The Temporal Dimension of Land Pollution: Another Perspective on Applying the Breaking the Logjam Principles to Waste Management

Unlike air and water pollution, pollution from dangerous solid and liquid wastes on land remains a relatively concentrated, active hazard for long periods of time. Uncontrolled, land pollution moves through the environment slowly and often without significant diminution of toxicity. Persistence, in fact, is often regarded as the defining quality of dangerous land pollutants. Hazardous and nuclear waste regulation is very much concerned with the problem of maintaining the isolation of solid and liquid materials over decades, centuries, and even millennia, and, the author argues, there is good reason to believe that waste management practices and institutions are not well designed to monitor and safeguard wastes over the time periods during which it remains dangerous. The author discusses how the principles of the Breaking the Logjam project might be applied in crafting solutions to the problems posed by the temporal dimension of hazardous waste management and concludes with the suggestion of an additional principle of institutional learning and the conservation of options: in any long-term effort one must expect that over time we will come to understand a problem better and so develop better ideas for addressing it. But these improvements can only be implemented if the regulatory system is capable of learning and if decisions now leave open options for the future

Synthesizing TSCA and REACH: Practical Principles for Chemical Regulation Reform

The European Union\u27s newly enacted comprehensive regulation for industrial chemicals, known as REACH, draws heavily on three decades of experience in the United States under the Toxic Substances Control Act. Much of that experience has been negative, inasmuch as TSCA is widely regarded as a disappointment among US environmental laws, and so REACH deliberately reverses many of the legislative choices that Congress made in TSCA. REACH also takes advantage of important new regulatory concepts that were not available to the framers of TSCA thirty years ago. The passage of REACH has sparked renewed interest in reforming TSCA, and the reformers will undoubtedly look to REACH for ideas. This article contends that, while many aspects of REACH can fairly be understood as the Anti-TSCA, on closer examination REACH follows many of TSCA\u27s fundamental approaches to chemicals regulation. The fundamental similarities offer a unique opportunity to develop a synthesis of the two regulatory regimes, which could form the practical basis for updating TSCA. While reform based on a synthesis of TSCA and REACH would be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, it could nevertheless greatly improve chemicals regulation in the US. This article offers principles for such reform. The article concludes with a discussion of the global impact of national regulatory systems like REACH