature.
People don't dump their garbage into their own swimming pools. Yet they have been known, in the classic instance, to dump their garbage over their neighbor's fence. There is no immediate tragedy when a chemical company buys its own land and properly uses it as a dump. The tragedy comes when the dump leaks and pollutes the air that someone else breathes or the water that someone else drinks.
To use a common example, why is it that most private yards are much cleaner than most public parks? It is human nature to "look after one's own things," and not the things of others (see Phillipians 2:4). It is all too human to be self-oriented; to be unconcerned for the other person.
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"We're not dumping it anywhere, Ma'am.
We're just going to keep driving it around."
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When property is held in common, it is human nature to let it deteriorate. No one feels responsible for it because 'no one feels he really owns it. Ranchers often over-graze public lands, keeping their own land lush. In West Africa the absence of private property rights led to overgrazing, which in turn was one of the reasons for the eventual denuding of vegetation that led to famine.
When human government is the owner of land, it may be better managed than if no one owns it, yet the lack of feeling of personal long-term responsibility for that land still may lead to bad management. Political pressures may force decisions whose long-term effects for the land are harmful. For example, one of the recent administrations in Washington, trying to cut the costs of housing (and who can quibble with that objective?) stepped up lumbering in national forests. It may or may not have been a wise decision: the point is that it was a political decision.
And yet the same factors that may make human governments inadequate managers of land can apply to private corporations. The whole idea of a corporation is limited liability. The owners aren't on the hook for any more than they invested in the first place. Like governments, there isn't the element of personal responsibility in land management.
While some antipollution laws do indeed personally penalize individual corporation executives who cause pollution usually only the corporation itself suffers when it is caught polluting. The executives may lose their jobs if the corporation goes bankrupt, but their personal assets aren't touched.
And yet in this world, who would undertake to make plastic or any of the hundreds of goods that make life easier (or at least more convenient) without the benefit of some limitations on his liability?
And if the key to curbing pollution in this world is individual private responsibility and ownership, the problem of limits makes itself felt in this area as well. How can courts enforce property rights in air? If you live in Canada, for example, the 'acid rain that falls on your property and gradually pollutes it may have come from a factory hundreds of miles away in the United States!
The good news of the Kingdom of God, which we announce in The Plain Truth, is that the nature of the world and man's own "human nature" will be changed after Christ returns to this earth to set up His government. Even the nature of animals will be changed! Poisonous animals and those with violent natures will be transformed by God into nonpoisonous and non-violent creatures (Isa. 11:6-9).
It will also be a time of "restitution of all things" (Acts 3:21), when the "groanings" that afflict the natural creation (Rom. 8:22) will cease.
While the Bible doesn't explicitly say so, the time of God's Kingdom will probably be an era when the very nature of certain physical processes will be transformed by new and surprising knowledge. Abundance can be possible without terrible, toxic, deadly wastes that threaten birth defects and cancer. But man will have to begin to live in contact with God and in harmony with God's law.
If there is no really satisfactory solution for this world, there is one promised for the World Tomorrow.