Garbage In, Garbage Out: Solving the Problems with Long-Distance Trash Transport

CHAPTER 4 Regulatory and Legislative Efforts to Limit the Movement of Trash

CHAPTER 4 Regulatory and Legislative Efforts to Limit the Movement of Trash It should come as no surprise to learn that municipal governments like to manage where trash goes within their jurisdictions. Garbage presents health hazards and it is aesthetically displeasing. For more than a century municipal authorities have assumed responsibility for ensuring that trash removal takes place, either through public or private trash haulers, and they have also encouraged citizens to stop littering, through public campaigns and the threat of small fines. However, what might prove surprising is the sheer variety of ways in which governments at the state, local, and national level have tried to channel the movement of garbage across their borders. E√orts to control the flow of trash highlight the ‘‘push-me-pull-you’’ nature of garbage. Dr. Doolittle’s mythical creature had two heads, one at either end, and therefore she could not decide which way to go. In similar fashion, garbage’s dual nature as both publicly undesirable and commercially valuable has sent it in di√erent, sometimes unpredictable directions depending on the time, place, and circumstances. This chapter first discusses two opposing kinds of local and/or state actions that have constrained the flow of trash. The first type of action, 92 Garbage In, Garbage Out flow control, restricts the outward movement of garbage collected in a specific area. Using flow control ordinances, cities and towns have forced local trash haulers to deposit their trash in local waste management facilities, partially to recoup the cost of those facilities, many of which were financed by bonds. In the 1994 Carbone v. Clarkstown decision the Supreme Court found certain kinds of flow control ordinances invalid. More recent court decisions have upheld local governments that achieve flow control either by using the market to select waste haulers committed to using local facilities or by directing trash to publicly owned facilities. However, the outcome of Carbone v. Clarkstown convinced many local governments in the 1990s that they could not a√ord to finance their own waste management facilities as there was no way to ensure a reliable flow of trash. An opposite kind of limit attempts to control the inward movement of trash into a state or locality. Such laws have been struck down when courts have decided that they unfairly targeted out-of-state waste. The list of such overturned laws is formidable, starting with the 1978 decision City of Philadelphia v. New Jersey (437 U.S. 617 [1978]), and continuing through Waste Management Holdings, Inc. v. Gilmore (252 F.3d 316 [4th Cir. 2001]). Because of court decisions that have increasingly restricted the ability of state or local governments to control the flow of garbage into or out of their jurisdictions, members of Congress have regularly introduced bills that would permit state or local governments to regulate the interstate transport of trash. The last portion of this chapter is devoted to describing the national policy solutions that have been introduced in Congress over the past fifteen years. They include reinstating the right of local government to control the flow of trash into and out of their jurisdictions and permitting state governments to levy extra fees on out-of-state waste. Those proposals have prompted several congressional hearings, and I draw upon the records of those hearings in my description of private- and public-sector reactions to the notion that the Congress should permit constraints on the interstate flow of trash. State and Local Attempts to Limit the Flow of Trash The last century of solid waste management in this country shows a distinctive trend toward increasing levels and disparate forms of government control. Since the Progressive Era, when municipalities recog- Regulatory and Legislative Efforts to Limit the Movement of Trash 93 nized the need to protect their citizens from trash mounting in the streets, local governments have overseen the related functions of trash collection and disposal.∞ Until the 1970s these e√orts were primarily aimed at getting trash away from people and into nearby dumps or incinerators. But in the past thirty years, state and local agencies across the country have gone further in that they have tried increasingly to restrict the flow of trash out of, or into, specific geographic areas. Across the country, state and local governments have enacted ordinances, laws, and taxes whose purpose has been to keep non-local trash out or, alternatively , to prevent trash...