This is the height of public irresponsibility by Congress, the EPA, and the environmental movement. In practice RCRA has also made the environment patently less clean and less safe. Every day individuals, groups, and corporations produce waste products that must be removed, but not with RCRA and the EPA around. No one can operate in such an environment. The wastes pile up, and there is no place to put them.
Most businesses have only temporary facilities for storing hazardous wastes.
Increasingly, emphasis in the RCRA process has shifted to the concepts of waste reduction, waste minimization, and recycling. The waste reduction and waste minimization concepts have been east in much of the same aura of unreality that characterized the beginning of the environmental movement and its belief in mandated zero discharges. While there is an element of truth in the observation that much of the business world is too often careless in reducing waste and eliminating processes that might save it money, this has become another philosophical movement, with profits generated by waste reduction viewed as an end in itself. Thus, the less we produce, the less will be the waste, and the wealthier we shall all be. Clearly there are some reality checks to that vision.