Editors' Summary: EPA recently proposed for public comment a draft guidance document that discusses voluntary federal recommendations for hundreds of thousands of nonhazardous industrial waste sites that currently escape RCRA regulation. In this Dialogue, a member of the chartered advisory group that assisted the Agency in the development of the document discusses its attributes and shortcomings. The Dialogue describes the history of EPA's use of RCRA Subtitle D and the statutory and programmatic obstacles to meaningful federal regulation.

This Article discusses the original goals of Agenda 21¹ related to achieving "environmentally sound" solid waste management and reviews U.S. activities and policies with regard to solid waste over the last decade. Of greatest interest to the public and the media has been municipal solid waste (MSW)—ordinary household, commercial and institutional garbage or trash. Overall, the record of the United States in achieving sustainable solid waste management, including steady state or decreasing levels of waste generation and disposal, is mixed.

Keynote Presentation: Making the Partnership Work

Panel Discussion: Regulation of Nuclear Materials

Regulation of Air Quality

Regulation of Water Quality: Is EPA Meeting Its Oblilgations or Can the States Better Meet Water Quality Challenges?

Regulating Solid and Hazardous Wastes

The 1990s mark the end of an era when pitched legislative battles can lead to either sound or timely public policy. Rather, the formulation of consensus by a critical mass of private-sector stakeholders is the only way to achieve the timely reauthorization of Superfund and may be the best (if not the only) way to break the gridlock that paralyzes other legislative debates.

Editor's Summary: In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its most recent pronouncement on the executive foreign affairs preemption doctrine in American Insurance Ass'n v. Garamendi. In this Article, Kimberly Breedon argues that lower courts are prone to overbroad applications of Garamendi because the Court assumed the presence of three elements when it developed the standard for executive foreign affairs preemption of state law: (1) formal source law; (2) nexus to a foreign entity; and (3) indication of intent by the executive to preempt the state law under challenge.

New rules are emerging to change the way the government makes decisions about cleanup of hazardous waste sites under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund). These changes have altered Superfund decisionmaking fundamentally and irrevocably, requiring the government to reach for new levels of accountability, rationality, and consistency. Central to the government's ability to meet this challenge is the way in which it makes and explains decisions about acceptable risks and required levels of cleanup.

Editors' Summary: Redeveloping abandoned urban hazardous waste sites, or brownfields, can significantly benefit developers, local communities, and the environment. Developers can purchase brownfields inexpensively, and subsequent redevelopment brings jobs to local communities and economic growth to inner cities, while allowing virgin land to remain pristine. Yet, barriers to redevelopment, such as the probability of legal liability, uncertainty regarding cleanup standards, and lenders' unwillingness to finance contaminated property, can make redevelopment extremely risky and difficult.

When the 103d Congress convened on January 5, 1993, many observers believed that it would make up for the dismal environmental record of its predecessor. The 102d Congress had tried and failed to reauthorize the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (FWPCA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Its attempt to elevate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to a cabinet-level department had been blocked in the House of Representatives, and its attempt to reform the General Mining Law of 1872 had been blocked in both houses.

In New York v. SCA Services, Inc., the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected the notion that a transporter cannot be an arranger under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). This Dialogue reviews the parties' arguments and the court's opinion. It then analyzes the impact this case will have on transporters.

Under the Superfund program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA or the Agency) faces a dilemma. The Agency wants potentially responsible parties (PRPs) to perform voluntary response actions pursuant to administrative consent orders or judicial consent decrees (collectively referred to as "orders" unless otherwise specified), but does not want to commit extensive attorney resources to negotiating the details of every order.