Fluff, ‘Bureaucratic Ping-Pong’ Give Car Shredders Headaches

For two years Ramon Corona has fretted about his “fluff pile,” the gloomy slag heap of ground-up upholstery, floor mats, batteries and other debris left over from shredding crushed cars at his Pacific Steel Co. in National City.

First, state health officials decided fluff was hazardous. So environmental officials stopped allowing shredders like Corona to dump it in city or county landfills. When officials then designated special landfills to solve the problem, the landfill operators balked.

Now Corona finds himself in the midst of “bureaucratic Ping-Pong,” in the words of one state health official. His fluff pile is rising; his profits are not. And he and others in California’s shredder-waste war say the public is losing out.

“Shredders are a way of recycling material,” said Corona, president of the Cleveland Avenue company. “Although it’s maybe not as clean as we want it for beautiful San Diego, and not as nice as other industries, it is a way to dispose of things that are rejected by society. The scrap recycling firms are necessary for this society.”

Corona’s quandary is shared by most of the seven other California shredders, who produce about 200,000 tons of fluff a year. Because California regulates fluff more strictly than any other state, shredders have found themselves in a logistical and financial pinch.

Some have taken to dumping their fluff in a landfill on an Indian reservation in Arizona. Corona ships 40% of his to Mexico. Meanwhile, fluff has piled up in small mountains around the state--posing more of a risk, some say, than if it were in an ordinary landfill.

“It’s one of the unique waste streams out there that is more dangerous outside a landfill than in a landfill,” said Dr. David Leu, chief of alternative technology and policy development for the state Department of Health Services. “That’s a very difficult concept for people to understand.”

In a way, the shredder-waste war can be traced back to Leu, a former New Jersey environmental regulator who arrived in California several years ago barely knowing the difference between shredder waste and Shredded Wheat.

One of his early assignments was to look into fluff--soft, spongy, molasses-colored muck vaguely resembling horse manure. For years, fluff had gone into local landfills. But in early 1984, Leu became convinced that its lead oxide content made it a low-level hazardous waste.

That meant it could no longer go into a municipal landfill, where the lead oxide might leak out and contaminate ground water. It would have to go to a hazardous-waste facility. And those are risky to run, increasingly rare, and expensive to use.

According to Leu, the price of dumping would rise from $3 to $7 a ton in a county or city landfill to $110 to $150 a ton in a hazardous-waste landfill. That would not include the cost of trucking the bulky waste to the site.

So the Health Services Department agreed to make things easier--if the shredders could cut the lead oxide in their fluff. If they would stop shredding the exhaust systems and other parts that contaminate the fluff, they could dump it in non-hazardous waste landfills.

According to Leu, department procedures allow such a variance if public health or ground water will not be endangered. He insists the risk is minimal: The lead oxide is “extremely immo bile,” binding itself to soil rather than seeping deeper into the ground.

So shredders like Pacific Steel stopped accepting cars that still had their exhaust pipes or fuel tanks--where lead oxide accumulates from burning gasoline. The policy escalated the price of junking an old car, but Leu says the lead content in fluff tested dropped markedly.

But there was a hitch.

The state’s Regional Water Quality Control boards still had to approve the fluff dumping, and many found that their rules define fluff as “borderline” hazardous. As such, it must be segregated in special areas in ordinary landfills--and there are no such areas in Southern California.

So the state Legislature intervened, ordering each water board to select three landfills in its region to accept the waste. But the new law allowed the water boards to require expensive safeguards, and did not require the chosen landfills to accept the waste.

Last month, the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board followed the Legislature’s orders and designated three landfills in San Diego and Orange counties. The landfill operators then exercised their prerogative, saying they wouldn’t take the shredder waste.

James Magee, who is in charge of San Diego County’s Otay landfill, said one of his reasons for refusing is political: Chula Vista residents around the landfill are adamantly opposed to a hazardous-waste landfill in their area. Furthermore, preparing the special area could cost several million dollars, he said. That would require money up front. Where it would come from and how it would be recouped remain unresolved.

Frank Bowerman, chief of the landfill program in Orange County, cited similar reasons for his refusal. “I think people are concerned about labels,” he said. “ . . . I think the public would have every right to stand up and say, ‘What are you doing?’

“Our policy in Orange County is that until the state Department of Health Services and the regional boards can agree that the waste is non-hazardous, we don’t want it.”

Whether that will occur remains unclear.

David Barker, a senior engineer with the San Diego regional board, insists that is not the answer. He says lead content is not the only problem with fluff; other metals like cadmium and nickel may also threaten underground water.

“I think it’s a resolvable problem,” Barker said. “But I don’t think the way to resolve it is to get the state to relax the standards for this type of waste. The way is to fight to establish a local landfill for borderline hazardous waste.”

Leu suggests processing to remove the metals from the fluff--an approach being tried by a Terminal Island shredder, Hugo Neu Proler Company. Leu said the process has cost the company $50,000 to install and costs only $7 to $9 a ton to operate.

“Quite frankly, it’s our position that the way they have gone is the way the other shredders ought to go, and avoid this bureaucratic Ping-Pong between the water boards and the industry and the landfill owners and ourselves,” he said.

Meanwhile, the fluff keeps coming.

Leu recalls three “mountains” of fluff at Hugo Neu Proler: “We were going to call it a ski resort, if it only snowed down there.” The pile has eroded since then, after the company found a landfill on an Indian reservation in Arizona.

One Anaheim facility had more than 30,000 tons of fluff. In National City, Corona says he has about 7,000 tons. He now trucks about a third of his generated waste to a sister company in Mexicali where nonferrous metal is removed and the rest dumped.

Fluff may pose a greater risk outside a landfill than inside, Leu said. Like leaf piles, it becomes biologically active and highly combustible. Piles have been known to smolder with persistent subterranean fires.

To put them out requires a heavy dousing, which risks contamination of rivers and ground water, he said.

“The stuff floats away into sewers, rivers or off-site,” Leu said. “It takes the elevated values of lead oxide and spreads them around. That’s something we’re not terribly excited to see happen.”

Meanwhile, the fluff war has disrupted the auto-wrecking and shredding industry, already troubled by depressed scrap-metal prices. By raising the cost of recycling automobiles, it has reduced the public’s incentive to dispose of them wisely.

Corona points out that San Diego relies on Pacific Steel to buy its scrap, which Pacific shreds and sells abroad to be recycled into finished products. Among its clients are General Dynamics and the Navy, which Corona said uses Pacific Steel to dispose of secret weapons.

If there were no shredders, Corona argues, old cars and other metal products would end up in ordinary, unmonitored dumps.

“It’s still the same hazardous waste,” he said. “And they can’t control that.”

On those points, public officials agree with Corona.

“I think most people who are looking forward to good waste management practices think recycling is an important aspect of good waste management,” said Larry Aker, chief of hazardous-materials management for San Diego County. “It’s not happening now. It seems we’re getting a little bit desperate when we ship things to Mexico when they should be recycled in the United States.”