JohnRoberts said:
in fact I am pretty sure the regulations are about what comes out of the sewage treatment plants and back into ground water.
Oh, John, don't get me started.
There are regulations in a lot of places in the USA, but not everywhere. And that's the crux of the problem.
Treated sewage is usually going into surface water, not ground water. So it crosses borders.
And another gotcha is that large cities, like New York, just export their waste to areas where regulations are weak, or non-existent. And from there, waste is exported to Africa, Asia, or South America. I don't think sewage gets exported, but there sure are sewage tubes to other counties if the rules in these counties are less strict.
Until recently, waste paid 6$ a ton for export. Because more and more nations (China, Indonesia, India...) now have strong restrictions about importing waste, US communities will have to pay from 60$ to 90$ per ton for incineration or disposal. That's a BIG problem.
In fact, the EPA has been effectively neutered. The current head is a former industry lobbyist.
I was surprised to read published advice (from my state government) advising to pour used antifreeze down into the sewer instead of just discard it on the ground. Apparently sewage treatment can handle antifreeze, but not waste oil and I doubt paint. Of course this does not apply to homes with septic tanks, or outhouses.
Antifreeze is glycol. Easily treated with bacteria. Motor oil is mineral or synthetic. Poison for bacteria and most other life forms, including humans. Still, in Europe, glycol is recycled.
It's really amazing how the culture from English speaking nations is able to deny problems. A few examples:
The Romans knew lead was poisonous. The Germans stopped using lead in food processing in the 16th century. The UK stopped doing that in the 20th century.
In Victorian England, a lot of wallpaper contained lots of arsenic. Tens of thousands of people died because of it. Germany abandoned the use of arsenic based pigment in the 19th century. The UK did that in
1970, despite Queen Victoria campaigning for legislation a century before.
The list is endless...
That's not to say the rest of Europe doesn't have any eco problems. But it's on a very much reduced scale. Germany, fi, is still exporting used defective fridges and freezers to Africa, despite of the EU and German laws that prohibit that.
The trick is that they get exported as "working" 2nd hand, some packed in 2nd hand cars. In Africa, the gases are released into the atmosphere and the rest is scrapped. Isolation is burned. Cheaper than real recycling. Of course, shipping those adds to the ecological cost...