[greenyes] Article: EPA official says material reuse, recycling

["Monica Wilson" <mwilson@no.address>]

Check out these statements from an EPA official. Wonder if this would ever
be true!
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http://www.wastenews.com/headlines2.html?id=1100031581
EPA should focus on material reuse, recycling, Thomas Dunne says

Kansas City, Mo., Nov. 9 -- After almost 30 years of a "command-and-control"
system of regulating solid waste disposal, the federal government needs a
dramatic policy makeover, a senior U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
official said Nov. 8.

The EPA has to become a different kind of agency, focusing primarily on
material reuse and recycling rather than regulation, said Thomas P. Dunne,
acting assistant administrator for the EPA´s Office of Solid Waste and
Emergency Response at the 2004 Byproducts Beneficial Use Summit in Kansas
City.

"I'm convinced this country must make a sharp and profound change in policy
direction," he said. "Things have got to change."

The 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act charged the EPA with
overseeing the safe disposal of solid waste and encouraging energy recovery
from recovered materials.

The agency needs to concentrate its resources on the second part, developing
a national material management policy instead of spending the lion's share
of its energy writing regulations, Dunne said.

"EPA's days of composing and writing waste disposal regulations is just
about over," he said. "That job's mostly done."

The agency must collaborate with industry, environmental groups and
third-party scientific institutions, such as universities and testing
agencies, to encourage the reuse of industrial byproducts. It doesn't make
long-term economic sense to use materials once and throw them away, Dunne
said.

"For manufacturers everywhere, materials management will become a much
higher priority than waste management," he said.