Corporate America's environmental lawyers lately have been turning from such staple issues as the snagged Clean Air Act amendments, the next round of federal water pollution control regulations, and even the regulatory demands of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). This dramatic shift of attention away from most traditional environmental regulatory issues has not occurred because those matters have suddenly lost importance; rather, it is because with increasing frequency the client companies are being confronted with ubiquitous EPA requests/notices/demands (the proper characterization is a matter of hot debate) which announce that the recipient may be held responsible for the possibly formidable costs of cleaning up an abandoned hazardous waste site. Because the federal government steadfastly maintains that cleanup liability can be founded merely on the basis of one's having generated wastes that found their way to the problem site, and because it contends that financial exposure is not necessarily limited to the ratio one's wastes bear to the total volume of material shipped to the site, it is not difficult to see why these EPA missives receive a careful reading in the corporate legal department.

In most cases, the firm that created the wastes ("generator") had no involvement with the actual disposal activities. Generators usually had a contractual arrangement with a local hauler. Specific information on the method or location of disposal was rarely fed back to the generator. Even up to the mid-1970s, it appears that many haulers—who were not sophisticated analysts of the potential danger of chemical pollution—were guided by simple economic theory: avoid high transportation and disposal costs. In other words, most haulers trucked the wastes to the nearest and cheapest landfill. Many of those economic decisions are now coming back to haunt generators—even those that dealt with reputable haulers and paid a premium for the disposal of wastes.