Leaders in Niagara Falls Try to Stem Flow of Toxic Waste

Beneath a series of grassy hills along Niagara Falls Boulevard--odd landforms in this monotonously flat cityscape--are PCB-fouled transformers from Pennsylvania, chemically poisoned earth from Michigan and myriad byproducts from more than 2,000 factories across America.

This is one of the nation’s largest active waste sites, literally a waste dump’s waste dump, the final resting place of poisons dug up under the federal Superfund cleanup program, as well as tons of industrial refuse generated annually by the makers of cars, chemicals, baby food, beer.

Source of Alarm

The 360-acre CECOS International landfill, or Mount CECOS, as locals are fond of calling it, was the source of some alarm recently when an Environmental Protection Agency scientist reported that the site may be leaking into ground water seeping toward nearby homes.

Although other state and federal environmental officials discounted the possibility of a leak from CECOS, suggesting that any contamination was more likely coming from an adjacent site that E.I. DuPont de Nemours Co. is voluntarily cleaning up, the report inevitably evoked visions of Love Canal--the notorious toxic waste disaster area just two miles away.

Along the expressway, the local rage has been expressed in the form of graffiti: “CECOS KILLS,” in six-foot red letters.

The fact that CECOS is supposed to be part of the solution to problems like Love Canal made the idea of a leak all the more outrageous to local officials.

Now, civic leaders are seeking to stem the flow of the nation’s waste to their city, which was a natural location for such a dump because of the dozens of waste-producing industries clustered along the hydroelectricity-generating Niagara River, and because the CECOS site was previously used by an acetylene company that left behind 70 acres of lime--perfect for burying chemicals.

The controversy at CECOS’s Niagara Falls site, and its site in Ohio, where state officials said contaminated water was illegally flushed into a creek, prompted renewed discussions about the best way to clean up the millions of tons of hazardous wastes abandoned over the years and how to dispose of more than 200 million tons of new solid and liquid waste produced annually.

Environmental officials agree that land burial is not the best long-term answer, but right now it is the only practical solution.

CECOS people, proud of their state-of-the-art containment technology, have tried to reassure the public that theirs is a safe and scientific operation.

“A lot of people seem to think all we do is dig a hole, wherever we happen to feel like digging that day, and throw the stuff in,” says Craig Frost, an environmental technician at the site. “It’s a lot more scientific than that.”

Steel Drums Covered

Frost, wearing safety goggles and a Kelly-green hardhat bearing the CECOS logo of a chemical flask, water droplet and spruce tree, stood on a wooden platform at the brink of a four-acre chasm lined with 10 feet of compacted clay and 80-mil polyethylene plastic--about twice the thickness of a phonograph record.

Below, workers in protective coveralls unloaded crates from a tractor trailer in one part of the pit, while earth-movers covered rows of steel drums in another section. Red clay berms delineated “subcells” within the landfill, where different types of waste were buried under a patchwork of selected cover materials--fly ash; diatomaceous (chalk-like) earth; graded and filtered lime over acid sludges; activated carbon over organic materials; pale green ferrous sulfate over cyanide-containing plating sludge.

“We keep a three-dimensional chart so that we know, within three feet, where every drum, every load of bulk material is buried,” said Thomas L. Moran, CECOS’s vice president for corporate communications. Contrary to common belief, no liquids are buried, he said. Drums are drained and filled with inert, absorbent material like diatomaceous earth, and the liquid contents are sent to recycling plants, the CECOS water-treatment plant, or, in the case of PCBs--polychlorinated biphenyls--to an incineration plant in El Dorado, Ark.

The landfill is built up from the ground, rather than dug into it. A drainage system collects leachate--rainwater that falls into the open pit--which is pumped to the on-site water treatment plant. After a cell is filled, it is sealed with a “cap” of clay topped with plastic, covered with topsoil and planted with grass to become a 50-foot-high mound that will be monitored for 30 years through a series of ground water testing wells.

For this elaborate disposal service, companies pay a high price. Charges range from $30 to $250 per drum of waste and $30 to $200 per ton of bulk material, depending on the substance, says Mike Scarano of CECOS Environmental Inc., which handles Superfund cleanup contracts.

CECOS was awarded the bid to do the Superfund cleanup of the abandoned Lehigh Electric plant in Old Forge, Pa. It cost $2.5 million to clean up the four-acre, PCB-contaminated site, Scarano says. The site preparation--installing truck-washing stations, showers, safety trailers, analytical equipment--took two months of the three-month cleanup.

Technicians in sealed coveralls, gloves, boots and helmets flushed PCB oil from transformers for shipment to the ENSCO incineration plant in Arkansas. Front-end loaders excavated 6,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil to be shipped in polyethylene-lined trucks to Niagara Falls.

More commonly, toxic materials are not actually removed from cleanup sites; they are simply “contained.” Such was the case at Love Canal, where more than 200 chemical compounds were detected in 21,800 tons of waste buried there. The contaminants were surrounded by a leachate-collection system and covered with a clay and plastic cap. Contaminated water is pumped to a treatment plant, where chemicals bind to activated charcoal filters that are later buried at the CECOS landfill at a cost of $3,500 apiece.

“When you talk about hazardous waste cleanup, in most cases you’re talking containment,” says Norman Nosenchuck, the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s solid waste program director. “There are thousands of sites around the country, and most will be contained. You could dig it up, but where are you going to put it?”

The volume of waste at Love Canal is small compared to some sites. The reason it was such a horror story was that homes, and an elementary school, were built on it. In another part of Niagara Falls, 80,000 tons of waste are buried in the Hyde Park landfill, and 65,000 tons in a site called the S-Area. Occidental Chemical Corp., after years of litigation, has agreed to a cleanup plan that includes capping the sites and surrounding them with an impervious clay wall.

In another agreement worked out by Nosenchuck’s department, the General Electric Co. this past summer built a wall of bentonite clay one foot thick and 110 feet down to the subterranean clay layer to enclose a PCB-contaminated site in Moreau, north of Albany.

Methods of destroying dioxin, considered one of the most poisonous man-made substances, are still under development. Until an acceptable technology is available, thousands of gallons of dioxin sludge and hundreds of barrels of sediment are being stored at Love Canal.

“My personal belief is that the best solution would be a portable technology that you take to the site and destroy the material at extremely high temperature,” Nosenchuck says.

One such thermal destruction process is being tested in Times Beach, Mo., to clean up dioxin. The J.M. Huber Corp. of Borger, Tex., is using a thermal reactor in Times Beach and in Texas to treat dioxin-contaminated soil by rapidly heating it to 4,000 degrees to 5,000 degrees.

RoTech Inc., of Cincinnati, Ohio, has developed a waste incineration process using a rotating cylinder, designed to handle more than 100 tons of waste a day.

Another heat treatment, called a “plasma arc system,” is being tested by Pyrolysis Systems Inc. of Welland, Ontario, as a possible means of destroying the sludge from the leachate treatment plant, under a contract with New York state and the federal government. The system uses electricity to destroy wastes at extremely high temperatures and can be shipped by truck to a cleanup site.

New York state requires that before it can get an operating permit, a landfill operator must develop, and update annually, a 10-year plan for developing new waste-destruction technologies. CECOS is working on 16 new treatment processes. One will produce fuel from waste residues; another oxidizes toxic organic materials such as PCBs, dioxin and pesticides to water and inorganic salts.

Lee M. Thomas, who was administrator of the EPA’s waste programs before his recent appointment to head the agency, has acknowledged that landfills are an inadequate long-range solution to the toxic waste problem, but he says industry is starting to work on finding alternatives.

“By and large, the best solution (for cleaning up dumps) would be to exhume the material and destroy it,” says Nosenchuck. “It makes no sense to dig it up from one site and bury it somewhere else--everything leaks at some point, no matter how careful you are to collect and treat the leachates, have double liners, even have triple liners at tremendous cost.

“The ultimate answer is not putting waste in the ground, but developing the technology to destroy it, and then forcing industry to use that technology. At the same time, the public will have to understand that the cost of a product will include the cost of destroying the waste.”