By Peter Montague
A new strategy for disposal of hazardous materials is emerging in the US. After years of unsuccessful efforts to gain public acceptance of waste disposal in the oceans, in landfills and in incinerators, frustrated federal and state environmental officials now advocate spreading hazardous materials onto and into the land — dispersing dangerous toxins into the environment, leaving no fingerprints.
Typical projects include:
- For several years, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been using money earmarked for "recycling" to run experiments on placing toxic incinerator ash in roadbeds. In June 1996, toxic ash from the Warren County, NJ, municipal trash incinerator was mixed with asphalt and spread onto the streets of Elizabeth, a major city.
The "ash recycling" operation took place in the dead of night, but local activists managed to videotape it. DEP officials defended the operation, saying it was completely safe and exempt from all state and federal waste management laws because it was termed "recycling".
- The phosphate fertiliser industry is lobbying the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for permission to spread radioactively contaminated phosphogypsum onto roadbeds, or to use it as a fertiliser.
Phosphogypsum is a waste product of phosphate mining. By the year 2000, some 870 million cubic metres of radioactive phosphogypsum waste will be piled up, awaiting disposition. Radium has a half-life of 1600 years.
The phosphate fertiliser industry proposes to hide this radioactive material beneath roadways. The amount of phosphogypsum available in 2000 would require 1.3 million kilometres of highway — about one-fifth of all the roadways under state and federal control in the US. Radioactive waste consultant Marvin Resnikoff says such a program could cause thousands of cancers among unsuspecting citizens.
- The EPA is actively promoting the "beneficial use" of sewage sludge contaminated with industrial toxins. "Beneficial use" includes ploughing contaminated sludge into soil as fertiliser for crops intended for animal feed and human food. Many such projects are under way.
To assure the public that almost any sewage sludge poured on crops is "safe", EPA has made exceptionally creative use of risk assessment.
Sewage sludge is the mud-like material that remains after bacteria have digested the human wastes that flow from toilets into sewage treatment plants. If human wastes were the only thing entering the plant, then sewage sludge would contain only nutrients and should undoubtedly be returned to the land.
Unfortunately, most sewage treatment plants receive industrial toxic wastes, which are then mixed with the human wastes, creating a pernicious mixture of nutrients and industrial poisons. Furthermore, many US cities have sewage systems that mix storm water run-off with the sewage; every time a rainstorm scours these cities' streets, additional toxins are added to the sludge.
US industry currently uses roughly 70,000 different chemicals. Any of these may be found in sewage sludge. In 1988, EPA sampled sludge from 180 sewage treatment plants, but it looked only for 409 chemicals, without sampling for the roughly 69,600 others.
The "detection limits" for many organic chemicals were set so high that few were detected even though many were doubtlessly present. Of the original 409, EPA narrowed the list to only 28, which were labelled "of concern". From that list of 28, EPA then picked 10 metals that it would regulate: arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, selenium and zinc.
Sewage sludge regulations were published in the Federal Register of February 19, 1993. The regulations were based on a "comprehensive" risk assessment of a "highly exposed individual".
In other words, EPA asked how much of each of the 10 pollutants a highly exposed individual would be exposed to in various scenarios. If the risk assessment showed that this individual would not be harmed by a particular level of pollutants, EPA declared that level safe.
There are serious flaws in such a procedure. First, no risk assessment is ever "comprehensive" (especially not one based on only 10 out of 70,000 possible chemicals).
Secondly, EPA assumed that the individual did not have any other exposures to toxins besides the exposures created by the sewage sludge. Clearly, this is a false assumption because each of us is exposed to tobacco smoke, automobile exhaust, pharmaceutical preparations, pesticides and a host of other pollutants.
Third, and most importantly, concern for the "highly exposed individual" omits the major category of dangers inherent in "beneficial use" of sewage sludge: the slow but steady build-up of toxins in soils and in food chains that begin in the soils.
As Robert Goodland of the World Bank and waste consultant Abby Rockefeller have recently written, "Land application [of sludge] was implemented in Sweden in the early 1980s with disastrous results, which to date the US EPA seems to be ignoring. Such a practice must lead to accumulation in living tissues of heavy metals and persistent organic chemicals ... life forms are damaged as thousands of non-biocompatible substances move up the food chain."
It has been shown, for example, that sewage sludge applied to soils can increase the dioxin intake of humans eating beef (or cow's milk) produced from those soils.
The fundamental problem with sewage sludge is that its four main categories of potential pollutants — nutrients, pathogens, toxic organics and heavy metals — behave differently and cannot all be managed by any single kind of treatment.
- In Pennsylvania, state environmental officials are promoting the "beneficial use" of coal ash and incinerator ash to rehabilitate coal mines and strip-mined lands. A private firm reportedly supplies the ash, which it gets from "power plants, mid-sized industries, and paper manufacturers".
Professor Barry Sheetz of Pennsylvania State University, funded by the EPA, is providing the engineering know-how to harden the toxic ash into a cement-like material, which is then placed in mines and onto strip-mined land. The cement-like material is then covered with "synthetic soil" and left.
Professor Sheetz says he hopes this provides a permanent solution to the problem of acid mine drainage. More likely, it promises to provide a cheap solution for toxic wastes generated by coal-burning power plants and incinerators, saving these facilities large sums of money that would otherwise be spent on toxic waste disposal, and absolving them of liability because their wastes will never again be identifiable or traceable.
- In Washington state, the Seattle Times recently published a series which documented the disposal, nationwide, of industrial wastes on farmers' fields as "fertiliser".
The Times gave this typical example:
"A dark powder from two Oregon steel mills is poured from rail cars into the top of silos attached to Bay Zinc Co. under a federal permit to store hazardous waste.
"The powder, a toxic by-product of the steel making process, is taken out of the bottom of the silos as a raw material for fertilizer.
"'When it goes into our silo, it's a hazardous waste,' said Bay Zinc President Dick Camp. 'When it comes out of the silo, it's no longer regulated. The exact same material. Don't ask me why. That's the wisdom of the EPA.'"
[From Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly. Like Green Left Weekly, Rachel's is a non-profit publication which distributes information without charge on the internet and depends on the generosity of readers to survive. If you are able to help keep this valuable resource in existence, send your contribution to Environmental Research Foundation, PO Box 5036, Annapolis, Maryland 21403-7036, USA. In the United States, donations to ERF are tax deductible.]