Solano County, California, voters passed Measure E in 1984, which obstructed regional waste management by drastically limiting the volume of solid waste that could be brought into the county for disposal or recycling. It sets a low limit on waste from other counties in California, and the county stopped enforcing it after receiving legal opinions that it violated the Commerce Clause because it discriminates against and excludes waste by place of origin.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups sued to enforce Measure E as written. The trial judge rewrote the law to apply only to other California counties, but not to waste generated outside of the state. That ruling was appealed.
The NAM and other organizations filed an amicus brief arguing that protectionist barriers like these have been struck down for decades because they interfere with interstate commerce. Simply limiting the reach of the measure to other California counties does not eliminate this problem. Solano County and thousands of others throughout the nation cannot "stand alone as economic islands around which the free flow of commerce may be diverted. Building a virtual wall around [the county] has a profound impact on the market for solid waste as an article of interstate commerce."
We urged an appeals court in California to reject laws like this that can create a patchwork of discriminatory and protectionist solid waste bans from cities and counties across the country. Allowing bans like this could lead to similar restrictions against many other goods and services, not merely solid waste, and would allow local entities to achieve what the states are prohibited from doing. The impact would be to dramatically undermine a national market of solid waste management and disposal, and could expose billions of dollars of other economic activity to discrimination by thousands of local governments.
On 7/31/2013, the court of appeal reversed the trial court's ruling and dismissed the case as moot, because California had enacted a new law (AB 845) that prohibits restrictions on the importation of solid waste based on the place of origin of the waste.