Incinerator Ships : Toxic Waste --Are Seas the Answer?

Within the next three years, specially built ships laden with some of the most hazardous wastes known to man are expected to sail from West Coast ports and steer a course for the open sea 200 miles off the California coast.

Once there--far from the shipping lanes and sensitive marine life--the ships will come to a crawl and begin burning liquid hazardous wastes. That process will occur in incinerators so hot, advocates say, that virtually all that will be left are harmless carbon dioxide, water vapors and hydrochloric acid that is quickly neutralized by the natural alkalinity of the ocean.

Ocean incineration--long a fact of life in Europe--is just over the American horizon. And at a time when the environmental and economic costs of leaky hazardous waste dumps are soaring, ocean incineration is being heralded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the waste management industry as a major contribution toward coping with hazardous waste.

Proven Technology

“Incineration seems to be a proven technology,” Edward Johnson, director of the EPA’s Office of Water Regulations and Standards, told reporters recently. “It’s available right now and it actually . . . destroys organic wastes and there isn’t any demonstration that the operation of incinerators has posed or will pose any environmental or human health problems. Those are three big pluses as far as I’m concerned.”

Already, the EPA has allowed three test burns in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the Pacific. An ocean incineration site midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, 200 miles at sea from Point Arguello, has been recommended by a private consultant under contract to the EPA.

Yet, for all its apparent advantages, ocean incineration is stirring a storm of opposition as the EPA prepares to approve final regulations by early next year that will clear the way for full-scale ocean incineration off the U.S. mainland.

Growing Opposition

Fears of spills in the ports, collisions at sea, air pollution, degradation of the marine habitat and a belief that the search for more environmentally acceptable measures will be slowed have served to galvanize opposition in affected coastal and gulf states from officials, the tourist industry, fishermen and environmentalists.

Others, including lawmakers in Congress and state legislatures, are calling for additional study and have accused the EPA of pushing ahead despite a call by its own Science Advisory Board for further study of potential environmental side effects.

“We have already paid the price on land for ineffective disposal of hazardous waste. We cannot afford to make the same mistake at sea,” Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) said recently. She and Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) have each introduced legislation placing a three-year moratorium on the EPA initiative. A similar resolution has been approved by the California Legislature.

Even the EPA’s thoroughness in picking burn sites has been questioned. Recently, for example, it was discovered that an EPA-approved Atlantic burn site, 115 miles east of Atlantic City, was an important habitat of the endangered sperm whale and other marine mammals. The site is being re-evaluated.

Clearly, the EPA’s credibility in the aftermath of previous program failures and controversy is an issue.

Nevertheless, a confluence of events has focused increasing interest in ocean incineration.

Western European countries began incinerating wastes at sea as early as 1969, but the availability in the United States of what seemed to be plentiful land for dumping toxic wastes at bargain rates seemed to obviate the need for more costly ocean incineration.

But, that picture is changing rapidly.

Each year, 264 million metric tons of liquid and solid hazardous waste are generated in the United States. Meanwhile, new sites are needed for hundreds of additional tons of hazardous wastes dug up from environmentally hazardous Superfund sites, such as the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Riverside County.

At the same time, Congress has responded to growing public alarm over contaminated rivers, lakes and domestic water supplies by placing new restrictions on hazardous waste dumps. Amendments in 1984 to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act prohibit a number of wastes from being dumped at landfills and others are being phased out over the next three to five years.

Indeed, some segments of the waste management industry that are investing heavily in ocean incineration have warned that without it the nation will not only fail to make gains in the fight to cope with hazardous waste, but risk further environmental degradation.

“Failure to develop this would create a huge and rapidly growing reservoir of toxic chemicals on land. These chemicals will leak and be dumped, contaminating our ground water, lakes, streams, rivers and the sea,” William Y. Brown, director of marine affairs for Waste Management Inc., told an EPA hearing in San Francisco.

The rising cost of hazardous waste land disposal is forcing waste generators to look elsewhere. The EPA expects to spend as much as $22.7 billion to clean up 2,500 hazardous waste dumps. The congressional Office of Technology Assessment has estimated the cleanup cost at $100 billion over the next 50 years.

Liability Insurance

Faced with such staggering figures, hazardous waste generators are finding it next to impossible to buy adequate liability insurance to protect them from what have come to be called “toxic torts.” During the last seven months, most major carriers have either stopped offering such policies, or have severely reduced their coverage.

“Any corporate executive that isn’t worried about the liability question from these wastes is putting his company’s future on the line. They have got to worry more and more of finding destructive methods for wastes rather than simply trying to store them somewhere,” the EPA’s Johnson said.

Jon Hinck, national toxics campaign director of Greenpeace, which opposes ocean incineration, says there is no doubt that burning waste at sea is appealing to businesses facing growing exposure to long-term liability.

“It’s most attractive to the generators of waste because it is almost a liability-free disposal method. After an accident at sea, a cleanup is impossible and it’s almost impossible to determine the origin of toxic waste,” Hinck said.

Although the EPA views ocean incineration as an interim solution in the management of liquid hazardous waste, an agency report published last March concluded that “incineration on land or at sea is an environmentally sound treatment technology.”

Reduced to Vapors

Tests of incinerators, operating at temperatures of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit to 2,700 degrees, have indicated that they virtually destroy liquid hazardous wastes by reducing their volume and converting them to relatively harmless vapors. The EPA’s proposed regulations require a destruction efficiency of 99.95% for most liquid hazardous wastes. And for such particularly harmful wastes as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the EPA will require a destruction efficiency of 99.9999%.

Monitors on the incineration stacks are designed to automatically shut down disposal operations if the destruction efficiency falls below the prescribed percentages.

The amount of heavy metals permitted in the waste stream would be limited by EPA regulations to 200 parts per million.

“We do not anticipate a long-term impact (on marine life) with that concentration,” said Tudor Davies, director of the EPA’s Office of Marine and Estuarine Protection. Prohibited wastes would include high-level radioactive wastes and materials produced or used for radiological, chemical or biological warfare.

Proposed EPA regulations would also require that a representative from both the agency and the Coast Guard be on board during all incineration voyages to assure compliance with environmental and shipping laws.

The new incineration ships now in service in Europe or undergoing sea trials off the West Coast are built with double hulls and equipped with the latest navigation and collision avoidance technology.

Still, opposition to ocean incineration runs high.

More than 6,400 people worried about the effect of ocean incineration on the fishing and tourist industries turned out for public hearings in Brownsville, Tex., and Mobile, Ala., in 1983 when the EPA was considering issuing special permits to a waste management company to begin burning wastes.

Recently, at a more sparsely attended hearing in San Francisco, ocean incineration was opposed by every public official who testified, including a congresswoman, two state legislators, Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp and officials from San Francisco.

Passing the Cost

“It is quick, cheap and dirty and not the solution,” Hinck told The Times. “The generators of the waste are looking for the cheapest and quickest method for getting the waste off their hands. They’re passing the cost on to the environment and onto everybody,” Hinck added.

Of special concern are “products of incomplete combustion”--known as PICs. The EPA Science Advisory Board recommended further study of the PICs, and there are concerns elsewhere that PICs will contribute to the growing problem of acid fog and rain.

Some have warned that dioxins, among the most poisonous substances known to man, have been found to be byproducts of waste burned in municipal land incinerators. Davies, however, said temperatures in oceangoing and land-based hazardous waste incinerators are so hot as to preclude that danger.

While ocean incineration tests have shown that hazardous wastes can be destroyed with a 99.95% to 99.9999% efficiency, the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, while endorsing ocean incineration, has said that some tests measured performance of ocean incinerators only for short periods under ideal operating conditions. This finding has prompted concern among Greenpeace opponents as to whether the necessary high temperatures needed for destruction could be maintained in an incinerator on such an unstable platform as a ship on rolling seas.

Others are alarmed at the potential “devastating” contamination of the marine environment in the wake of a spill in a harbor or at sea.

No one, including the EPA and waste management industry, disputes that such a spill would be extremely serious. In fact, the EPA has stated that a major spill near the shore affecting an estuary “would destroy many organisms, including bottom-living forms, and contaminate the area for a substantial period of time.”

Quick Dilution

“A spill on the continental shelf could have a significant short-term impact on local organisms,” the EPA added, but said that such a spill in the open sea would quickly be diluted and that any long-term effect at the spill site would be “significantly reduced.”

But, the U.S. Coast Guard has testified that the chances of collisions and other accidents at sea are “extremely remote.”

The EPA’s Office of Policy, Planning and Evaluation two months ago said that there were no casualties or spills during 320 voyages made since 1972 by European incineration ships operating in the North Sea.

Incineration ships, with a capacity to burn 800,000 to 1.3 million gallons of liquid hazardous wastes, could each be making 15 to 20 voyages annually as early as next year in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico where burn sites have either been approved or are near approval.

Based on spills from other types of ships such as oil tankers, the EPA has estimated that the probability of a spill from one incinerator ship would be no more than one per 1,200 operating years.

The spill frequency would be even less for any one location. For example, the spill rate for the pier and harbor area is estimated to be about one per 3,000 operating years and for Mobile Bay, one per 10,000 operating years.

The statistics notwithstanding, concerns remain.

Serving to underscore those fears were the series of explosions that blew apart the petrochemical tanker Puerto Rican 16 miles off the Golden Gate last November, sending its stern to the bottom with more than a million gallons of oil.

Scenario of Devastation

“If one ship loaded with chlorinated organics were to founder in San Francisco Bay, the marine ecology, the recreational resource and fishery of the entire bay and much of Northern California could be devastated for years to come,” Sierra Club President Michele Perrault said.

“If such a vessel were to explode, like the Puerto Rican, the human health hazard to millions could easily exceed what happened at Bhopal,” she warned.

Nevertheless, the EPA considers ocean incineration as an environmentally sound alternative to hazardous waste dumps. It has a political advantage over land incineration, the EPA says, because it is easier to win public acceptance to burn waste 200 miles off the coast than to win approval to build an incinerator on land.

Many predict that within the next three to five years the nation’s incineration capacity must be increased from four to 10 times to deal with the shifts from landfills, underground injection wells and other environmentally suspect methods. Of the estimated 264 million metric tons of hazardous waste produced in the United States each year, an estimated 1.5 million metric tons is being incinerated.

Currently, only about half of the nation’s incineration capacity--all of it on shore--is being used to destroy liquid hazardous wastes. The only exception, but an important one, is PCBs. The capacity has already been reached.

Nationally, the EPA has estimated there are 30 to 50 commercial hazardous waste incinerators to which waste generators transport their toxins to be burned. Most of them are in the Southwest and Southeast. The only one in California is operated by the General Portland Cement Co. in Kern County.

There are another 240 to 290 incinerators operated at the various manufacturing plants where the wastes are produced. Nine of those are in California, including one at the Stauffer Chemical Co. in Carson.

Three incineration ships would be immediately available after EPA approval. Two of the ships are operated by Waste Management Inc. of Oak Brook, Ill., the same company that earlier this month was charged by the EPA with 129 violations of hazardous waste laws at its Kettleman Hills dump in Kings County.

Doubling of Capacity

A third ship--the Apollo--owned by At-Sea Incineration Inc. of Port Newark, N.J., is undergoing final certification in Tacoma, Wash. By putting them on line, the U.S. incineration capacity could be doubled overnight.

While a company’s long-term exposure to liability is believed to be considerably less when wastes are burned at sea, up-front costs are far greater. The cost of simply dumping the liquids in bulk at a hazardous waste dump--a practice that is no longer allowed--ran between $55 and $83 a ton in 1981. The cost of disposing of the same liquid by ocean incineration was estimated by the EPA at $200 to $250 a ton in 1981 dollars.

Today, incineration on land runs between $660 and $770 a ton and ocean incineration costs are expected to be comparable, according to Brown of Waste Management Inc.

“I know that philosophically the EPA agrees that waste reduction at the source is the best thing to do. If you don’t create it you don’t have to worry about it,” Johnson said.

“But, the realities of life are that over the next three to five years we have a heck of a lot of waste to get rid of.”

OCEAN TOXIC WASTE INCINERATION

Growing concern about leaking hazardous waste dumps, skyrocketing liability and tougher regualtory actions are forcing a search for new ways of disposing of hazardous waste. Many see ocean incineration as a solution.

Liquid hazardous wastes are trucked to ports where they are loaded onto incineration ships. The wastes are pumped into 8 to 12 separate steel holding tanks below the deck. The ship then heads to a burn site about 200 miles from the coast.

When the ship reaches its station, the liquid wastes are pumped from the steel container tanks at a rate of about 5,000 gallons per hour. To achieve combustion, the waste is injected into the base of preheated incineratiors with a large volume of forced air.

The wastes are burned at temperatiures of 2,000 degrees F. The resultant gases are then mixed in a large chamber and vented from the ship’s incineratior stacks. The EPA says the combustion process primarly to water, carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid.

The carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. The hydrochloric acid is in gaseous form but when cooled by the atmosphere quickly condenses and drops into the ocean where it is neutralized by the natural alkalinity of the sea.