Abstract
Sometime in the late 1990s the state of Virginia earned a new, dubious distinction
as the second-largest importer of trash in the United States, trailing only its northern
neighbor, the state of Pennsylvania. Virginia and Pennsylvania are not alone in this regard.
Imported trash has become big business in many other states as well.
For ten years the United States Congress has entertained, but has never passed,
bills that would allow the states to constrain the interstate movement of garbage. The
various legislative proposals to date all revolve around a central question: should we
restrict the interstate trade of trash? This question might seem odd when considered
against the backdrop of modern environmental policymaking. Forty years ago we still
wondered if we should leave pollution control in the hands of state and local agencies, but
since then it has been widely accepted that we should control the generation of pollution
that can move across political jurisdictions.
At the root of this puzzling question is the fact that policymakers are conflicted
over whether to regard trash as commerce, which should be encouraged, or as pollution,
which should be discouraged. One of us (Thomson) addresses this dilemma in an ongoing
book project,
Garbage In, Garbage Out: Virginia is For Landfills.
In this paper we explain why long-distance trash transport is on the rise in the
United States and we describe the legislative remedies that have been proposed in the
Congress. We observe that, while Congress has delegated municipal waste management to
the state and local agencies, they are currently handicapped in their ability to control the
movement of waste over their borders. At present, policymaking for waste management
in the United States remains much more about fostering commerce than about controlling
pollution. We frame our discussion of these issues through selected comparisons with
waste generation and management patterns in western Europe and Japan, where the
principles of proximity, harmonization, equity, and pollution prevention provide the
foundation for waste management policies.
2
Convention