=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #338
— May 20, 1993 —
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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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK:
EPA ANNOUNCES NEW INCINERATOR POLICIES
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Carol Browner on
Tuesday announced what may turn out to be major changes in
hazardous waste incinerator policy, including a sort of
moratorium on new hazardous waste incinerators.
However, even as the new policies were being announced, one was
put to the test and it failed. The incident raises a fundamental
question about Carol Browner: can she gain control of this
antediluvian dinosaur, this anti-environmental EPA? No one
doubts Browner’s good intentions, her keen intelligence, her
personal environmental credentials and convictions, or her sound
character. By every measure, she seems a genuinely good person.
But can she discipline the EPA staff to adopt pro-environment
policies after a decade spent lumbering off in a different
direction? Can this ponderous 7000-member adjunct-to-industry
behemoth be tugged and shoved in a new direction by a smart young
person wielding only the title “Administrator” and a sharp pencil?
* * *
Terri Swearingen, 36, a nurse fighting the WTI incinerator in
East Liverpool, Ohio, heard about Browner’s new policies from a
reporter 24 hours before they were announced, moments after she
was released from jail Monday afternoon in Washington, D.C.
Swearingen had been confined in D.C. jail briefly for handcuffing
herself, along with 53 other citizens, to a mock incinerator
parked across the street from the White House. The citizens
handcuffed themselves to each other, then to a bright yellow
24-foot Greenpeace truck, affectionately known as “Big Bird.” For
the occasion, Big Bird was sporting a 16-foot black smokestack
which belched non-toxic white clouds throughout the “action.”
The sides of the incinerator-truck bore huge signs: “Clinton and
Gore: Keep Your Word, Shut Down the Incinerator.” Police could
not remove the truck from its embarrassing location on
Pennsylvania Avenue because Beth Knapp, 26, from East Liverpool,
and Greenpeace campaigner Steve Kretzmann, 29, were lying beneath
it, handcuffed around its axles. Swearingen and Beth Stenger, 30,
from East Liverpool had their right arms thrust through holes in
the side of the truck, handcuffed into pipes embedded within
steel-reinforced concrete blocks inside the truck. Their left
arms were handcuffed to a human chain of handcuffed citizens like
Billie Elmore, 64, from North Carolina and Sue Lieber, 35, from
Arizona, chanting “Al Gore, Read Your Book” and “For Our
Children, We Won’t Move.” The chain of citizens was dispatched
to jail after about an hour, but it took fire crews nearly 5
hours to cut Swearingen and the others loose from the truck,
jackhammering the concrete blocks into dust to expose their
handcuffs.
Police had to close the busy westbound lane of Pennsylvania
Avenue the better part of Monday. The media had a field day, and
the White House sent over a clerk to record how many people, from
which states, had handcuffed themselves to the truck.
Clearly the grass-roots movement for environmental justice has
got the President’s attention. The NEW YORK TIMES announced
EPA’s new waste policies on its front page this way Tuesday
morning: “Reacting to protests about the burning of toxic
chemical wastes in Ohio, Arkansas, and a dozen other states, the
Clinton Administration plans to bar the development of new
hazardous waste incinerators for 18 months.”
* * *
A moratorium on new incinerators! This was real news. I
received a last-minute invitation to EPA headquarters mid-day
Tuesday to hear Carol Browner explain her new policies to an
assembled group of incinerator operators. To my surprise, Carol
Browner was nowhere in sight. Instead, the meeting was conducted
by old-time EPA hacks Sylvia Lowrance and Richard Guimond. I was
dumbstruck. These two individuals were personally responsible
for many of the Reagan/Bush policies and programs that
beyond-the-beltway environmentalists have found most loathsome
and contemptible. (See RHWN #318 and #325.) It
was as if I had
been summoned to a briefing at the SEC (Securities and Exchange
Commission) to hear about strict new junk-bond policies only to
find Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken running the meeting. To the
assembled incinerator operators, Lowrance and Guimond spoke with
great earnestness about EPA’s new incinerator policies and how
they would fully protect public health and the environment. But
these two, and hundreds more like them, have spent the last
decade mouthing similar-sounding platitudes, which turned out to
be disingenuous pap, defending EPA’s previous policies which,
they have always insisted with equal earnestness, were fully
protective of human health and the environment. It has gotten so
bad that people in East Liverpool have a standing joke about all
EPA staff: “I know you’re lyin’ ’cause your lips are movin’.” So
what is going on? Can Carol Browner wrest control of this agency
from these hacks who for a decade have religiously committed EPA
to the benign neglect of environmental problems, or worse?
Events at EPA on Tuesday provided no reassurance. Even as
Browner’s new policies were being announced, one was put to the
test and it flunked embarrassingly. In a printed statement
Browner said she was taking five actions to “immediately
strengthen our program for the regulation of incinerators and
industrial furnaces that burn hazardous waste.” One immediate
action was to “improve public participation.” “Public
participation is one of the major cornerstones of EPA’s
environmental programs. EPA is committed to meaningful public
involvement in its permitting programs,” Browner’s documents said.
Outside the EPA auditorium where the new policies were being
announced, Terri Swearingen, just 24 hours out of the hoosegow,
arrives accompanied by Joe Thornton, mild-mannered co-author of
Greenpeace’s technical study of incineration, PLAYING WITH FIRE.
They sign in, peaceably and openly, to hear Browner announce her
new policies. Uniformed guards, on orders from higher-ups, throw
them out and bar the door. So much for participation by the
interested public. Does Ms. Browner have control of her agency?
Did she herself order the door barred or was her worthy new
“public participation” program sandbagged unbeknownst to her by
bureaucrats of the Lowrance/Guimond ilk, grotesque remnants of an
era when the agency was fully committed to secrecy and deception
in the service of polluters?
What of the new moratorium? Officially, it goes this way:
Currently there are 184 hazardous waste incinerators and 171 BIFs
(boilers and industrial furnaces, including cement kilns) burning
5 million tons of hazardous wastes each year. Fifteen
incinerators and 171 of the BIFs have “interim” but not “final”
permits.
The moratorium means that these 186 existing burners without
final permits will receive priority attention–they will be
subjected to new risk assessments to examine their effects on the
food chain and human health, and if the numbers turn out badly,
permit restrictions will be tightened and some might even lose
their permits. While this is going on, no “new” incinerators
will be licensed unless a “new” incinerator is better than an old
one it is intended to replace. That is the announced plan.
Unfortunately, there are numerous large loopholes.
** No “remedial” incinerators will be affected. No Superfund
cleanup incinerators and no “soil burners” are subject to this
moratorium. For them, it’s business as usual, and many of them
are among the dirtiest burners in America.
** EPA actually has authority to stop new incinerator permits in
only 4 states (Wyoming, Iowa, Alaska and Hawaii) and in four
other U.S.-controlled territories (Puerto Rico, the Virgin
Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa). In
the remaining 46 states, the states themselves have been given
authority to issue RCRA incinerator permits and Carol Browner has
no permit-stopping authority in those 46.
** Even in the four states where Carol Browner HAS authority,
Lowrance and Guimond told Tuesday’s meeting, new incinerators
that are “close” to having final permits will get a green light
despite the so-called moratorium. (What “close” means will be
decided on a case-by-case basis–which gives the Lowrance/Guimond
axis full discretion.)
Discretion is everything, as shown by the WTI incinerator which
failed its official “test burn” but was given a year-long
operating permit by Ohio officials anyway. Lowrance told me WTI
is a “fully permitted” facility, not subject to the moratorium.
Guimond told me it had been “fully permitted” in 1985 (4 years
before construction began) and will not be re-examined until
1995, when its permit comes up for renewal.
* * *
At a meeting May 6th in his office in Chicago, EPA region 5
Administrator Valdus Adamkus told a group of citizens that,
“Personally, in my heart, when I saw the location [of the WTI
incinerator], I was shocked.” He said he personally believed the
elementary school, 1100 feet from the WTI smoke stack, should be
bought out and moved by the incinerator owner, Swiss steel maker
Von Roll. It was a devastating admission from a civil servant
whose actions over the past 5 years have shown him to be fully
committed to the Lowrance/Guimond religion of industrial
promotion at any cost.
What about the homes where children live even less than 1100 feet
from the stack? Should they be moved too? Should the whole town
be moved to make the area safe for a dangerous incinerator? Mr.
Adamkus had no answers for these questions when Terri Swearingen
posed them, stabbing her finger in the air. But his damaging
admission–that WTI is too dangerous to be sited where it is–is
on the public record. How long can the President ignore this?
The vaunted incinerator moratorium made headlines, but the
substance is small. Other, more important, announcements
accompanied that one but got little press. EPA issued a “draft
strategy for combustion of hazardous waste” that promises a
completely fresh look at “how best to integrate source reduction
and waste combustion.” It’s a worthy goal, and my hat is off to
Carol Browner for putting it out. But events have convinced me
that until some major house cleaning takes place, EPA is still
not in shape to protect much besides polluters.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: incineration; carol browner; epa; policy;
hazardous waste; public participation; terri swearingen; east
liverpool, oh; civil disobedience; greenpeace; bill clinton; al
gore; beth knapp; steve kretzmann; beth stenger; billie elmore;
sue lieber; sylvia lowrance; richard guimond; joe thornton;
moratorium; superfund; coil burners; soil burning; valdus
adamkus; von roll; draft strategy for combustion of hazardous
waste;