Who Says It's Risky Business? Public Attitudes toward Hazardous Waste Facility Siting

Abstract

The 1980s and 1990s have been marked by a growing scholarly interest in public response to the siting of hazardous waste treatment facilities. This interest has been kindled, at least in part, by important changes in federal law. The original legislation, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, set regulatory standards for hazardous waste management, but these standards were widely viewed as inadequate, especially in that they permitted a variety of land-based technologies. Perhaps the most prominent provision of the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments of 1984 is the phased prohibition of virtually all of these technologies. This stipulation, along with the requirement (added by the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986) that all states must demonstrate a twenty-year capacity for the safe treatment and disposal of hazardous waste, has brought the problem into sharp focus: What sort of public response do state and local governments face as they move toward siting decisions? The public policy dimensions of hazardous waste facilities demonstrate collective benefits with narrowly borne risks, similar to airports, prisons, landfills, and highways. The study of the facility siting process would seem to have a natural home in the rich literature on public resistance to concentrated costs, the so-called NIMBY problem: OK, but not in my back yard.' Local citizens' perceptions of likely impacts on the economy, property values, environmental quality, traffic congestion,