Whenever a community is faced with the prospect of a hazardous waste facility being located in its midst, the response is usually, "Not in my back yard!" That response has been dubbed the "NIMBY principle." Such reactions are usually governed by visions of hazardous waste dumps of days gone by and of rusty dented drums oozing hazardous liquids into the environment. Those visions were all too real in the past, and remnants of these situations still exist. Were it not for modern, state of the art disposal facilities, there would be no hope of these visions ever becoming a thing of the past. The NIMBY principle, however well meaning it may be, prevents the construction of new environmentally sound sites, and forces HW facilities to be built upon pre-existing, already contaminated sites that are frequently located in depleted neighborhoods. Often the geology of these locations is less favorable for containment than new sites would be. We get stuck with them, however, because they are already grandfathered into existence.
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