ENVIRONMENTAL LAW—HOW IT GOT THERE MATTERS: TRAIL SMELTER EVADES CERCLA RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE AERIAL DEPOSITION OF HAZARDOUS WASTE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Trail Smelter, operated by Teck Cominco Metals, Ltd., is an integrated smelting and refining complex in Trail, British Columbia. It is situated approximately ten miles north of the United States-Canadian border. In the early 1900s, the smelter was at the center of an international lawsuit that led to a landmark decision of international environmental law. Now, almost a century later, the smelter, still in operation, is responsible for widespread contamination on tribal lands located within Washington State. Once again, the smelter is embroiled in a protracted legal battle, this time facing liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA).\nWhile Teck Cominco, which operates the Trail Smelter, suffered several defeats throughout the legal proceedings, it recently scored a significant victory. In 2016, the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the smelter operator, holding that emissions of hazardous waste do not constitute “disposal” for the purposes of CERCLA liability. This Note will argue that despite the Ninth Circuit’s conclusion that it was bound by prior precedent, there were important factual differences that distinguished the Pakootas case from the preceding case law. Furthermore, the decision in Pakootas is incongruous with CERCLA’s legislative history and administrative enforcement. This Note will argue that a definition of disposal that includes the aerial deposition of hazardous waste is consistent with CERCLA’s statutory language and conducive to its broad, remedial purpose.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".