Toxic Wastes Plan to Avoid Spills Pushed

With support from the Environmental Protection Agency, Los Angeles County is pushing to become the first region in the country to adopt a European system for treating and burying toxic wastes that proponents claim will virtually eliminate chances of ground water and soil contamination.

The treatment system turns the mostly liquid wastes into dry ash and rock-like materials before they are buried.

“We are talking about an entirely new system from top to bottom,” said Kierin Bergin, engineer for the 24-unit Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. “No more reliance on a big moist dump site that may or may not leak.”

Face a Huge Task

County officials, who are searching for treatment and burial sites, acknowledge that they face a huge task selling the public and industry on the innovative plan, which has been endorsed in principle by the Board of Supervisors.

The county is responding to several factors: a critical shortage of disposal space caused by closures of conventional landfills that have filled up or leaked, intense community opposition to siting new ones and new federal regulations that require the phasing out of traditional landfill dumping over the next five years.

The proposed system--for which no price has been set--would extensively treat hazardous wastes at several urban plants. The resulting dry, compact residue would be entombed in a remote “residuals repository”--actually a landfill capped with clay.

Bergin said the new system’s advantage will be particularly evident in the event of a spill. “Now when there’s a spill, you have to call out people in moon suits,” he said. “Ours, you could probably clean up with a broom and a shovel.”

The treatment and disposal system would be the largest of its kind in the world, patterned after smaller systems used for 10 years in Denmark and eight years in Germany that have not contaminated the soil or ground water, county officials said.

The project is being promoted by key Environmental Protection Agency officials who view it as a national model for a new era of hazardous waste disposal.

EPA officials said far-reaching 1984 amendments to the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act--which ban land disposal of all liquids and will prohibit land disposal of most solid hazardous wastes over the next five years--have given strong impetus to the Los Angeles project.

Precedent in L.A.

“Congress has said traditional land disposal must stop, and things are just going to get tighter and tighter,” said John Skinner, director of the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste.

“Los Angeles is precedent-setting in what it is doing, and others are going to have to follow their lead,” Skinner said.

Experts agree that the project faces several major obstacles.

- Each of about half a dozen cities and communities within the county, as yet unnamed, would have to agree to accept a hazardous waste treatment plant. Persuading the community to accept it “is absolutely essential to our success,” said county Supervisor Deane Dana, a proponent.

- Public opposition to landfills, fueled by contamination at such sites as Riverside County’s Stringfellow acid pits and Los Angeles County’s BKK landfill, would have to be overcome. Since 1981, several proposals for hazardous waste treatment and disposal facilities in the county have been shot down, largely by community opposition. With the closure of BKK last year, Los Angeles County has no toxic waste disposal sites left. As a result, 560,000 tons of hazardous waste per year are being hauled about 200 miles north of Los Angeles for disposal, county officials said.

- The waste industry will have to be won over. The industry has been extremely reluctant to build expensive treatment facilities such as those in Germany and Denmark because they cannot compete with cheaper dumping alternatives still available in California. Industry leaders say they want assurances that government is going to phase out the cheaper alternatives before they invest in treatment plants.

‘Should Be Applauded’

Because of the politically delicate task ahead of them, David Morell, senior policy analyst at the EPA’s San Francisco regional headquarters, said the county Board of Supervisors “should be applauded for biting a big political bullet.”

“It’s really kind of stunning that they have come forward on an issue this volatile,” Morell said. “We at the EPA are going to do everything we can to make it happen.”

Predictably, some criticism of the plan has already emerged.

Skeptical residents in Hi Vista, an Antelope Valley community near a site that has been investigated for use as a residuals repository, have showered the county with protests.

‘Very Promising’

County officials said initial geological borings of the remote site have shown the area is underlain by solid rock, making it “very promising” for a repository.

But Jo Anne Darcy, an aide to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, said many residents “are dead-set against the repository at this point.”

“The public doesn’t understand what a residual repository is yet,” she said, “and there’s going to have to be a lot of public education before the uproar goes away.”

Local industry leaders, who have formed the Private Sector Coalition in Los Angeles to explore alternative waste disposal methods, also have expressed some reservations about the project.

Industry leaders said the state and the EPA will have to crack down on the cheap alternatives to treatment that are still available before industry will make a big commitment to build treatment plants.

Paul Abernathy, regional development manager for Chemical Waste Management Inc., one of the largest waste firms in the nation, said that inexpensive dumping in deep injection wells and old surface ponds is still practiced in California and that some companies ship their wastes to other states.

“I know of companies that send the stuff to cheap old missile silos in Idaho, and they aren’t going to pay me a fortune for treatment when they have those alternatives,” he said.

Abernathy said, however, that if the state and the EPA crack down on cheap methods of disposal, most of which are supposed to be phased out under the new federal laws, “we would basically support the county’s approach.

“We . . . will probably be one of several large companies who demonstrates interest and makes a financial commitment” if that occurs, he said.

Similarly, Gloria McGregor, chief of staff for the Private Sector Coalition, said the group, made up of leaders from 30 to 40 major industries and waste companies, “is very interested in the county’s proposal.”

Expressed ‘Great Hopes’

She said the group met in Los Angeles last Wednesday for a presentation on the regional treatment system and “expressed great hopes” that the county can find appropriate sites for the project.

Industry leaders are seeking alternatives to dumping partly because of increasing fears of huge future liabilities if sites they have used for dumping are found to be leaking, federal and county experts said.

“Love Canal’s waste probably would have cost $4 million to treat and safely dispose of in the way we are proposing,” said the sanitation districts’ Bergin.

“But digging it out now is costing tens of millions, and industry is learning that it’s really a bad bargain not to do it right the first time,” he said.

If industry and the public are receptive, members of the county Board of Supervisors said, they hope to select a repository site and begin applying for state permits for it within a year. The board and the sanitation districts are conducting a joint $500,000 study to identify remote sites for a residuals repository, possibly to be owned by the county. At the same time, officials are “very close” to unveiling a list of possible urban sites for the multimillion-dollar system of treatment plants, which the county hopes would be built and operated by private industry, Bergin said.