hazardous waste
...ge of people of color.” Studies have shown that there is a negative correlation with this and Harris County is a poor black community. I have lived near Houston for seven years and during that time it flooded two times. That means that all of the hazardous waste and material from these sites were flowing through poor neighborhoods and homes, making it very unhealthy. – Explain cleaning the houses and knocking out the dry wall and them not understanding. Texas manages ninety-nine percent of hazardous waste on site with deep well injections and at times incinerators. In Houston there are twenty approved or active hazardous waste incinerators and eight deep injection wells in the Houston Area. As stated in the Mayer’s book, incineration is “high-temperature combustion of waste materials that greatly reduces their volume and sometimes their toxicity” and deep well injection is “deposition under pressure of mainly liquid hazardous wastes, such as oil-industry drilling wastes, through deep steel and concrete-encased underground shafts.” There are so many of these deep well injections and incinerators because of Houston’s dependence on the oil industry; it is one of the biggest oil importers in North America and this means high risk for contamination of the Gulf of Mexico and Galveston Beach. I remember going to Galveston Beach for prom my senior year and going swimming for a couple of hours and when I was finished I was visibly covered in oil. It has been extremely affected by the oil business and the disposal of hazardous wastes. Many think that incineration of hazardous waste is the best way to deal with this but like Mayer’s stated; many times this can give off dioxins into the air causing more damage to the environment. Also some people say that deep well injections are the best way to control the contamination of the environment but between 1989 and 1997 there were five hundred and sixty cases of ground water contamination and over fifty percent of the U.S. depends of ground water for drinking water. The cause of this could be “abandoned oil, gas, and water wells located near hazardous waste injection wells creating possible avenues for the hazardous waste to seep up to the surface or into underground drinking supplies.” Whatever the cause for the contamination, injection wells are not failsafe and therefore not the best way to manage hazardous waste. I would argue that source reduction is the best method for avoiding contamination and managing hazardous waste. Source reduction has three steps: create a waste minimization and source reduction plan, create a summary of the plan, and after applying this plan keep an annual progress report. By 1999 in Texas 4,500 companies submitted their plans and...