Suppose an unethical person decides to severely contaminate the environment (air

Question

Suppose an unethical person decides to severely contaminate the environment (air, ground, or water) with a highly toxic material. Consider these examples: (1) A bankrupt small-business owner cannot afford to properly dispose of his/her hazardous waste, so they dump it on the ground behind their place of business. (2) A chemist who has worked at a large chemical manufacturing facility for his entire career has routinely taken "samples" home and stockpiled a huge quantity of them in his garage. Some of the containers have leaked and the contents have flowed into a nearby stream of water. He has a heart attack and dies, leaving no family nor funds to clean up the mess. (3) You buy a parcel of land, intending to build your "dream home" on the lot. As you start to excavate the soil for the foundation, you uncover numerous metal drums of hazardous waste that were buried there by an unknown person, and you have no idea how long they have been there. (4) An unidentifiable person decided to dump a hazardous material down the drain of the laboratory sink. The chemical ultimately flows into the water treatment facility of the local community, where it plugs the filters, kills the activity of the aerobic reactor, and the effluent causes a devastaing "fish kill" as it passes downstream. Damage is in excess of $100,000.

All four of these scenarios are true. In any of these cases, who do you think should pay for the cleanup? Regardless of who you think SHOULD pay for it, who do you think actually WILL pay for it? Does that seem fair? What do you think is an appropriate punishment for individuals who are caught disposing hazardous chemicals improperly?

Explanation / Answer

1. In all of the above cases, the person responsible should have to pay for it. In the first case, the small-buisness owner; in the second, the chemist; in the third case the unkown person who buried the drums; in the fourth, the unidentifiable person who dumped the chemical down the laboratory drain.

2. However, since in the individuals are either bankrupt or they are unidentifiable, the responsible government body would end up cleaning in order to effectively control the damages.

3. While it does not seem fair, this would be the only solution to clean up the hazardous wastes in all the four cases.

4. The government should levy fines and cancel their buisness licences.

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