>Worst case, ditch line concentrates leach down into a water table close enough to an extraction pump that goes to water food or be drunk by people. (Or later in time earthworks for housing kick up a dust layer that just happens to be mostly "20 years of bad ju-ju")

Pretty much all water discharge rules are built around filtering stuff out. I thought we wanted it in the dirt so it would't be in the water?

The part that drives me up the wall is the two faced capricious nature of all this.

I have a grass parking lot and everyone screeches about tire rubber concentrating in the dirt.

I pave the lot and everyone screeches about the rubber in the runoff

I pay an engineering firm to say that my grass strip on the side of the paved parking lot is an engineered feature that per their calculation will catch yada yada yada blah blah blah and I get my permit.

Seems to me like you can't put anything anywhere. You just go in circles until you've the right rings for the right amount and then they say "this is fine".

Whether the ditch is dirt and grass (nature's filter) or lined with something, hexavalent chromium is just the big boy big dollar version of the same stupid parking lot problem.

Say they filter the chromium out. So then it winds up concentrated in something. Where does it go then? Seems like the only way to permanently deal with waste is to sell it into another jurisdiction where the buyer has kissed the right rings to let it be used as some input to some other process where it then goes from waste to something else.