Household hazardous waste (HHW) was a term coined by Dave Galvin from Seattle, Washington in 1982 as part of the fulfillment of a US EPA grant. This new term was reflective of the recent passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA 1976) in the US. This act and subsequent regulations strengthened the environmental protection requirements for landfills, in Subpart D, and created a "cradle to grave" management system for hazardous wastes, in Subpart C. From RCRA 1976 the US EPA promulgated rules in 1980 which explicitly excluded any wastes from household origins from regulation as a hazardous waste at the federal level. Most US states adopted parallel regulations to RCRA 1976 but were allowed to be more stringent. California took advantage of this allowance and chose to not exempt household origin wastes from their state hazardous waste laws. HHW products exhibit many of the same dangerous characteristics as fully regulated hazardous waste which are their potential for reactivity, ignitability, corrosivity, toxicity, or persistence. Examples include drain cleaners, oil paint, motor oil, antifreeze, fuel, poisons, pesticides, herbicides and rodenticides, fluorescent lamps, lamp ballasts containing PCBs, some smoke detectors, and in some states, consumer electronics (such as televisions, computers, and cell phones). Except for California, most states exclude HHW from their hazardous waste regulations and regulate the management of HHW largely under their solid waste regulatory schemes.
Certain items such as batteries and fluorescent lamps can be returned to retail stores for disposal. The Call2Recycle maintains a list of battery recycling locations and your local environmental organization should have list of fluorescent lamp recycling locations. The classification "household hazardous waste" has been used for decades and does not accurately reflect the larger group of materials that during the past several years have become known as "household hazardous wastes". These include items such as latex paint, non-hazardous household products and other items that do not generally exhibit hazardous characteristics which are routinely included in "household hazardous waste" disposal programs. The term "home generated special materials" more accurately identifies a broader range of items that public agencies are targeting as recyclable and/or should not be disposed of into a landfill.
