Waste management guide: laws, issues and solutions

This book is a pragmatic guide through the morass of regulations and issues affecting solid waste management. It starts by stating the rules of the game - laws, regulations, and guidelines under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), Pollution Prevention Act, Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), and Clean Air Act and trends in state regulation. It goes on to discuss industrial and municipal waste recycling policies and issues, pollution prevention and hazardous waste reduction requirements, incentives, and practices, disposal technologies, siting issues, and more. The book also examines some of the societal attitudes that create and exacerbate waste management problems: traditional purchasing and marketing behaviors that mitigate against efforts to reduce the formation of waste; varying and often confusing perceptions of risk; the friction generated when waste moves over state lines; and the growing sense of outrage and powerlessness on the part of citizens everywhere who worry about assaults to planet earth but feel at a loss to effect any change.