The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That may be true, but as we witness a flawed bill making its way through the California legislature, it may also be paved with new, burdensome metal recycling regulations that as written will cost jobs, force businesses to close and leave fewer recycling options for consumers.
SB 811 by Senator Anna Caballero is well intentioned to protect our environment when recycling scrap metal and automobiles, but it misses the mark on holding the largest corporations accountable for their negligence.
However, an unintended consequence of this proposal is the adverse impact it will have on small, family-owned recycling businesses that, in contrast to the large facilities, do not expose the environment to such chemicals or waste during their operations.
Larger scale operations recycle entire vehicles — automobile fleets, buses, trucks — directly into their machines. For a long while, the state granted these facilities an exemption from California’s hazardous waste laws, allowing them to chemically treat the residue — a hazardous waste — and deliver it to ordinary municipal landfills as though it were household trash.
Proponents are right to recognize that this discretionary arrangement allowed the large facilities to operate outside of the waste permitting system, thus producing contamination problems and enforcement settlements. They use chemicals treatment of metal residue, a known hazardous waste in lieu of following Hazardous Waste Control Laws for disposal of their toxic waste, we don’t.
The problem is that the bill brings the small facilities — under the same rules and regulations as the larger players, even though the gaps it targets never existed for us. SB 811 duplicates the process. We would now be required to obtain two separate permits from the State Department of Toxic Substances Control.
SB 811 codifies a historically relaxed standard that allows chemical treatment of hazardous waste and codifies settlement terms from lawsuits after major environmental disasters.
Facilities like ours won’t likely to survive sending their customers to the larger facilities, placing more trucks and cars on the highways, emitting more pollution and a metal recycling market will be consolidated into the hands of a few multinational corporations. SB 811 essentially will create a monopoly of larger corporate bigwigs versus the family-owned companies that make America great.
SB 811 must be amended to focus on the problem: chemical treatment of auto shredder residue, performed only by larger scale facilities. This will preserve the intent of Caballero’s bill, modernize standards and create real accountability for the operations that prompted this legislation — while allowing small recyclers like ours to keep our lights on, people employed and communities served.
SB 811 must make good, durable policy sense for all stakeholders in the ecosystem. By narrowing the bill to focus on the responsible entities, larger recycling facilities, to address the prevailing concerns, it helps ensure we can best serve our citizens, job creators and communities in the safest, smartest and most equitable way of all.