Hazardous Waste: Part 2

How do you know if something you buy is hazardous? The boldfaced words in the preceding paragraph are a good indication. If they appear on the label, the product is hazardous. Other warning words that might appear are Poison, Danger, Warning, or Caution. Poison and Danger are the worst; they mean the contents are highly toxic.

Unfortunately, about 100,000 chemicals are currently in commercial use, and new ones are begin developed every year. We tend to take their safety for granted, but in fact most have not been properly tested for their potential to cause adverse health effects in the long run. For more than 80% of them, there is no toxicity information whatever.

Let us assume that you hove a hazardous product and want to get rid of it – used motor oil or half a can of drain cleaner. This is what you should not so:

• Pour it into the sink or toilet. From there it will go into the city water treatment system, which is incapable of neutralizing it. Furthermore, it can release toxic fumes and is likely to contaminate the water into which the sewage is eventually discharged.
• Pour it onto the ground or into a storm sewer. It will be washed into a stream or filter down through the earth into an underground water supply.
• Put it out with your regular trash. It will either be incinerated (burned), in which case it will release toxic gases into air, or be buried in a landfill. Then the can will open when a bulldozer runs over it, and the oil or drain cleaner will leak out and eventually contaminate the soil or water supply. Household toxins have started landfill fires that released toxic fumes across neighborhoods, and they have exploded, injuring or killing landfill workers.
  

Although these are the ways one should not dispose of hazardous waste, they are the methods most people use. We tend to assume that hazardous waste disposal is a problem for the industries that generate the waste, and we aren’t aware of which household products are hazardous. In the pages that follow we indicate how to handle hazardous materials and suggest some safe alternatives.