Toxic Substance Control

Report Outline
Health, Environmental Hazards
Development of Protective Laws
Concern About Pesticide Usage
Special Focus

Health, Environmental Hazards

Consequences of Improper Waste Disposal

Midnight Mover. The phrase evokes images of a late-night disco dancer or someone who skips out on the rent. Actually, a “midnight mover” is a person who disposes of toxic chemical cargoes illegally under cover of darkness. Midnight movers operate in nearly every state of the union. They have dumped toxic substances in sewers, streams, lakes, rivers, oceans, old quarries, forests, fields, trenches and even along roads. Illegal dumping of toxic substances is one manifestation of a much larger national problem: how to prevent the large number of toxic chemicals manufactured and distributed in this country from endangering the health of the American people and poisoning the environment.

Incidents involving poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals have occurred with increasing frequency in the last several years. “The presence of toxic chemicals in our environment is one of the grimmest discoveries of the industrial era,” President Carter said last year in an environmental message to Congress. “Toxic substance pollution,” Rep. William Brodhead, D-Mich., said recently, “is one of the most pervasive and potentially most devastating health problems today.”

Douglas M. Costle, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, emphasized the seriousness of the situation in a recent article in The Journal of Commerce. “The health and environmental hazards stemming from our society's heavy reliance on commercial chemical substances reach into virtually every nook and cranny of modern life,” Costle wrote in the Sept. 21, 1978, issue. “Nothing we touch, smell, consume, or otherwise use throughout a given day has not in turn been affected in some way by chemicals.”