RACHEL’s Hazardous Waste News #312

=======================Electronic Edition========================

RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #312
—November 18, 1992—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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NEW EPA MEMO SAYS ALL HAZARDOUS
WASTE INCINERATORS FAIL TO MEET REGULATIONS

An internal memo sent to all 10 regional offices of EPA [U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency] by Sylvia Lowrance, EPA Director
of Solid Waste, confirms that hazardous waste incinerators cannot
meet EPA requirements for near-total destruction of hazardous
wastes. (See RHWN #280.)

EPA’s incinerator regulations require 99.99 percent destruction
of all hazardous wastes and 99.9999 percent destruction of
especially-hazardous wastes such as PCBs and dioxins. The
Lowrance memo dated Sept. 22, 1992, and interviews with Sonya
Sasseville of Ms. Lowrance’s staff, confirm that the agency
possessed scientific information as early as 1984 showing that
hazardous waste incinerators cannot destroy some of the most
dangerous wastes as completely as the regulations require.

EPA possessed this information but chose to ignore it when
hazardous waste incinerator regulations were established for
dioxin in 1985.

These new revelations cast doubt on the safety of all hazardous
waste incinerators, and could conceivably lead to charges of
criminal wrongdoing by some EPA officials. The agency has been
touting incineration as “safe” for more than a decade. When
asked, agency officials define “safe” as “in compliance with all
regulations.” In sum, the agency established regulations in 1985
knowing no incinerator could comply, and now the agency’s own
logic forces the conclusion that no hazardous waste incinerator
can be operated safely. It would appear to expose the agency to
liability claims by anyone believing they have been harmed by
incinerator emissions.

EPA’s acknowledgement of its malfeasance surfaced during an
incinerator battle in Jacksonville, Arkansas. For the past decade
Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton and the citizens of Jacksonville,
have been battling each other over the Governor’s plan to burn
dioxin-contaminated chemical warfare agents in a residential
neighborhood of Jacksonville. (See RHWN #311.) EPA officials in
Region 6 (Dallas, Texas) supported the Governor’s plan.

The Jacksonville wastes contain an estimated 75 pounds (34
kilograms) of pure dioxin, a poison that kills laboratory animals
such as guinea pigs exposed to only a few micrograms, making it
one of the most powerful poisons ever found. From 1988 onward,
federal and state environmental officials in Jacksonville said
publicly on numerous occasions that an incinerator could destroy
dioxin with 99.9999 percent efficiency, thus eliminating all
health threats to the surrounding community. The Lowrance memo
makes it clear that Region 6 EPA officials were either lying or
were kept ignorant by officials at EPA headquarters in Washington
who knew the truth.

EPA’s regulatory failure was discovered when an independent
researcher, chemist Pat Costner of Greenpeace, analyzed
government data from the Jacksonville incinerator as it was being
tested before startup. In early 1992, Costner analyzed government
data collected during an October, 1991, trial burn in
Jacksonville. Her analysis revealed that instead of 99.9999
percent (“six nines”) destructiuon, the Jacksonville incinerator
had achieved only 99.96 percent destruction of dioxin. Federal
and state officials confirmed her analysis. At that rate the
Jacksonville incinerator would release 400 times as much dioxin
as the regulations say it should.

How the Regulations Work

EPA’s hazardous waste regulations require the owner/operator of a
new incinerator to select several POHCs (principal organic
hazardous constituents)–chemicals to be destroyed. The selected
POHCs must be harder to burn than dioxin. The POHCs are
“surrogates” for dioxin–they “stand for” dioxin or “represent”
dioxin during the test. During a “trial burn,” the POHC
surrogates are fed into the incinerator in nearly pure form under
ideal laboratory conditions, and the incinerator’s ability to
destroy them is measured. If a destruction/removal efficiency
(DRE) of 99.9999 percent is achieved with the POHCs, then EPA
allows the owner/operator to assume that 99.9999 percent of
dioxin will also have been destroyed. It is this assumption that
EPA has known since 1984 is false.

The trial burn procedure was followed precisely in the
Jacksonville case, with one exception. The owner/operator
inadvertently burned some actual dioxin along with the POHCs
during the trial burn and dutifully reported the DRE for the
POHCs, but did not analyze the data to establish a DRE for
dioxin. Costner did the calculation for dioxin and revealed that
dioxin was not destroyed with an efficiency anywhere near six
nines.

Since Region 6 officials had been promising for several years
that the Jacksonville incinerator would destroy dioxin with six
nines efficiency, Costner’s analysis made them look like fools or
liars or both. Region 6 called headquarters for guidance and on
September 22, Sylvia Lowrance sent out a memo telling regional
EPA offices how to handle this embarrassing situation.

The Lowrance memo says, in part, “The low dioxin DRE in this
recent [Jacksonville] case was consistent with our current body
of incinerator performance data, which show a very clear trend of
decreasing DRE for hazardous constituents with decreasing
incoming concentration of the constituents in the waste feed.
(That is, the lower the constituent concentration in the waste,
the lower the DRE.) The data show that a properly operating
incinerator, which reached 99.99% DRE (four nines) on higher
concentrations of POHCs, will often achieve less than four nines
when the concentration of a POHC (principal organic hazardous
constituent) in the waste is less than 1000 ppm [parts per
million]. At this time we have not established a definitive
scientific explanation for this phenomenon,” the memo says.

The Lowrance memo goes on to point out that, in establishing
regulations for incineration of dioxin-contaminated wastes, in
1985, EPA relied on risk assessments in which the agency assumed
that 99.9999 percent destruction was routinely achieved. “For
this reason, the risk assessment calculations performed in the
course of the rulemaking may not be representative in some
cases,” the Lowrance memo says. In sum, the entire superstructure
of regulations created for dioxin incineration in 1985 was based
on assumptions that the agency knew at the time were false.
Indeed, in an internal EPA memo dated October 24, 1985, Robert
A. Olexsey, who was at the time an employee of EPA’s Hazardous
Waste Environmental Research Laboratory, wrote “We have a problem
with the ‘surrogate POHC’ approach for the determination of the
dioxin destruction efficiency. In our incinerator and boiler
field tests, we found a consistent relationship…. In essence,
across the entire test program, POHC DRE increased with
increasing POHC concentration in the feed. If this relationship
holds for dioxin (we see no reason why it would not), reporting
the DRE for the dioxin material as being identical to that of the
higher concentration surrogate will result in overstating the DRE
for the dioxin waste.” Olexsey went on to recommend that dioxin
itself be measured during incinerator tests, to check the
efficiency of destruction, rather than testing a POHC and
assuming that it revealed something about dioxin. Olexsey’s
advice was not followed.

During 1984-1985, John C. Kramlich of the Energy and
Environmental Research Corporation (Irvine, Cal.) completed a
contract study for EPA, analyzing the failure of hazardous waste
incinerators to destroy wastes. EPA did not publish the Kramlich
study until 1989. Kramlich wrote, “[Our] results indicate that
current technology has difficulty meeting the licensing
regulations when the waste represents less than 1000 ppm [parts
per million] of the feed stream. This finding has significance
with respect to waste streams contaminated by low concentrations
of extremely hazardous materials (e.g. dioxin or chlorophenol
contaminated pesticides).”[1]

EPA’s data reveal that all incinerators fail in the same way, but
the public health hazard seems especially great at sites burning
wood-preservative wastes, pesticides, PCBs, pulp and paper mill
sludges, or dioxins. All contaminated-soil incinerators, all
Superfund cleanup incinerators, and all of the Army’s proposed
chemical weapons incinerators are also cast into doubt by EPA’s
recent admissions. Furthermore, all of the agency’s risk
assessments and rulemakings regarding hazardous waste
incinerators are now known to have been based on false
assumptions. In short, the entire regulatory structure intended
to guarantee the protection of public health and safety from
hazardous waste incinerators has now been thrown into grave
question.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.

===============
[1] John C. Kramlich and others, EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF
CRITICAL FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES IN HAZARDOUS WASTE INCINERATION
(Springfield, VA: National Technical Information Service [NTIS],
September, 1989.) This is EPA document No. EPA/600/2-[89/048]
available from NTIS for $26.00; phone (800) 553-6847 and request
NTIS document No. PB90-108507. See pgs. 5-1, 5-2.

Descriptor terms: hazardous waste incineration; epa; waste
disposal techologies; waste treatment technologies; dre;
regulations; jacksonville; ar; studies; sylvia lowrance; dioxin;
health;

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