We Need Harsher Punishments for Polluting
Today I stumbled upon a very old article that made me giggle. The author, Karen, has 25 years of experience as a regulatory compliance professional and is apparently a three letter acronym collector as well. It wasn’t the subject of the article that I found amusing, in fact I found it depressing. The article is about a recent fine (at that time, in 2013) incurred by Wal-Mart for the improper handling and disposal of hazardous wastes and pesticides at several of their retail locations.
What I found laughable were sentences like these and the (hopefully) naiveté behind them:
Does it though? I would expect something like this to be written by a person that just came across an article like this and had their simple mind bamboozled by that enormous $100 MILLION fine (not knowing that represents 0.02% of Wal-Mart’s revenues or 0.36% of its profits for the year in question) but not by Karen. Karen has 25 years of experience in this field and is a, and I quote, “Certified Safety Professional (CSP), Certified Environmental health and Safety Trainer (CET), Walkway Auditor Certificate Holder (WACH), OSHA-Authorized Outreach Trainer for General Industry, Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) trainer and hazmat technician. She serves on the Blair County, PA LEPC. Her specialties include a wide variety of environmental, safety, emergency response, risk management, DOT and NIMS topics. She conducts trainings and seminars at national conferences and webinars for several national organizations.”
I hate to break it to you but it doesn’t beat paying the fine. You know how I know this, Karen? Because if it did, they wouldn’t have done it. It seems like common sense and a 5 minute Google search beats 25 years of experience. A quick search reveals that this isn’t Wal-Mart’s first rodeo with the EPA. Three years prior, they were fined in the same two states, California and Missouri, for doing the exact same thing. This is what the EPA had to say about it at the time:
“By improperly handling hazardous waste, pesticides and other materials in violation of federal laws, Wal-Mart put the public and the environment at risk and gained an unfair economic advantage over other companies,’’ said Ignacia Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Justice Department.
And this is what Wal-Mart had to say about it:
Wal-Mart said it was “pleased” to have resolved the issue.
I tried reading the whole declaration on their website but Wal-Mart deleted that page from it’s servers. They must be running low on memory space. I ask you now: do you think it is fair for a company that has admitted to repeatedly violating regulations and illegally disposing of fertiliser, pesticides and bleach down the literal drain and potentially jeopardizing the lives of thousands of people and other living organisms, to be walking away from a courtroom feeling pleased? Does that sound to you like someone who is going to think twice about doing it again in the future? No, it doesn’t. How do I know this to be true? Because I live in the future.
Fast forward from 2013 to December 2021 and this article comes out. And I want to give you a few excerpts from that article.
Walmart illegally dumps more than 1 million batteries, aerosol cans of insect killer and other products, toxic cleaning supplies, electronic waste, latex paints and other hazardous waste into California landfills each year, state prosecutors have alleged.
Bonta said Walmart’s own inspections showed it illegally disposed of nearly 80 tons of such waste each year, which his office estimated amounted to more than 1m individual items.
Williams added that “other companies manage to comply with those laws”, while Walmart has even more means and incentive based on its prior violations.
“So it’s really quite astounding that they continue to violate these hazardous waste control laws,” she said.
Until there will be criminal prosecution and not financial slaps on the wrist for executives of companies that continue to engage in these practices, nothing will change. The fact of the matter is that it is cheaper for companies to illegally dispose of these items and pay a fine once in a while than to do so properly. And I’m not on some anti Wal-Mart crusade here either. They are far from being the only ones engaged in this practice. Thousand and thousands of other companies are doing it and a simple Google search will substantiate my claims. The examples below are just a sample of how this is happening not just on the mega corporation level, but on every level of the economic ladder. Mind you, these examples are all just from the month of September 2021 and just from Oregon:
State environmental regulators have fined Salem’s Ennis-Flint $8,400 for multiple hazardous waste violations. The facility generates more than 2,200 pounds of hazardous waste per month.
Earth Peoples Park and Timin Murray, Selma: $84,647 for establishing and operating a waste disposal site without a permit; and for open burning of prohibited materials.
Samual Humbert, Milton-Freewater: $57,282 for establishing and operating a waste disposal site without a permit; and for placing waste near waterways.
Kenneth and Amie Barnard, Gold Beach: $19,200 for establishing and operating a compost facility without a permit.
There were in total 12 violations and you can find the article here. That’s just one state and one month. How many more violations have gone undiscovered and unpunished? I’m willing to bet that a lot more than twelve. On top of that, the fines are laughable in some cases. Punishing Ennis-Flint, a company with about $600 million a year in revenues with $8400 (a percentage so low that the online percentage calculator refuses to display it) will surely set them straight... With the budgets of environmental watchdogs diminishing continuously, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better.
We are literally poisoning ourselves for profit. Of course, none of the executives that are turning a blind eye to it live anywhere close to the sites where it is happening so they can rest assured. But for other people that come into contact with these contaminated substances the story is very different. The resulting cost in lives and resources of this practice on society is immense and very difficult to accurately quantify. Even if a person does not immediately die as a result of exposure to hazardous materials, that does not mean that their life expectancy isn’t decreased, that doesn’t mean their quality of life isn’t diminished. If you expose 10.000 people to toxic waste and as a result their lives are shortened by only one year, that’s 10.000 years. If we divide that by the average lifespan in the US which, according to Google, is 78.79 years, that’s almost 127 full human lives.
And then there’s a plethora of wasted resources ranging from reduced productivity to strains on the healthcare system to costs associated with the clean-up of these sites. In the end all of these costs to society and taxpayers are incalculable. This practice needs to be criminally prosecuted, not just fined with laughable amounts. Prison time is what’s needed, and lots of it!
To be continued…
