Kristin Shrader-Frechette. Bioethics. Editor: Bruce Jennings, 4th Edition, Volume 3, Macmillan Reference USA, 2014.
Developed nations such as the United States annually use more than 60,000 hazardous chemicals in their agricultural and manufacturing processes. Because at least 2,000 new toxins are introduced each year (Grossman 2012), often we know very little about their effects. When we began massive use of such chemicals, we did not know that by the 1970s human breast milk would become more contaminated with toxins than manufactured foods. We did not realize that measurable amounts of DDT would appear in the polar ice caps. We did not suspect that by 2000, Silicon Valley would have more Superfund sites, twenty-nine, than any other single US location—all because of toxic wastes from manufacturing high-tech products such as disk drives and semiconductors. We did not realize that, because of their long lifetimes, many hazardous chemicals would be able to migrate from their present waste sites and would threaten persons living thousands of years in the future. On the whole, we have assumed that dangerous chemicals are innocent until proved guilty. Because we do very little sophisticated epidemiological testing and rarely take account of food-chain and synergistic effects, thousands of chemicals have become both important to our agricultural and manufacturing processes and ubiquitous in our environment. Hence, it is often difficult to prove that any one chemical is responsible for specific harms, even when we know that it is theoretically able to cause many statistical casualties.
Hazardous wastes, byproducts of manufacturing, scientific, medical, and agricultural processes, have at least one of four characteristics: ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, or toxicity (McGarity and Wagner 2008). Hazardous substances become wastes only when they have outlived their economic life. They include solvents, electroplating substances, pesticides, dioxins, and radioactive wastes. Toxic substances, a subset of hazardous substances, have the characteristic of toxicity: the ability to cause serious injury, illness, or death.
Many people became aware of the threat of hazardous wastes and toxic substances when the American scientist Rachel Carson (1907–1964) wrote Silent Spring (1962), one of the earliest warnings of the dangers of pesticides, or when Michael Brown wrote his spellbinding account of hundreds of cancers, genetic damage, and birth defects near Love Canal, New York, and other waste sites in 1980. Indeed, hazardous-waste management has become one of the most serious environmental problems facing the world. In the United States alone, more than 5 billion pounds of toxic chemicals are released each year into the air, water, and land. Approximately 80 percent of hazardous waste has been dumped into thousands of landfills, ponds, and pits throughout the world, from Love Canal in New York, to Mellery in Belgium, to North-Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. It has polluted air, wells, surface water, and groundwater. It has destroyed species, habitats, and ecosystems. It also has caused fires, explosions, direct-contact poisoning, and numerous cases of cancer, genetic harms, neurological disorders, and birth defects.
In part to protect workers and the public from the dangers associated with hazardous substances, the US Congress passed laws such as the 1954 Atomic Energy Act; the 1970 Clean Air Act; the 1972 Clean Water Act; the 1975 Hazardous Materials Transportation Act; the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA); the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA); and the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as CERCLA or Super-fund (Dominguez and Bartlett 1986). These laws include provisions that require monitoring pollutants, reporting spills, preparing manifests describing particular wastes, and special packaging for transporting specific types of hazardous materials. The Clean Air Act regulates smelter emissions, for instance, and the Clean Water Act regulates mining-caused water pollution (Young 1992). RCRA was passed to fill a statutory void left by the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which require removal of hazardous materials from air and water but leave the question of the ultimate deposition of hazardous waste unanswered. Although RCRA addresses the handling of such waste at current and future facilities, it does not deal with closed or abandoned sites. CERCLA focuses on hazardous-waste contamination when sites or spills have been abandoned; through penalties and taxes on hazardous substances, CERCLA provides for cleaning up abandoned sites.
Despite laws that govern dangerous substances, and although about 50,000 environmental-impact assessments are prepared annually in the United States, many to evaluate waste sites under the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, hazardous wastes remain a major problem. One reason is that well-financed industrial waste polluters often dominate underfunded government regulators. For instance, polluters have blocked most testing and regulation under TSCA. Despite massive growth in chemical production and use, since 1976 TSCA has required testing of only about 200—and has regulated only 5—of roughly 80,000 industrial-agricultural chemicals.
Why are polluters often able to “beat” the regulations despite the fact that toxin-induced disease and death are increasing? One reason is “private-interest science” (Krimsky 2004), science funded/done by special interests in order to achieve their predetermined ends. The American Association for the Advancement of Science notes that roughly 75 percent of US science is funded by industry, 25 percent by government; that more than half of US-government-funded science is military; and that for every $100 that environmental-health industries spend on their science, government spends about $1 (Shrader-Frechette 2007). Even in top medical journals, for instance, pharmaceutical industry-funded studies rarely attribute harmful effects to their drugs, although independent researchers often do so (Krimsky 2004). Similarly, chemical industry-funded studies rarely attribute health damage to their pollutants, although independent researchers often do so (Michaels 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010). Special interests not only attempt to manipulate science, however, but also often harass scientists who seek to protect the public from toxins. At least 50 percent of environmental epidemiologists—mostly in universities—report polluter harassment after publishing environmental-health research (McGarity and Wagner 2008).
Besides “private-interest science,” toxins/hazardous wastes also remain a problem because the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has allowed more US waste to go to countries such as Mexico. For example, the United States to Mexico waste flow doubled from 1994 to 1999, and yet Mexico has only one licensed hazardous waste facility. A third factor is that toxins/hazardous wastes raise ethical issues that have not been adequately addressed by existing regulations. These issues include siting, rights of future generations, workers’ rights, free and informed consent to risk, compensation, due process, appropriate ethical behavior under conditions of uncertainty, where to place the burden of proof regarding alleged toxin/waste harms, and workers’ and the public’s right to know about what threatens their health.
Appropriate ethical behavior under uncertainty is an especially pressing problem, as the case of developmental toxicity (DT) illustrates. DT refers to the fact that many recent increases in disease/dysfunction/death are caused in part by increases in in-utero and early postnatal exposures to environmental chemicals; DT is a robust effect, repeatable across species, including humans (Barouki et al. 2012). Perhaps most worrisome is that many DT-induced epigenetic modifications can be passed from one cell generation to the next and, when germ cells are targeted, can be transgenerationally transmitted, although not immediately apparent (Skinner et al. 2011). As a result, increased incidence, earlier onset, or increased severity of disease/dysfunction occurs, including asthma, allergy, cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, hypertension, immune and autoimmune diseases, infertility, neuro-developmental and neurodegenerative diseases, osteoporosis, precocious puberty, sarcopenia, and schizophrenia. These DT diseases/dysfunctions are caused by chemicals such as bisphenol A (from polycarbonate plastics), phthalates (a softener in plastics), some organophosphate and organochlorine pesticides, nicotine (from tobacco smoke), air pollution, perfluorooctane compounds (from stain and water repellents), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (from flame retardants)—all chemicals found in most people’s blood or urine (Barouki et al. 2012).
Despite their ubiquity, because most DT chemicals have not been fully studied, many minor questions (for instance, about their mechanisms of action and the heritability of their developmental damage) remain uncertain. This uncertainty provides an opening for private-interest polluters to argue that regulations cannot be justified until all information is known about such chemicals (McGarity and Wagner 2008; Michaels 2008; Oreskes and Conway 2010).
Equity Issues
One of the most worrisome aspects of toxic chemicals/hazardous wastes is that their risks are not borne equitably. Those who can afford to avoid toxins/hazardous wastes typically do so. Those who cannot are usually poor. For this reason, exposure to such hazards raises questions of intergenerational, geographical, and occupational equity. Intergenerational-equity problems deal with imposing risks and costs of hazardous wastes and toxic substances on future persons. Geographical-equity issues have to do with where and how to site waste dumps or facilities using toxic substances. Occupational-equity problems focus on whether to maximize the safety of the public or of the people who work with hazardous materials, because we often cannot protect both groups at once. For example, effective decontamination and safety assurance at waste sites typically require more worker exposure to toxins but reduce public risk. Using mechanical or nonhuman decontamination and safety procedures, however, is safer for workers but usually increases public risk because such procedures are less effective than those controlled closely by people (see Kasperson 1983).
Intergenerational equity requires us to ask whether we ought to mortgage the future by imposing our debts of buried (or stored) hazardous wastes—or the effects of our use of toxic chemicals, as with DT—on subsequent generations. Currently there are no regulations that attempt to avoid toxic-chemical-induced DT among future generations. Similarly, current plans for US government storage of high-level radioactive waste, for example, require the steel canisters to resist corrosion for as little as 300 years. Nevertheless, the US National Academy of Sciences admits that the waste will remain dangerous for roughly one million years. Government experts agree that, at best, they can merely limit the radioactivity that reaches the environment and that there is no doubt that the nuclear repository will leak over the course of the next one million years (Shrader-Frechette 2007).
To saddle our descendants with medical and financial debts, such as radioactive waste and DT, is questionable at best: We have received most of the benefits from the use of industrial/agricultural processes that create toxins/hazardous wastes, whereas future persons will bear most of the risks and costs. This risk/cost-benefit asymmetry suggests that, without good reasons or compensating benefits, future generations ought not to be saddled with such debts. Moreover, any alleged economies associated with storage of hazardous waste are, in large part, questionable because of the practice of discounting future costs (such as deaths) at some rate of x percent per year. For example, at a discount rate of 10 percent, effects on people’s welfare twenty years from now count only for one-tenth of what effects on people’s welfare count for now. Or, more graphically, with a discount rate of 5 percent, one billion deaths in four hundred years count the same as one death next year. A number of moral philosophers, such as Derek Parfit (1986), have argued that use of a discount rate is unethical, because the moral importance of future events, such as the death of a person, does not decline at some x percent per year.
Another issue related to intergenerational equity is what sort of criteria might justify irreversible damage to the environment, such as that caused by deep-well storage of high-level nuclear waste. On the one hand, irreversible management schemes for nuclear waste, because they are premised on the nonretrievability of the waste, theoretically impose fewer management burdens on later generations, but they also preempt future choices about how to deal with the hazards. On the other hand, schemes that are reversible allow for wider choices for future generations, but they also impose greater management burdens. If we cannot do both, is it ethically desirable to maximize future freedom or to minimize future burdens? The technical problems associated with storing long-lived hazardous waste for centuries are forcing us to take a great gamble that our descendants will not breach the waste repositories through war, terrorism, or drilling for minerals; that groundwater will not leach out and transport toxins; and so on.
Using and storing toxins also raises questions of environmental justice, that is, spatial or geographical equity in the risk distribution (Shrader-Frechette 2002). One such issue is whether it is fair to impose a higher risk (of being harmed by seepage from a hazardous-waste dump, for example) on persons just because they live in a certain spot. Or, is it ethical for people in one area to receive the benefits of products created by using toxic substances, although people living in another area bear the health risks associated with a hazardous-waste dump?
Questions about the equity of risk distribution are central to the issue of managing toxic substances because thousands of persons—such as the 1984 victims of the Union Carbide toxic leak in Bhopal, India—have already died as a consequence of exposure to hazardous substances. Yet, economic comparisons of alternative chemical technologies and different waste sites typically ignore the externalities (or social costs) such as the inequitable distribution of health hazards/benefits associated with them (Shrader-Frechette 2002).
The most serious problems of geographical equity in the distribution of risks associated with dangerous substances arise because developed nations often ship their toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes to developing countries. One-third of US pesticide exports, for example, are products that are banned for use in the United States yet annually cause 40,000 pesticide-related deaths, mainly in developing nations (Shrader-Frechette 1991). Likewise, the United Nations estimates that as much as 20 percent of the hazardous waste produced in developed nations is sent to other countries where health and safety standards are virtually nonexistent. The Organization of African Unity has pleaded with member states to stop such traffic, but corruption and crime have kept the waste transport going (Moyers 1990). Indeed, exporting toxic substances and hazardous wastes may be the current version of the infant-formula problem. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, US and multinational corporations have profited by exporting infant formula to developing nations and by encouraging young mothers not to nurse their children. They have been able to do so only by using extremely coercive sales tactics and by misleading people in developing countries about the relative merits and dangers of the exports.
Some of the greatest risks and inequities associated with toxins/hazardous wastes, whether in developed or developing nations, are borne by children and by workers. As already noted, children’s in-utero and early postnatal developmental periods are particularly sensitive to DT, a sensitivity that (scientists say) requires new regulatory, policy, and public-health responses in order to prevent DT (Barouki et al. 2012). For some hazardous materials, such as ionizing radiation, children are up to 40 times more sensitive than adults. Yet a fundamental ethical problem is that almost all environmental-health regulations are written to protect merely adult males and hence, by definition, do not adequately protect children.
Workers likewise are at special risk from toxins/hazardous wastes because regulations often allow them to receive as much as 50 times the dose of some carcinogens as members of the public (Shrader-Frechette 2007). Hence, one of the main questions of occupational equity is whether it is just to impose higher health burdens on workers in exchange for wages. Is it fair to allow persons to trade their health and safety for money? This question is particularly troublesome in the United States, because many other countries—such as the Scandinavian nations, Germany, and the former Soviet Union—have standards for occupational exposure to risks from toxins that are just as stringent as standards for public exposure. The United States, however, follows the alleged compensating wage differential (CWD) of economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), presupposing that wages compensate workers for increased occupational exposures to toxic substances. As a consequence, US regulators argue that, in exchange for facing higher risks than the public faces from toxic substances, workers receive higher wages that compensate them for their burden. Other countries do not accept the economic theory underlying the CWD and argue for equal health standards, for making public and worker exposure norms the same (Shrader-Frechette 1991).
Consent and Right to Know
One reason critics question the theory underlying the CWD is its presupposition that, by virtue of accepting certain jobs, workers exposed to serious hazards give free, informed consent to the risks. Yet, from an ethical point of view, those most able to give free, informed consent—those who are well educated and who have many job opportunities—are usually unwilling to do so. Those least able to give genuine consent to a risky workplace or neighborhood—because of their lack of education or information and their financial constraints—are often willing to give allegedly informed consent.
The 1986 US Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act requires owners or operators of sites using hazardous materials to notify the Emergency Response Commission in their state that toxins are present at a facility. However, at least two factors suggest that this law may fail to ensure full conditions for the free, informed consent of persons likely to be harmed. First, owners or operators (rather than a neutral third party) provide the information about the hazard. Often those responsible for toxins/hazardous wastes do not inform workers and the public of the risks they face, even after company physicians have documented serious health problems. Employers in the chemical industry, for example, frequently spend money on genetic screening to exclude susceptible persons from the workplace rather than to monitor workers’ health on the job (Draper 1991). Second, the existence, location, and operational procedures of dangerous facilities are likely things to which citizens and workers have not given free, informed consent in the first place (Ashford and Caldart 2009; Ashford and Hall 2011; Cranor 2011).
Sociological data reveal that, as education and income rise, people are less willing to accept either work in hazardous facilities or risky jobs; those who do so tend to be poorly educated or financially strapped. The data also show that the alleged CWD does not operate for poor, unskilled, minority, or nonunionized workers. Yet these are precisely the people most likely to have risky jobs, such as handling nuclear wastes. In other words, the very persons least able to give free, informed consent to occupational risks are precisely those who most often work in risky jobs (Shrader-Frechette 2002).
At the international level, a similar situation occurs. The persons and nations least able to give free, informed consent to the location of facilities for using/storing toxic substances are typically those who most often bear such risks. Hazardous wastes shipped abroad, for example, are usually sent to countries that will take them at the cheapest rate. These tend to be developing nations that are often ill informed about the risks involved. In 1994 the Basel Convention banned the export of hazardous waste for any reason from rich to poorer countries—mostly from the 29 wealthiest and most industrialized countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to all non-OECD nations. Although all the European Union countries and most wealthy nations have ratified the ban, it has not been implemented, mainly because three-quarters of all countries have not ratified it. The major nation that has not done so is the United States—which has been lobbying against the ban. Thus, at present, non-ratifying wealthy nations, such as the United States, can ship hazardous materials anywhere, provided the leader of receiving country gives some sort of consent. Because socioeconomic conditions and corruption often militate against the exercise of free, informed consent, however, a complete ban is needed (Puckett 2012).
Industrial offers of financial benefits—for storing or “recycling” hazardous waste in a developing nation or in an economically depressed community—create a coercive context in which requirements for free, informed consent are unlikely to be met. Likewise, high wages for desperate workers who agree to take risky jobs may jeopardize their legitimate consent.
Given the many consent-related problems relevant to risk from hazardous substances, a crucial issue is: Who should give consent? Liberty and grassroots self-determination require local control of whether a hazardous facility is sited in a particular area. Yet, equality of consideration for people in all regions and minimizing overall risk often requires federal control. Should a particular community be able to veto the location of a hazardous facility, even though that site may be the best in the country and may provide the most equal protection for all people? Or should the national government have the right to impose such risks on a local community, even against the wishes of that group?
On the one hand, federal jurisdiction is more likely to protect the environment, to avoid the tragedy of the commons, to gain national economies of scale, and to avoid regional favoritism. Federal jurisdiction is also more likely to provide compensation for victims of spillovers from another locale and to facilitate the politics of sacrifice by imposing equal burdens on all. On the other hand, local jurisdiction is more likely to promote diversity, to offer a more flexible vehicle for experimenting with waste regulations, and to enhance citizen autonomy and liberty. Local jurisdiction also is likely to encourage cooperation through participation in decision making, to discourage some kinds of inequitable federal policies, and to help avoid many violations of rights.
Compensation
US laws do not typically provide for full exercise of due-process rights by those who may have been harmed by toxins/hazardous wastes. Many of the companies that handle dangerous substances do not have either full insurance for their pollution risk or adequate funds to cover their liability themselves. Nuclear plants, for instance, have capitalization to cover only about 20 percent of their worst-case accidents (Shrader-Frechette 2011). RCRA and CERCLA, however, require companies both to show that they are capable of paying at least some of the damages resulting from their activities and to clean up their sites. Because enforcement of the liability and coverage provisions of these laws is difficult, many hazardous-waste industries often operate outside the law. Furthermore, most insurers have withdrawn from the pollution market, claiming that providing such coverage carries the risk of payments for claims that would bankrupt them. Thus, often the bigger the risk of toxins/hazardous waste, the less protected is the public. Because of the 1957 Price-Anderson Act, the US nuclear program, including radioactive-waste management, like most nuclear programs throughout the world, has operated under a government-imposed limit for liability coverage that is less than 2 percent of the government-calculated costs of the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Yet Chernobyl was not a worst-case accident (see Shrader-Frechette 2011).
Limits on government or industry liability for toxic/hazardous-waste incidents are problematic for several reasons. First, liability is a well-known incentive for appropriate, safe behavior. Second, refusal to accept full and strict liability suggests that hazardous-and radioactive-waste sites are not as safe as the government maintains they are. Third, if government officials may legally limit due-process rights then, in the case of an accident at a hazardous-waste facility, the main financial burdens will be borne inequitably by accident victims rather than by the perpetrators of the hazard. Fourth, because much less is known about the dangers from toxins/hazardous wastes than about more ordinary risks, full liability seems a reasonable requirement. And finally, the safety record of hazardous facilities, in the past, has not been good. Every state and every nation in the world have extensive, long-term pollution from toxins. Even in the United States, the government has been one of the worst offenders. Scientists say that cleaning up the hazardous and radioactive wastes at government weapons facilities would cost more than $1 trillion (Shrader-Frechette 2007). Such problems argue for citizens’ rights to full liability protection.
Uncertainty, Human Error, and the Burden of Proof
Inadequate compensation, risk inequity, and uncertainties about harm provide powerful arguments for reducing or eliminating exposure to toxins/hazardous wastes. To do so, and to move beyond dumping, however, we must have market incentives for reducing the volume of toxins/hazardous wastes (Piasecki 1987). To reduce these volumes, we must know exactly what effects they cause, and we must make risk imposers accountable for their behavior. Ensuring accountability is not easy. Adequate tests for medical responses to low-level chemical exposures require samples of thousands of persons, because so many toxic substances produce health effects synergisticaily, because there are many uncertainties about actual exposure to hazardous substances, because the effects of such exposure often are unknown (Ashford and Miller 1991), and because phenotypical characteristics among individuals often vary by a factor of 200. All four variables cause extreme differences in human responses to toxins.
Uncertainties about exposure and about the consequences of exposure to toxins/hazardous wastes are compounded by the fact that industries that produce them and profit from them—usually perform the required tests to determine toxicity and health effects. In western countries, pesticide-registration decisions (about allowing use of the chemicals), for example, are tied to a risk-benefit standard that combines scientific and economic evidence. Because industry does most or all of the testing, and because environmental and health groups are forced to show that the dangers outweigh the economic benefits of a particular pesticide, there is much uncertainty about the real hazards actually faced by workers and consumers. As a consequence, virtually no groups want toxic substances or hazardous wastes used or stored near them. Hence the protest known as Not in my backyard—NIMBY.
NIMBY responses also arise as a consequence of public mistrust of human institutions for controlling hazardous wastes and toxic chemicals. All dangerous technologies are unavoidably dependent on fragile, sometimes short-lived, human institutions and human capabilities. For example, organized crime still dominates hazardous-waste disposal and illegal dumping (Liddick 2010; Walters 2012). Given the potential for human error and corruption, citizens are frequently skeptical regarding whether hazardous and toxic substances will be handled safely, with little threat to workers or to the public.
Because of scientific unknowns and uncertainties about human behavior and corruption, several moral philosophers have argued that potentially catastrophic situations—involving hazardous wastes and toxic substances—require ethically conservative behavior (Ashford and Miller 1991; Cranor 1993, 2011; Shrader-Frechette 2007, 2011; Ashford and Caldart 2008; Ashford and Hall 2011). Such situations often require one to choose a maximin decision rule to avoid situations with the greatest potential for harm, as John Rawls (1971) has argued. Ethical conservatism, in a situation of uncertainty, also may require society to place the burden of proof—regarding risk or harm—on the manufacturers, users, and disposers of hazardous substances rather than on their potential victims. This, in turn, may mean that we will need to reform our laws governing so-called toxic torts (Cranor 1993, 2011).
Whose duty is it to help address all these ethical problems with hazardous wastes/toxic substances? For many reasons, this burden falls on everyone. All citizens, and especially better educated and wealthier citizens—because of their greater ability and power—have justice-based duties to help take action on toxins/hazardous wastes because they have helped cause these harms. That is, virtually everyone contributes to air pollution, and virtually everyone uses or purchases products containing bisphenol A, phthalates, organophosphate and organo-chlorine pesticides, nicotine, perfluorooctane compounds, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and so on. Because everyone contributes to harms such as DT, through pollution and product use, everyone has duties to help stop these harms. The ethics is basic: if you broke it, you should fix it.
Moreover, because democracy is not a spectator sport, and because all citizens in a democracy are responsible for being politically active, so as to help stop public harms, all citizens have duties to help stop avoidable harms associated with toxins/hazardous wastes. Thus, although everyone who helps cause these harms has prima facie duties to help stop them those duties differ, ultima facie and individual to individual, as a function of factors such as one’s fractional contribution to the harms and one’s knowledge, profession, time, expertise, wealth, and so on (Shrader-Frechette 2007).
In response to all these problems with toxins/hazardous waste, some people argue against tighter regulations and duties to protect human health and welfare. Antiregulatory political theorist and attorney Cass Sunstein, 2012 administrator of the US Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—whose research has been funded by right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute—makes such arguments. He and other alleged free-market environmentalists say that (1) monies spent on regulations “produce less employment and more poverty,” (2) “wealth buys longevity,” and therefore health-related regulations cost money, “increase risk,” thus kill people (Sunstein 2002).
Arguments such as Sunstein’s, however, err scientifically/factually, logically, and ethically. Factually, many scientists have shown that costs of preventing serious health harms—such as DT—are likely less than those caused by allowing them. For instance, many researchers have shown that pollution abatement and prevention costs for extremely hazardous materials, such as lead and mercury, are far less than the pollution-induced health and social costs of disease-screening, special-education programs, increased crime, and reduced earnings. France, for instance, whose population is one-fifth that of the United States, has lead-induced IQ losses in children that cause them to lose to about €22 billion per year or $30 billion per year in future earnings—and that cause society to lose €62 per year or $81 billion per year because of additional crime (Pichery et al. 2011). Similarly, the health, IQ, future-earnings, and other losses of US children’s mercury exposures are up to $8 billion per year (Rice and Hammitt 2005). More generally, US costs of environmentally attributable (caused) children’s lead exposure, asthma, cancer, and neurobehavioral problems are up to $55 billion per year (Landrigan et al. 2002). If lead-pollution costs are analogous to those for other developmental toxins, every $1, spent on lead (or other toxin) controls, causes $17-$221 in benefits (Grosse 2007). Therefore the economics objection, to better regulation of toxins/hazardous waste, has little scientific or factual merit.
This objection also has little logical merit because it commits the logical fallacy of false cause assuming that toxics regulations reduce employment. Why? Health-related regulations typically increase overall employment or shift it from one sector or industry to another, with no net job loss. For instance, workers often move from old and dirty to new and clean technologies, with no overall job loss, as when workers move from coal to wind industries (Morgenstern, Pizer, and Shih 2002; Dwoskin and Drajem 2012). In fact, classical economists deny that, in general, regulations reduce employment (Hahnel and Sheeran 2009). A second false-cause fallacy in Sunstein’s argument is his assumption that industrial profits are always spent to increase employment, an assumption falsified by US economic history since the 1950s. A third false-cause fallacy in this objection is its assumption that wealth buys longevity. Instead, research shows that mortality is strongly associated with societal income inequality, not with either per capita or median income (Kaplan et al. 1997).
This objection to increased protection against toxins/hazardous wastes is ethically questionable. It invalidly assumes that higher employment excuses injustice to innocent victims, such as children; that cost-benefit analysis (not also justice) is the sole test for regulations; and that polluters operate within the constraints of the free market. However, polluters often do not operate within such constraints, because economists recognize that without full information and free exchanges, market behavior is neither economically efficient nor ethical. Yet polluters routinely mislead about harm, fight labeling and right-to-know requirements, and resist government and consumer information-gathering about pollution harm (Beder 2002; Trasande, Landrigan, and Schechter 2005; McGarity and Wagner 2008; Michaels 2008). Consequently, poor or poorly educated consumers—harmed by toxins/hazardous wastes—often have neither equal bargaining power nor the ability to correct disinformation, skewed market forces, and the harms done to them.
Besides the preceding economics objection, scientists and ethicists have effectively answered other prominent objections to correcting ethical problems associated with toxins/hazardous wastes. Carl Cranor (1993, 2011) and Kristin Shrader-Frechette (1991, 2007, 2011) show that these objections employ questionable ethical premises. David Michaels (2008) reveals the flawed science on which they rest. Thomas McGarity and Wendy Wagner (2008) provide clear analyses of the legal flaws in such objections.
Given the longevity and the catastrophic potential of many toxic substances and hazardous wastes, we may need to reevaluate the human and environmental price we have paid for our economic progress. Although our society may not be able to avoid use of certain toxic substances and disposal of some hazardous waste, it is clear that we need to maximize the equity with which we distribute toxic risks, to guarantee that potential victims of toxins are both informed about their risks and consent to them, and to ensure that those put at risk from toxins/hazardous wastes are compensated, so far as possible, for harm done to them.