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Interesting note on abuse of law

I may have posted earlier on how the major firearms manufacturers essentially started GCA '68, in order to cut off competition. In the early 60s they were getting killed by mail order houses offering cheap surplus rifles (as in $30-40 Mausers and Springfields), and so wanted to stop surplus imports and interstate sales.

Here's an article on how the same thing is happening in environmental law. Basically, there is money to be made in incinerating certain forms of hazardous waste, and companies specialize in it. Then cement kilns found they could do it, too, and since the heat was useful to them, they charged only a third of what the incinerators were charging. The incinerators began setting up environment suits against the kilns.

"Examples of industry-environmentalist cooperation are numerous. Blakeman Early of the Sierra Club stated forthrightly that “The commercial waste industry has an interest in improving regulations sufficiently to drive mom-and-pop operations out of business.”

Adler notes that WMX, the largest waste management company in the United States, “has funded the National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wilderness Society, and World Resources Institute, typically giving over $700,000 annually to environmental causes.”

A former director of environmental affairs for WMX, William Y. Brown, who also served as acting director of the Environmental Defense Fund, acknowledged, “We’re in a position to benefit from the same objectives that [environmental groups] are pursuing…. Stricter legislation is environmentally good and it also helps our business.”

Pennsylvania Environmental Enforcement Project (PEEP), a local citizens’ group based in the Bath area, filed suit against Keystone [a cement kiln]. PEEP, which was incorporated only weeks before the suit was filed, was found to have been heavily supported by one of Keystone’s competitors—a hazardous waste incinerator. Within eight months’ time, PEEP received at least $250,000 from Rollins Environmental Services..."