Oil-soaked waste worries landfills’ neighbors
By LESLEY CLARK AND FRED TASKER – McClatchy Newspapers
08/01/10 MOUNT VERNON, Ala. — At a sprawling landfill some 50 miles from the oil-spotted coastline, trash bags brimming with tar balls, oil-soaked boom, sand and tangles of sea grass are dumped. Though workers in the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history wear protective gloves and coveralls as they labor across the Gulf Coast clearing beaches of oil, the mounds of debris they amass meet a pedestrian fate: burial in the same landfills that take in diapers, coffee grounds, burnt toast, yogurt containers, grass clippings and demolition debris. Since the first trucks began rolling in June, nearly 40,000 tons of “oily solids” and related debris have been sent to municipal landfills from Louisiana to Florida, sparking complaints – and in one case, enough consternation that BP decided to stop dumping in a landfill. “They tell us, ‘It’s not bad, it’s not hazardous,’ ” said Christopher Malloy, who borrowed a sign from his wife’s tanning salon to announce his opposition to using the Pecan Grove landfill in Mississippi’s Harrison County. “Oil in Gulf – Bad. Oil in landfill/wellwater not bad? What!,” reads the sign in his front yard, less than half a mile from the landfill where 1,300 tons had been disposed before BP – facing community pressure – agreed to curtail dumping. “What I worry about is when they come back and say, ‘Oops, we were wrong. So sorry,'” said Malloy, 39, a registered nurse who said he feared that toxic chemicals from the oil-soaked material could seep into his groundwater drinking supply. “Where does that leave us?” Under a 34-page waste management plan developed by the federal government, oily solid waste that reaches Gulf Coast beaches is bagged by BP contractors and transferred to area landfills by waste management giants: Heritage Environmental Services in Louisiana; Waste Management Inc., which is working from the Louisiana-Mississippi border east to the Ecofina River, southeast of Tallahassee, Fla.; and Republic Services, which covers Florida’s west coast, the Keys and Miami. Oily water is handled differently: mostly it’s processed for recovery. The EPA and each state’s environmental protection agency have signed off on the plans for the oil-smeared bulky waste. And the operators of the landfills insist that the BP garbage is not unprecedented and is suitable for the type of landfills they’ve selected: disposal sites that take household waste, as well as “special waste,” like contaminated soil. They note much of the waste is generated by the cleanup operation itself: soiled cleanup coveralls, gloves, sandwich wrappers and drink containers. Some 44 tons of waste materials have been recycled. “This waste is not that much different from what we’ve been accepting here every day,” said Matt East, a district manager with Waste Management, which runs the Pecan Grove site and the Mount Vernon landfill, Chastang. The BP waste at Chastang averages about 20 tons a day – which sounds staggering, East notes, until you realize it accounts for just 2 percent of the landfill’s daily intake. “The volume is minuscule, it really is,” East said. Waste Management estimates that the BP waste at Pecan Grove accounts for 6 percent of the landfill’s waste per day. The landfill, according to the state, accepts about 8,000 tons of trash a week. What worries environmentalists and some residents is that under EPA rules, waste from petroleum operations is exempt from hazardous-waste rules. But cleanup officials say they’re taking the precautionary measure of testing the BP waste shore-side for potential carcinogenic volatile substances including benzene, toluene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals like nickel. …
