Cradle to grave. To spare the environment and safeguard public health - that's the way toxic waste is supposed to be monitored, from when it's created until it safely meets its demise. On paper, environmentally conscious California has one of the toughest systems in the nation for keeping track of toxic waste. But in a recent four-part series that drew heavily on computer-assisted reporting, the San Jose Mercury News documented big problems in monitoring and management of toxic waste: - California's system for keeping track of 2 million tons of waste a year is riddled with so many holes that it can't account for where hundreds of thousands of tons of waste go each year.
- Although notoriously illegal dumpers might be caught with the help of some of the tracking information, regulators have a policy to ignore tipoffs the system offers. - The biggest violator of waste disposal reporting rules is the state itself. - Recycling of toxics often is a sham, nothing more than disposal in disguise. - Waste generators have roundly failed in efforts to cut down the torrent of waste they produce - even though there's clear evidence such cuts can be made profitably.
Key to making our project work were 410,000 computerized records detailing waste shipments for 1989, the latest year for which data were available. These records, not to be confused with TRI [3], were from shipping documents known as manifests. They offered a load-by-load look at waste disposal. This information created big databases - one with about 60 megabytes, another with 30. To slice through it all, we used a 33-megahertz, 80386-based IBM PC clone with a 360 MB hard disk drive.
(When we were done, we had pretty much filled up the drive.) We didn't use the MICAR-touted XDB database management software, instead opting for Paradox version 3.5. We can confirm recent highly favorable computer magazine reviews of Paradox: It's quite speedy and offers excellent, easy to learn Query-By-Example system. "When we matched a list of Superfund sites against waste destinations, we identified dozens of tons of waste that had been illegally shipped." Some of the most productive computer work on this project came in matching one set of data against another.
California has a law that prohibits transport of hazardous waste on state highways if the destination is a federal Superfund site. When we matched a list of Superfund sites against waste destinations, we identified dozens of tons of waste that had been illegally shipped. When we asked one of the biggest offenders about their practice, they immediately stopped. We also used matching to dispute state officials' claim that their tracking system didn't offer information of value for cracking down on toxic violators.
We took a sample of 36 enforcement cases in one year, then looked back to the previous year to see whether the tracking system had pointed out any problems with these firms. It had - 4,978 different times. In one case, we found that one of the biggest hazardous waste cases in years - involving smuggling of waste into Mexico - could have been cracked months earlier if regulators had paid attention to tracking system information.
You can do what we did, but outside California, information may be more limited. For any questions about what we did, please feel free to call: (408)-920-5048.