Cite as: 511 U. S. 328 (1994)
Stevens, J., dissenting
put as not hazardous, the 1984 amendment excludes the activity from the definition of hazardous waste generation that would otherwise apply. For it is obvious that the same activity cannot both subject a facility to regulation because its residue is hazardous and exempt the facility from regulation because the statute deems the same residue to be nonhazardous.8
Thus, if we are to be guided only by the literal meaning of the statutory text, we must either give effect to the broad definition of hazardous waste generation and subject all municipal incinerators that generate hazardous ash to Subtitle C regulation (including those that burn pure household waste) or give effect to the exclusion that applies equally to pure household waste and mixtures that include other non-hazardous wastes. For several reasons the latter is the proper choice. It effectuates the narrower and more recently enacted provision rather than the earlier more general definition. It respects the title of the 1984 amendment by treating what follows as a "clarification" rather than a repeal or a modification. It avoids the Court's rather surprising (and uninvited) decision to invalidate the household waste exclusion that the EPA adopted in 1980,9 on which
8 The Court characterizes my reading of the text as "imaginative use of ellipsis," ante, at 335, n. 1, because the subject of the predicate "shall not be deemed to be . . . hazardous" is the recovery facility rather than the residue that is disposed of after the waste is burned. That is true, but the reason the facility is exempted is because it is not "deemed to be . . . disposing of . . . hazardous wastes." Thus it is the statutorily deemed nonhazardous character of the object of the sentence—wastes—that effectively exempts from Subtitle C regulation the activity and the facility engaged in that activity. If, as the statute provides, a facility is not deemed to be disposing of hazardous wastes when it disposes of the output of the facility, it must be true that the output is deemed nonhazardous.
9 Although the first nine pages of the Court's opinion give the reader the impression that the 1980 regulatory exclusion for pure household waste was valid, the Court ultimately acknowledges that its construction of the statute has the effect of "withholding all waste-stream exemption for waste processed by resource recovery facilities, even for the waste
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