Engineers Hope Prototype Vehicle Is Wave of the Future : Roving Treatment Plant Cleans Toxic Liquids

When longtime engineers Bob Speach and Quin Johnson heard that Los Angeles County was touting a plan for turning liquid toxic wastes into dry bits of rocklike material, they thought they were experiencing deja vu .

For five years, the two men have waded through governmental red tape and ignored skeptical colleagues, pursuing a dream they believed could help end the dumping of hazardous wastes in Southern California.

Like the county, they saw the value in turning liquid wastes into less-hazardous dry material, using a chemical process long practiced throughout Denmark and Germany that removes metals and other toxins from wastewater. The process also has been used on a limited basis by U.S. industries.

Federal experts say the dry residue can be incinerated or buried, posing far fewer hazards than toxic liquids dumped into a landfill.

But Speach and Johnson say they have come up with an even better idea.

Instead of building treatment centers throughout the county--to which dozens of trucks would transport hazardous liquids along streets and freeways each day--they have invented what county officials say is the county’s first treatment plant on wheels.

‘It’s So Simple’

“We don’t haul the waste to the plant like the county has proposed,” Speach said. “We bring the treatment plant to the waste.

“No spills, no traffic hazards. It’s so simple, it’s beautiful.”

Hazardous-waste trucks from Los Angeles County are expected to log 45,000 miles on freeways and streets this year, according to a report by the Southern California Hazardous Waste Management Project, a coalition of local government groups.

Mobile treatment vans could alleviate that problem, and would provide an alternative to thousands of small companies that cannot afford their own treatment plants. Those companies must hire trucks to haul their wastes to toxic dumps in Casmalia and Kettleman Hills, both about 200 miles north of Los Angeles.

Small waste generators, estimated to number more than 15,000 in Southern California, contributed a substantial share to the 560,000 tons of toxic wastes shipped from Los Angeles County to those and other disposal sites last year, according to state and county sanitation officials.

But new federal regulations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act will phase out land dumping of most hazardous wastes in the next five years, forcing waste generators to find other disposal methods, county and state officials say.

As a result, said Kieran Bergin, county Sanitation Districts engineer, “everybody is scrambling to find some alternative to hauling it off. We think the only real alternative is treatment.”

In fact, Los Angeles County is pursuing a pilot project to build a regional system of toxic waste treatment plants in industrial sectors, where liquids would be reduced to dry cakes for burial in a clay-fortified landfill in the desert.

National Attention

The plan, recently praised by officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency as “precedent-setting,” has received national attention because many environmental experts and scientists believe such systems will soon replace traditional land disposal of toxic wastes.

Speach, whose Rancho Dominguez company, Environmental Services Division, hopes to have 19 more mobile vans operating in 1986, said that since word got around about his company’s mobile van, “the phones have been ringing off the hook from people asking us to come out and treat their stuff.”

The company has treated waste water at 20 businesses since it began testing the van in the field a few months ago, and now Environmental Services is awaiting word on $1 million in private financing for a fleet of vans.

Speach said that although the first van cost about $300,000 to design, develop and “get the bugs out,” the rest of the vehicles should cost a fraction of that amount. Once the fleet is operating, he said, the company hopes to turn a profit within a few years.

Speach’s and Johnson’s prototype treatment plant is squeezed--just barely--inside a 22-foot-long truck.

“It was quite an achievement,” said Johnson, who spent the better part of the last five years designing and refining a plant that would fit into the truck.

“Some guys at one company were so interested in the insides of my van that I had to make sure they weren’t memorizing everything,” said Johnson. “We are working with patent attorneys to protect the design.”

Crystal-Clear Water

The mobile plant can transform 5,000 gallons of toxic metal-laden or acid-tainted water into colorful chunks of solid material in about eight hours. The residue amounts to about 10% of the original bulk and is taken to a landfill that accepts toxic wastes. The leftover water is crystal clear and nontoxic, with only traces of metal remaining.

If the mobile van concept gains acceptance, Speach said, his company hopes to give the large waste haulers who dominate the industry “a real run for their money.”

Speach said that 70 mobile treatment vans could take care of about half of the county’s 560,000 tons of waste that is now hauled to disposal sites. The remaining wastes include complex organic toxins such as PCBs and solvents, which the vans cannot handle.

However, the vans can treat most wastewater from companies that do metal finishing, electronic manufacturing, water softening and other processes that create metal or acid-tainted wastewater, Johnson said. The leftover water, which Speach said is 99% pure, is legally dumped into the sewers under permits authorized by the cities and counties in which they have operated.

Speach was recently invited to explain his concept to the California Circuits Assn., whose 300 electronics company members generate toxic wastes during production of circuit boards.

“Everyone is beginning to realize that landfill dumping is Stone-Age,” Speach said. “Nobody wants to find out that they have been dumping into another Love Canal, and that they have to pay to clean it up.”

County, state and EPA officials are pushing for a shift from land disposal to chemical treatment of toxic wastes, which produces a dry residue of less-toxic metal or chemicals that can be buried or burned far more safely than liquids.

However, residents in areas being studied for clay-fortified landfill sites have argued that dried residues might still get wet and leak toxins. In addition, the South Coast Air Quality Management District has expressed concern that incinerators for toxic wastes will generate moderate levels of nitrogen dioxide pollutants.

Dumping of liquids, most environmental experts and scientists agree, has contaminated the soil and ground water at landfills throughout California.

‘Thing of the Past’

The current widespread practice of dumping moist, largely untreated wastes in landfills and surface ponds “is a thing of the past,” said Bergin, the Sanitation Districts engineer who is spearheading the county’s shift to treatment of wastes.

Bergin called the mobile van concept “a sound one that could certainly service a lot of the industry.”

“It has several advantages, including the idea that there’s no transportation, and the fact that the small companies would really be able to use this.”

“You take a guy who generates only about 20 or 30 tons of waste a year, that’s just two or three truckloads. But multiply two or three truckloads by all those little companies out there and you’ve got quite an impact in this county.”

Both Orange County and the city of Los Angeles have issued permits to the firm, and the van is operating under a research and development permit from the state Department of Health Services, which allows prototypes to be put into action.

However, Los Angeles County has delayed issuing an operating permit for the firm until several questions are ironed out.

“We don’t intend to run out and watch them every time they go out, but we want to be sure they operate under some restrictions that ensure safety,” said Carl Sjoberg, a county engineer.

“We know they’re a little mad at us for not jumping on their idea, but we’ve been looking at it for two years now and we want to be sure everything works.”

For example, Sjoberg said, because it is a mobile plant, “we want it to be confined to the site of the business it is serving, and not parked out on the street with a lot of hoses running across the pavement.”

But, he said, if safety and operational questions can be answered, “we certainly won’t hold them up. We support anything that works that can help alleviate the toxic waste problem. “

Spot Checks

City and county sanitation officials both said the firm will be monitored on a spot-check basis, without warning, to ensure that it is following local and federal wastewater dumping laws.

Speach and Johnson, both engineers, have been designing a variety of wastewater treatment systems for 12 years, launching their business after the Clean Water Act in the mid-1970s required industries to pre-treat waste before dumping it into sewers. The two men began building small treatment plants for medium-sized companies but found that many companies could not afford the $50,000 to $200,000 cost. Five years ago they struck upon the idea of a mobile plant.

The mobile van has serviced 20 companies from the San Fernando Valley to Orange County that otherwise would have sent their liquids to a toxic dump site, Speach said.

Mike Murray, of Diceon Electronics in Irvine, said he hired Environmental Services to treat nitric acid waste that had been used to strip copper plating from circuit board equipment.

“We paid the equivalent of what we were paying . . . to haul it away to Kettleman--about 60 cents a gallon,” Murray said.

“We know that treatment of toxic waste will soon be at or below the cost of hauling, and that’s why we checked it out.”

Built Own Plant

Murray said his company was happy with the results, but later decided to build its own wastewater treatment plant on-site at a cost of $50,000 to $100,000.

“We’re a pretty big company, generating about 1,000 gallons a week, and we figured this would be a great way to stay one step ahead of the Environmental Protection Agency,” Murray said. “It’s not going to be too long before they won’t let you haul the stuff away.”

Peter Martin, operator of Martin Metal Finishing in Lynwood, said his company hired Environmental Services and found the treatment “worked out excellent, but it cost more than we pay to have it hauled away.”

Despite the higher cost, Martin said, “this is something we wanted to try because we feel it will be very convenient for the future.”

He said companies like his will continue to hire trucks to haul wastes to landfills “as long as that is economically feasible, but you can’t say how long that might be.

“We think if enough of these treatment (vans) are operating, the price will go down, just like if you buy in quantity, the price goes down. We will be watching to see when that happens.”