Jonathan Campbell, Health Consultant
Natural Therapies for Chronic Illness & Health Maintenance

ToxicAlert

Helping people take charge of their health

If you or a loved one or friend is afflicted with cancer, heart disease, AIDS, or other chronic illness, click here.

If you use Lipitor, Zocor, or another statin drug to control cholesterol, click here

Hazardous Waste & "Treatment" Site lists

The vast majority of hazardous waste around the world is not treated in a manner which is sustainable or ecologically sound. Below is a description of most of these technologies - techniques which almost certainly guarantee that the toxic chemicals or their by-products are either an immediate threat or will pose a threat to future generations, followed by a list of hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal (TSD) sites by country and state.

In summary, these toxic technologies are:

• Dumping - this is now illegal in the U.S., but still occasionally done anyway. Thousands of sites all over the U.S. have been contaminated by this practice in the past. See the Superfund list.
• Incineration, including use as "fuel" in furnaces, cement kilns, boilers, etc. This seldom works, and produces super-toxic by-products.
• Deep-well injection - pumping it deep into the earth, with the hope that it won't leak on the way down or come back up.
• Landfilling - sticking it in a hole in the ground. In the US, a  plastic or cement liner is required, and sometimes the waste is encased in cement.
• Land application as "fertilizer." This is a relatively new industry strategy, supported in part by the EPA (!).

The chemical industries worldwide produce over 200 billion pounds (100,000 million kilograms) of synthetic organic chemicals each year. That is a 1000-fold increase since 1935. A significant percentage of that becomes hazardous waste.

For some wastes, there are non-polluting technologies for destruction, but they are rarely used because they are expensive. The real answer to the toxic burden that we face today is the development of non-toxic, zero-discharge manufacturing processes, and a dramatic reduction in the manufacture and use of toxic materials.

The EPA now has an excellent and easily-accessed database containing all of the known (legally registered) handlers of hazardous waste in the US, available at http://www.epa.gov/oswfiles/rcraweb/web_reporting/tsds.htm