Industry Overview
Hazardous waste manage-ment revenues are expected to advance 1.9 percent per
year through 2004. This represents a slowdown from the previous periods, as the
bulk of the work of cleaning up hazardous waste hot spotsEis completed.
While certain sites remain problematic, many of the contaminated sites in the
US will be wholly or mostly cleaned up by 2004. This trend will impact
transporta-tion and disposal and remediation revenues the most, although
analytical services and consulting and engineering services will also record
slower gains.
The amount of hazardous waste generated and managed reached its peak in the
late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, the drawdown of stored wastes and the
significant reduction in new waste creation has led to a decline in the volume
of wastes generated and managed.However, this does not mean that the problem is entirely solved. Nuclear
wastes, for example, account for a relatively small portion of the total in
tonnage terms, but are a significantly greater problem due to their long lives
and the lack of permanent storage facilities.
Medical wastes also pose problems. The ongoing controversy over the wisdom of
incinerating such wastes, as well as concerns over bacterial and viral
contamination (particularly if such waste is merely placed in landfills) are
issues which will have to be addressed.
Although stricter environ-mental regulation, on both the federal and state
levels, has been the primary driver behind the increased management of hazardous
wastes in the past, the focus is now shifting to economic factors. Chief among
these is the realization that source reduction technologies offer a number of
economic ad-vantages to industrial concerns. By reducing the creation of
hazardous wastes, firms reduce the probability of potentially expensive legal,
regulatory and reme-diation costs in the future.
Additionally, many of the production technologies now emerging also offer ad-
vantages in terms of produc-tivity, decreased unit costs and reduced energy and
raw material costs. Finally, re-source recovery (recycling) is developing as a
means of both reducing production costs and avoiding future environmental
liabilities.
Study Coverage
These and other findings are detailed in Hazardous Waste Generation &
Management, a new study from Freedonia priced at $3600. Historical data and
forecasts to 2004 and 2009 are provided for chemicals and heavy metals,
petroleum wastes, medical wastes and other hazardous wastes (asbestos, nuclear
and miscellaneous wastes).
Generation and management are provided on a regional basis (Northeast,
Midwest, South and West), with data given in millions of short tons. In
addition, hazardous waste management revenues in millions of US dollars are
presented by activity (trans-portation and disposal, ana-lytical services,
remediation, consulting and engineering services). The study also evaluates
market share and profiles key companies.
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