=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #164
—January 17, 1990—
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
==========
The Back issues and Index
are available
here.
The official RACHEL archive is here.
It’s updated constantly.
To subscribe, send E-mail to rachel-
weekly-
request@world.std.com
with the single word SUBSCRIBE in the message. It’s free.
===Previous Issue==========================================Next Issue===
THE LANDFILLERS’ NEW PLAN: MEGAFILLS.
As long as there have been humans, there have been garbage dumps.
Archaeologists call dumps “midden heaps” and sift through them
meticulously, searching for the meaning of life–or at least
trying to understand what it means to be human.
For thousands upon thousand of years, humans have thrown their
detritus into holes in the ground not far from home. And for
thousands of years, this made sense. Soil contains an immense
number of tiny creatures who spend their time breaking down
organic materials into their original constituents. (These
creatures make up the “detritus food chain” and they are
essential to the wellbeing of the planet, though we rarely hear
much about them–after all they are so small they are invisible,
and who likes to discuss detritus-eaters anyway?) Bury a banana
peel or a dead squirrel for a month or two and they begin to lose
form and substance, recycled by members of the detritus food
chain back into their original inorganic constituents (oxygen,
nitrogen, calcium and so forth). Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Yes, shallow land burial (a dump) makes good sense for nontoxic
materials.
But now dumps have become dangerous because many of the things we
throw into them are toxic. Starting about the time of World War
II, the nature of our economy changed. We began to turn our backs
on the old raw materials–cotton, wood, paper, leather, glass,
and iron–and we began substituting new raw materials. Many of
the new materials are toxic. Because many of these materials do
not occur in nature, the detritus food chain has never developed
any members who lunch on them, so the new materials persist in
the environment, unable to be broken down efficiently.
As a consequence, if you expose a modern dump (called a landfill)
to rain, then collect the rain water that has filtered through
the garbage (it’s now called “leachate”), you will find that the
leachate from a solid waste landfill has about the same toxicity
as the leachate from a landfill specially designated for toxic
industrial chemicals (a “hazardous waste” landfill). (See RHWN #90.) This
should not surprise us. There is one stream of raw
materials coming in the front door of a factory. Inside the
factory, manufacturing occurs. Two streams of materials leave the
factory–one is “hazardous waste” and one is “product,” but they
are both made from the same stream of raw materials that came in
the front door. After the “products” are used, they are discarded
into a “municipal solid waste landfill.” Leachate from each type
of dump–municipal waste vs. hazardous waste–is about equally
toxic; no surprise.
For nearly 40 years after World War II, people buried toxic
materials in the ground. Make no mistake–industrial chemists
knew what they were doing; they knew it was dangerous (see RHWN #97), but
it was cheap, and America was on a blind binge of
growth and affluence. The modern formula for success became,
“Haste plus waste makes profit.” And let the devil take the
hindmost. Then Love Canal occurred. Suddenly within about five
years everyone with a shred of sense came to realize that
landfilling the byproducts of the modern economy is certain to
cause enormous environmental damage and human misery. In 1980,
Congress passed the Superfund law to begin to clean up the past
40 years’ abuse. Then Congress began to ban landfilling of the
most dangerous materials. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) funded studies showing that 86% of all the landfills they
studied had actually contaminated groundwater. (See RHWN #71.)
Combining these studies with the fundamental principles that
underpin physics and chemistry (for example, gravity and the
second law of thermodynamics), EPA began saying in the FEDERAL
REGISTER that there is good reason to believe that, sooner or
later, all landfills will leak, and will contaminate the local
environment. (See RHWN #37.) Even more importantly, citizens
across the nation took to the streets to prevent the siting of
new landfills. The movement for environmental justice was born.
While this scientific and common sense opposition to landfilling
was growing, a counter-current was developing among those who
make billions of dollars burying poisons in the ground–the waste
hauling industry.
During the ’70s and ’80s, the waste hauling industry was being
transformed from thousands of unorganized local haulers into a
nationwide network dominated by a few corporations who learned
their business techniques from organized crime. (See RHWN #40.) A
few visionary and ruthless business leaders saw that citizen
opposition to new landfills created a fabulous opportunity. Their
initial tactic was to purchase every landfill in sight. The fact
that these landfills were leaking dangerous materials into the
local environment might seem to be a serious liability, but the
waste haulers saw that this was actually an opportunity. The
large firms organized themselves into hundreds of small
subsidiary corporations, no one of them holding much capital.
Then each small firm bought one or two leaking landfills, went to
local government, and said, “We own this landfill, which is
leaking poisons into your water supplies. If you allow us to
expand it, we will be able to make money and we will use part of
the money to contain the poisons and do our best to clean up past
damage. If you will not allow us to expand it, we will be forced
to declare bankruptcy and leave you to clean up the poisons.” The
federal Superfund cleanup program has shown that the average cost
of cleaning up a leaking landfill is $25 million, so most local
governments can’t think about financing a cleanup themselves.
Never mind that the expanded landfill will eventually leak,
making the local problem much worse, and that the owner of the
landfill will then declare bankruptcy and skip town; for people
worried about the short term only (i.e., politicians), the
proposal to clean up the site in return for a license to expand
is an offer they can’t refuse. Once the giant waste haulers had
hundreds of landfills under their control, they began to form
alliances with garbage incinerator companies; the incinerators
can be sited on, or very near, the landfill sites, thus avoiding
the troublesome problem of siting a new landfill to handle all
that incinerator ash, which is laced with toxic metals (see RHWN #92). It’s
perfect–especially if the Washingtonbased
environmental groups and Congress will cooperate to strip
incinerator ash of its “hazardous” label. (See RHWN #85.) Then
the toxic ash can be put into the local landfill and no one has
any grounds for objection.
Thus the country now finds itself in the throes of a major
struggle that will play itself during the 1990s. Those scientists
and regulatory officials who haven’t been bought by the giant
waste haulers plainly state that all landfills leak and can be
expected to poison local water supplies. Yet the waste haulers
have developed what amounts to a political movement to a maintain
landfilling as the nation’s principal means of waste disposal.
Local people are tipping the balance in this struggle. The
nationwide movement opposing new landfills continues to gain
strength, and it is taking a terrible toll on the waste haulers’
profits. The waste haulers are having to defend themselves at
every turn; this is expensive, it creates bad publicity, and it’s
a nuisance. Their goal is to make money by burying dangerous
wastes in the ground, not to fight with citizens. So now they
have developed a new strategy designed to minimize siting
battles. They have formed an alliance with the nation’s railroads
to develop a few giant landfills, each covering one thousand to
40,000 acres, which will accept wastes from cities a thousand (or
more) miles away. The term being used to describe these giant new
landfills is “megafill.”
Only one megafill is operating today–BFI’s 880-acre dump near
Poland, Ohio. Another megafill on the drawing boards is the
8,300-acre Eagle Mountain Project, currently seeking permits to
operate in the desert 200 miles east of Los Angeles. It is
designed to accept 20,000 tons of trash each day for 100 years.
If successful, it’s owner will only have to fight a siting battle
once every century.
The 2782-acre Gallatin National landfill in Fairview, Illinois,
and the 1200-acre site near Edgemont, South Dakota, are other
examples of burgeoning megafills. The two largest proposals are
near Lordsburg, New Mexico (23,480 acres), and in Schuyler
County, Missouri (40,000 acres). Railroads are involved in each
proposal.
Trains make sense for large garbage operations. One train can
carry 4000 tons, about the same amount carried by 400 18-wheel
semi-trailer trucks. Conrail now hauls about 700 tons of garbage
a day, earning roughly $4 million per year. Within 10 years they
expect their earnings from this source to hit $100 million.
Soon the deserts of the southwest and prairie hillocks of the
midwest may be graced by megafills yawning open to swallow the
toxic residues of New Jersey and New York. After all, it’s got to
go somewhere, doesn’t it? Or does it? That’s the central
question, and we’ll have an answer during the 1990s.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: landfilling; megafills;