Crossing over: Toxic waste

[question everything]

Crossing over: Toxic waste

U.S. lacks good data on hazardous materials trucked from Mexico

By Mike Lee
STAFF WRITER

June 12, 2006

(snip)

But perhaps what concerns experts most is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lacks a computerized system to quickly receive and process details about cross-border movements of hazardous waste.

The EPA makes do with paper manifests on which truckers list the hazardous waste that they are hauling. Three years ago, the agency abandoned its Haztraks computer database that quantified data taken from those manifests. The EPA had hired a private contractor to do the data entry, and the project was more than two years behind when the program folded in 2003.

Today, the EPA relies on a $30,000-a-year program that is much smaller in scope, and administered by the Border Compliance Assistance Center, a nonprofit educational outfit. The center hires a private contractor in Virginia to replicate some of the data entry that the EPA gave up on. It started compiling numbers on cross-border hazardous waste about 18 months ago. By the time the center's computerized figures are made public, they are several months old and riddled with uncertainties.

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http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060612/news_1n12waste.html