Waste disposal records for 10 years?
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• Contractors hauling hazardous waste materials may soon be required by law to keep accurate records of the exact location of disposal for a period of not less than 10 years. This was stated at a one-day seminar in Manchester attended by 500 delegates, largely from local authorities throughout the UK, on the subject of the collection and disposal of these materials and organized by the Institute of Public Cleansing.
Anxiety was expressed by a number of delegates that such a system could lead to huge queues of lorries at tips, mine shafts and other privately owned dumping grounds where segregation between normal waste loads and those classed as hazardous would have to take place.
Dr E. L. Streatfield, a consultant on the subject, estimated that industry alone disposed of over 10m tons of wastes annually and the figure could quite possibly be put at over 20m tons. Of this, however, flammable process wastes constituted only 1.1 per cent, acid or caustic wastes 3.9 and indisputable toxic wastes 1.8. The real problem, he said, of the disposal of these was how it could be achieved by the producers, who were in law solely responsible at present, and the carriers with safety to people and to the environment while also ensuring the recovery of potentially useful materials.
Dr F. S. Feates, head of the Toxic and Hazardous Wastes Group at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, forecast further legislation which would cover the important question of how far hazardous wastes could be legitimately moved by road as well as more stringent laws on the methods of removal and carriage to safe dumping grounds organized by experts at regional and national levels. Already, he said, in the road transport of these wastes specialist companies were coming more and more into their own. The Deposit of Poisonous Waste Act (1972) was a preliminary move in this direction.