When ‘Cleanup’ of Hazardous Messes Is a Misnomer

PLAINFIELD, N.H. —  Exxon hired workers to “clean up” the massive oil spill near Valdez, Alaska.

The government estimates that “cleaning up” the radioactive contamination at its weapons plants will cost more than $100 billion.

The states have submitted a list of 2,000 hazardous waste sites for priority “cleanup” under Superfund.

What does “clean up” mean? When the technicians scour oil-coated shores or go behind skull-bedecked warning fences, put on moon-suits and rev up their vacuum-cleaner trucks, what, exactly, is going on? What is left when they’re done? Where do they empty the vacuum-cleaner bags?

I have been asking those questions for months. The answers I get depend on what site and what hazardous substance. About the only firm conclusion I’ve come to is that “clean up” is rarely the right expression for what we do with toxic messes. “Wall off” might be more accurate, or “immobilize for awhile,” or “put somewhere else” or “hide.”

For example, the No. 1 site on the Superfund list, the Lipari Landfill in Pitman, N.J., is an eight-acre dump containing 3 million gallons of mixed chemicals. Fumes from the dump brought tears to the eyes of neighbors; a lake downstream occasionally turned purple or orange. The “cleanup” plan called for “containment.” The site was surrounded by an underground concrete wall and covered with a cap of clay and plastic. Chemicals continue to leach out in the ground water, and fumes still come through the cap. Now the site will be “recleaned.” The lake will be dredged, the bottom mud put somewhere else and the landfill will be flushed with water for seven years. The leachate from the flushing will be collected, treated and put somewhere else.

Capping, containment and putting somewhere else are the cheapest options, and the most common, as indicated by these Superfund case study summaries by the Office of Technology Assessment:

Chemical Control Corp., Elizabeth, N.J.: “Unproven solidification technology was selected to treat . . . highly contaminated subsurface soil. . . . The cleanup will leave untreated contamination on the site.”

Compass Industries, Tulsa County, Okla.: “Capping was called a cost-effective, permanent cleanup even though it does not provide permanent protection . . . . Treatment of contaminated ground water is not yet planned.”

Conservation Chemical Co., Kansas City, Mo.: “Pumping contaminated ground water and capping the site were chosen instead of . . . excavation and treatment of contaminated soil. Water treatment cannot remove all the diverse contaminants at the site.”

A report by the Hazardous Waste Treatment Council estimates that only about 8% of the remedies selected for Superfund cleanup use the maximum technical option required by law. And maximum treatment at its best is still not “cleaning up.”

In one of the best Superfund operations, electric equipment contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) abandoned in a warehouse in North Carolina was hauled to a special toxics facility in Alabama. The material was shredded, packaged, and sent to an incinerator in Chicago. In the flames, the PCBs became water vapor, carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and various chlorine compounds (causes of smog and stratospheric ozone depletion). The ash went back to Alabama to be put in landfills. Much cleaner, but not clean. And very expensive.

For some hazardous materials, “clean” is a possibility; for others it is not. Here is the best we can hope for:

-- Strong acids and bases can be neutralized.

-- Cyanides can be made harmless by chemical reaction.

-- Organic chemicals, including petroleum and pesticides, can be digested by natural organisms in a few cases. Some fall apart when exposed to sunlight. All can be broken down into water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and chlorine compounds, if carefully incinerated at the right temperatures.

-- Radioactive elements cannot be “cleaned up.” They must be strictly sequestered from wind, water and all life forms until they break down naturally according to their internal atomic clocks. Their half-lives (the time it takes them to decay to one-half their original quantity) vary--12.5 years for tritium, 33 years for cesium-137, 24,000 years for plutonium-239, 4.5 billion years for uranium-238.

-- Heavy metals like lead, cadmium and mercury last forever.

Even those “cleanup” efforts that are chemically possible are foiled if the toxic materials become dispersed in soil, carried off in water, absorbed into living things or wafted away in the air, or if they are mixed up together. Scooping the spilled oil out of the water and off the rocks of Prince William Sound is simply impossible.

I suggest that we stop using “clean up” when referring to hazardous materials and start facing the fact that we are risking irreversible damage and making uncleanable messes. Then, maybe, we’ll start handling dangerous chemicals with the seriousness they require.

One country is already doing that.

In low-lying Denmark, people do not live very far from their ground water. Whatever they dump onto the land ends up in their wells, and quickly. Back in 1970, before Love Canal, before Times Beach, before any hazardous waste disaster in their own land, the Danes were working out how to prevent such disasters. By 1975 they had instituted a hazardous-waste disposal system that is one of the best in the world.

The system is overseen by the central government, but its day-to-day operation is in the hands of cities and towns. Each municipality has a collection point to which households bring solvents, pesticides, used oils, anything they don’t want to find in their water. Hazardous materials can also be taken back to where they were sold--unused medicine to the pharmacy, half-empty paint cans to the paint store, dead batteries to the hardware store. The stores take them, separated and labeled, to the collection point.

From the collection point they are trucked to one of 21 transfer stations, none more than 30 miles away.

Every industry must tell the municipality within which it operates exactly what types and quantities of wastes it produces. (That’s a step we are just reaching now in the United States.) Unless the town or city gives a permit for on-site treatment, the industry must deliver its wastes--again separated and labeled--to the transfer station.

From the 21 transfer stations all materials go to a central facility called Kommunekemi, which maintains a professional staff that directs each type of waste to its proper treatment process.

About one-fourth of the materials arriving at Kommunekemi are relatively nontoxic and immobile. They are sent to a lined, monitored landfill.

Cyanides are destroyed by chemical reaction. Organic chemicals, solvents and oils are burned in high-temperature incinerators, which provide steam to heat 45% of the houses in the nearby town of Nyborg. The smokestacks are fitted with pollution-control devices. Air emissions are carefully monitored. Ash from the incinerator is sent to a separate, labeled compartment of the same landfill.

Heavy metals are also sent to separate and labeled landfill sites, with the intention of someday reclaiming them. They are covered regularly with lime, to maintain low acidity so they will not leach into ground water, and with a plastic membrane.

If you’re noticing the frequent repetition of the words separate and labeled here, that’s one of the keys to the Danish system. Noxious materials mixed together in a toxic brew are next to impossible to deal with. Separated materials can be treated with relative ease.

The Danish Environmental Protection Agency keeps a permanent inspector at Kommunekemi. There have been a few minor spills, broken drums and gas releases, none that have done measurable harm to the ground water or to human health. For a facility that handles 100,000 tons per year of hazardous materials, the safety record is outstanding.

Who pays for Kommunekemi? Municipalities and companies are charged by amount and type of waste; fees are high, not only to pay fully for handling, but to encourage reduction of waste. Chemists and engineers at Kommunekemi will consult with any industry or town about how to recycle materials or reduce wastes.

Danes are no more angels than the rest of us. Their system is neither perfect nor perfectly well accepted. They could recover and reuse more materials than they do. Despite the high disposal fee, the generation of toxic waste has been growing in Denmark by 17% per year. The people of Nyborg are resisting a needed expansion of Kommunekemi in classic “not in my back yard” fashion.

Still, compare their situation with ours. The United States has at least 10,000 mixed, unlabeled hazardous waste dumps. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 85% of our toxic wastes are still disposed of in an environmentally unsound way--12% directly into watercourses. We have a lot to learn from the principles of the Danish system.

Its principles are simple. Put information and control at the local level, with the people most likely to be impacted by improper disposal. Make the system easy for everyone to comply with. Do not tolerate non-compliance. Catch wastes immediately at the point of generation. Keep them separated. Hand them over to professionals. Charge a disposal fee high enough to ensure top-quality treatment. Encourage waste reduction.

In short, get serious about hazardous wastes. Seems like something almost any country could do.