=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #281
—April 15, 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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HAZARDOUS WASTE INCINERATORS: A TECHNOLOGY OUT OF CONTROL?
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, EPA (U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency) learned the hard way that
landfills always leak and usually contaminate groundwater. So the
agency kept making new restrictions on what chemicals could be
buried in the ground. Because the agency did next to nothing to
promote waste avoidance and pollution prevention, industry
continued to produce more and more hazardous waste each year.
Thus each year a larger and more diverse brew of toxins has been
sent to the nation’s 18 huge commercial hazardous waste
incinerators.
There is now a decade’s experience indicating that hazardous
waste incinerators have never worked as designed, create massive
pollution themselves, and periodically explode. Furthermore, as
we saw last week, EPA scientists have known since
1985 that hazardous waste incinerators cannot destroy wastes to
the extent required by law.
This week we focus on the human management failures of
incineration technology.
Chemical Waste Management is the nation’s largest and wealthiest
operator of hazardous waste incinerators. If anyone can afford to
run an incinerator properly, Chem Waste can. Furthermore, the
company says environmental compliance drives everything it does.
Some of the parent firm’s top executives donate time to sit on
the boards of directors of prominent environmental organizations
like Audubon and National Wildlife Federation. They have a
vice-president in charge of environmental policy AND ethical
standards. If anyone were capable of running an incineratior
well, it would seem to be this company.
Yet during recent years Chem Waste’s two incinerators have racked
up a list of leaks, spills, releases, explosions, violations and
coverups that would fill a hefty book.[1]
Standard operating procedure says:
–all wastes must be sampled and incompatible wastes must never
be mixed, BUT CHEM WASTE HAS MIXED INCOMPATIBLE WASTES TOGETHER,
CAUSING CHEMICAL REACTIONS THAT SENT PLUMES OF WASTES WAFTING
OFF-SITE.
–The rate at which wastes can enter the furnace is carefully
specified, YET CHEM WASTE ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS HAS BEEN CAUGHT
FEEDING WASTES AT EXCESSIVE RATES, REDUCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF
WASTE DESTRUCTION.
–Temperatures in the furnace must be maintained at 1600 degrees or
higher, YET CHEM WASTE SOMETIMES BURNS WASTES AT TEMPERATURES OF
ONLY 1300 DEGREES.
–CO (carbon monoxide) must not exceed 500 ppm in the stack gas,
YET CHEM WASTE HAS PERMITTED CO TO EXCEED THIS LIMIT.
–Manifests are supposed to say where all the wastes came from,
YET CHEM WASTE HAS FAILED TO MAINTAIN PROPER MANIFESTS.
–Operating records are supposed to be kept, YET CHEM WASTE HAS
FAILED TO KEEP THEM PROPERLY.
–Waste in leaking containers is supposed to be transferred to
new containers, YET CHEM WASTE HAS FAILED TO DO THIS IN SOME
CASES.
–All wastes are supposed to be sampled to avoid putting
explosives into the furnace, YET BOTH CHEM WASTE INCINERATORS
HAVE EXPLODED DURING THE PAST YEAR, OFFERING CLEAR EVIDENCE OF
FAILURE TO IDENTIFY WASTES PROPERLY.
–Explosions are to be reported when they happen, YET CHEM WASTE
HAS FAILED TO REPORT EXPLOSIONS AT ITS INCINERATORS.
–Waste feed is supposed to cut off automatically when
hydrochloric acid (HCl) in the stack gas exceeds 100 ppm BUT CHEM
WASTE HAD THEIR CUT-OFF SET FOR 500 PPM HCL.
–Chem Waste’s incinerators are not licensed to burn dioxins, BUT
ON DECEMBER 3, 1991, CHEM WASTE’S INCINERATOR AT SAUGET, ILLINOIS
BURNED A 25-MILLIGRAM VIAL OF DIOXIN–ENOUGH DIOXIN TO PROVIDE A
MAXIMUM ALLOWABLE LIFETIME DOSE FOR 232,000 PEOPLE.
The preceding list barely scratches the surface. How could these
lapses, violations and pollution disasters occur? If the company
can’t control it’s own technology, what about government? The
person responsible for developing EPA’s hazardous waste
incinerator regulations back in 1978 was William Sanjour. In a
recent letter to a grass-roots activist, Sanjour offered several
reasons why the regulations, as finally written, don’t work:[2]
“I’ve talked to many people who live near hazardous waste sites
and I have reviewed many records, and this is the way it really
works,” Sanjour wrote. “Inspectors typically work from nine to
five Monday through Friday. So if the incinerator has anything
particularly nasty to burn, it will do so at night or on
weekends. When the complaints come in to the inspector’s office
the next day he will call the incinerator operator and ask what’s
going on. He may also visit the plant but rarely finds anything.
The enforcement officials tend to view the incinerator operator
as their client and the public as a nuisance.”
“Keep in mind that hazardous waste is a factory’s garbage. If
they typically ship out say a thousand gallons a month of waste
solvents and they find themselves with say fifty gallons of waste
PCB which they don’t know what to do with. What is more natural
than dumping it in with the waste solvent to be hauled away to
the incinerator? No one would be the wiser,” Sanjour wrote. He
offered other reasons as well:
–The regulations require no monitoring of ambient air in the
vicinity of the incinerator.
–It’s easy for an operator to cheat because he or she produces
and maintains the records.
–Government inspectors are typically poorly trained. They have
low morale and high turnover. EPA statistics show that 41% of
inspectors have conducted fewer than 10 inspections. “There is no
reward to inspectors for finding serious violations and, indeed,
zealous inspectors are typically given a hard time by their
supervisors,” Sanjour wrote.
* * *
Recent events at the Jacksonville, Ark., incinerator (not a Chem
Waste facility) appear to follow a script that might have been
written by William Sanjour.[3]
The Jacksonville site manager, Robert Apa, issued respirator
masks to all employees and sent an inter-office memo April 1
ordering everyone to keep their masks handy because of dangerous
“puffs” of pollution being emitted from the furnace, which has
begun burning 16 million pounds of dioxin-contaminated chemical
warfare wastes left over from Vietnam. Seals in the fire box are
leaking, and periodically, for reasons that are not understood,
pressure builds up inside the furnace, forcing “puffs” of
contaminants to escape. The puffs last from 5 to 45 seconds and,
of course, represent emissions that entirely bypass the
pollution control system. The Jacksonville incinerator was
constructed in the middle of a residential neighborhood, over
the objection of local citizens, as a demonstration of the manly
prowess of the government-industry partnership that developed
during the governorship of Bill Clinton.
When news of the puffs got out, Mark McCorkle, an Arkansas state
official assigned to regulate the Jacksonville incinerator, first
tried to pressure the ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE (the state’s
largest paper) not to print anything about it. McCorkle then
conceded that the pollution “puffs” posed a potential hazard to
workers, but denied that the public could be affected when the
puffs drifted off-site to the homes that lie a long stone’s-throw
from the furnace. “If you were to take this memo out of context,
it would appear to be a horror story,” McCorkle said.
Site manager Apa stressed the difficulty of preventing the puffs.
He said, “We have taken measures via procedural changes and a new
interlock, to minimize the duration [of the puffs.] However, as
soon as one problem is identified, another seems to appear. This
last week, the slag dams caused release of unburned material onto
the TDU pad.”
Jacksonville citizens continue to work desperately to shut down
the incinerator. A new group, Jacksonville Mothers and Children
Defense Fund (JAMAC), will soon file a lawsuit seeking shutdown.
They are asking groups everywhere to sign on to their suit. For
details, contact Sharon Golgan at JAMAC, 1105 Wilds,
Jacksonville, AR 72076; phone (501) 982-4366. Or contact attorney
Gregory Ferguson in Little Rock: telephone (501) 372-0771.
After a decade of experimentation and experience, the record now
indicates that hazardous waste incinerators cannot be operated
safely even when the operator desires to do so. If the operators
have any inclination to cut corners, regulatory officials seem
unwilling or unable to bring them to justice.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: epa; landfilling; groundwater; incineration;
hazardous waste; chemical waste management; cwmi; explosions;
compliance; carbon monoxide; co; sauget; il; dioxin; hcl;
hydrochloric acid; william sanjour; enforcement; pcbs;
jacksonville; ar; cbw; vietnam; bill clinton; jacksonville
mothers and children defense fund; jamac; chicago;