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Controlling Waste at the Borders

Think of illegal border crossings from Mexico, and your thoughts may fly to immigrants walking across the desert, or people smuggling drugs. How about truckloads of illegal hazardous waste being driven straight through legal checkpoints, in plain sight of the U.S. Border Patrol?

Some say it happens all the time, but nobody can say exactly how often, or how many tons of toxic waste enter the U.S. regularly from Mexican industrial plants. That’s because very few people are actually checking. California has instituted a fairly rigorous process for controlling the hazardous waste crossing its borders, but there’s no corresponding program in Arizona or Texas and no federal oversight, either.

State officials typically rely upon the U.S. Border Patrol to monitor toxic waste shipments, but they have other concerns, such as looking for illegal aliens and drugs. A computerized system designed to solve this problem was scrapped several years ago when consultants carried a two-year backlog on data entry.

Meanwhile, toxic chemicals are shipped regularly to U.S. television and electronics manufacturing plants lining the border in Mexico, and, under an agreement between the two countries, must then be disposed of in the United States. But there’s no reliable process in place for tracking who’s shipping what or whether it’s being properly disposed of once it gets here.

Rough estimates – and nobody considers them more than that – place the figure for illegal hazardous waste crossings at more than 43 million pounds per year. Where do they go? Environmental groups fear they end up being dumped in landfills and deserted canyons, where they seep into soil and local water supplies.

But until there’s a strict system for counting and inspecting toxic waste crossing our borders, it’s anybody’s guess what happens to this waste – or what’s even in it.

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To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org