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taminants. Such an amendment would serve, consistent with Ms. 
Gorsuch’s desire, to enhance EPA’s authority to assure that its 
legal obligations in this area are fulfilled. 
The draft amendments take a logical and moderate middle 
ground approach between that of the court in the New York City 
case and that of EPA’s current ocean dumping regulations and cri- 
teria. The approach laid down by the court would require harm to 
the ocean, no matter how severe or how inappropriate, to be uni- 
formly and invariably balanced against the incremental cost and 
impacts of land-based alternatives before the dumping could be 
barred. 
EPA’s regulations would invariably preclude dumping on the 
basis of either excessive environmental effects or availability of 
land-based alternatives. The draft amendments, on the other hand, 
would recognize, I think quite appropriately, gradations of harm to 
the marine environment. The most harmful material could not be 
dumped at all. The most innocuous could be readily dumped. For 
material between these extremes, the magnitude of anticipated 
harm would be balanced against the availability of prudent and 
feasible alternatives. This strikes us as an eminently reasonable 
approach to take. 
There are those who argue that the “prudent and feasible alter- 
native’ test that would be established under the draft amendment 
would require would-be dumpers to resort tc extravagantly more 
costly land-based alternatives in preference to ocean dumping. This 
is a gross mischaracterization of the letter and intent of the draft 
amendments. The “prudent and feasible’ rubric was not pulled out 
of thin air. It has a long and respectable history as a central fea- 
ture of the Department of Transportation Act where it applies to 
highways routed through public parks and wildlife refuges. 
The same common property attributes that made it necessary to 
protect public parks against preferential use in highway routing 
apply equally strongly to the ocean. In both cases, but for at least 
marginally stronger Federal protection, highway developers would 
always choose to go put roads through parks rather than residen- 
tial or commercial neighborhoods, and waste disposers would 
always prefer to dump wastes in the ocean rather than in some- 
body's proverbial “backyard.” 
As the courts have recognized in construing the “prudent and 
feasible alternative” concept, while cost considerations certainly 
deserve a prominent place in the analysis, the public interest in 
parks—or, in this case, in the ocean—was to be regarded as para- 
mount. An engineeringly feasible alternative could, therefore, not 
be lightly dismissed simply on the basis that other alternatives 
were more expensive. On the other hand, developers were not ex- 
pected to incur “extraordinary” cost increments as the price of 
safeguarding parkland resources. This approach, I might add, is 
little different from that currently embodied in EPA’s ocean dump- 
ing regulations. 
I would like to note with respect to the New York City situation, 
about which we have heard a great deal this morning, that the 
sludge which New York City ocean dumps is generated by 12 sepa- 
rate sewage treatment plants that are scattered throughout the 
city. As the city’s environmental protection administrator noted 
