Salvage Yard’s Levels of PCBs Raise Concern

Cancer-causing PCBs have been found at nearly double state limits in automobile shredder waste at an Anaheim salvage yard, raising concerns about whether the waste can be safely disposed of at an ordinary landfill, state officials said.

The fine metal dust, known as “fluff,” was classified as hazardous in 1982 for containing lead oxide. A law enacted last year permits its disposal in ordinary landfills if precautions, such as monitoring for ground-water contamination, are taken.

But if the presence of highly toxic PCBs at levels 26% to 90% higher than the state limit is confirmed by a second battery of tests, state health officials said Orange County Steel Salvage Inc. will have to do what it has been trying to avoid: dispose of about 38,000 tons of stockpiled fluff at a dump licensed to receive hazardous waste.

“If, in fact, there are PCBs, there would have to be some action by the auto shredder to dispose of it at a place that will accept hazardous waste,” said Marcia Murphy, spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services toxics substances division in Sacramento.

Murphy said the 35-foot-high pile of shredder waste at Steel Salvage’s compound near the Riverside Freeway does not pose an immediate public health hazard.

May Be Fire Hazard

Orange County health officials concurred. “The health threat, we don’t think, is really significant at this time,” said Robert Merryman, the county’s director of environmental health.

“The PCBs are confined in fluff, which is really the headlining of cars, seat covers and things like that. The biggest danger out there is the potential fire hazard, and the (owners) have installed a sprinkler system that works pretty well,” Merryman said.

George Adams Jr., who runs the family-owned business, said he is baffled by the finding of PCBs and plans to hire a private laboratory to analyze samples. “I don’t understand it because it has never come up before,” Adams said.

But if ordered to haul the material to a more expensive hazardous waste dump, Adams said, he would be forced into bankruptcy. He said he would abandon the site before he would pay $150 a ton to take the material to the nearest dump licensed to take hazardous waste.

Murphy said that state officials are treating the find of PCBs as isolated to Orange County Steel Salvage and that it may reflect improper practices by Adams and his father, George Adams Sr., such as shredding electrical transformer boxes contaminated with PCBs.

Denied Such Practices

Adams strongly denied such practices, adding that transformer casings are metal and require no shredding.

Dennis Valentine, Sacramento-based lobbyist for the scrap metal industry, said Wednesday that he had heard nothing of the new PCBs find.

Valentine added that health officials had once before thought they found PCBs at a shredder waste stockpile. They later discovered that “. . . it was something that had occurred in the ground before that stuff got there,” he said.

“There could be some real confusion here,” Valentine said, adding that he doubted its validity.

Murphy said PCBs had indeed been found previously at a Long Beach-area shredding yard. But, she said, the chemicals were at “real low levels,” well below the state limit of 50 parts per million for solids.

PCBs found in Orange County Steel Salvage samples taken last October ranged from 63 to 95 parts per million, Murphy said.

Once Widely Used

PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were widely used in electrical transformer insulation and hydraulic systems. These thick, colorless liquid compounds, which are slow to break down in nature, are considered highly toxic and are thought to cause cancer in humans. Their manufacture was discontinued in the United States in 1976.

Electrical utility companies have been slowly replacing transformer boxes containing PCBs, and their disposal is strictly regulated.

PCBs were first found in January in test samples taken from the Adams’ property last October, health officials said. Test results from new samples taken in late January are expected within a few weeks.

But even before PCBs were found, many of Adams’ seven competitors, as well as local officials, wondered why Adams was allowed to collect so much of the highly flammable shredder waste on his family’s 32-acre compound.

State health officials began requiring in 1984 that the metal dust be handled and disposed of as a hazardous material. That prompted Adams and the industry as a whole to back legislation to downgrade the hazard.

Lobbyists Waged Campaign

The auto shredders argued that California’s maximum limit of 5 parts per million of lead oxide in the dust was unnecessarily stringent and pointed out that California was the only state to so label the material.

While industry lobbyists waged a campaign in Sacramento to change the designation, other shredding firms in Los Angeles County were spending millions of dollars to haul their waste to an Indian reservation near Parker, Ariz.

Top state health officials later began to question whether the shredder waste was indeed hazardous and eventually said it could safely be deposited in ordinary landfills.

However, water quality officials, who share authority in regulating disposal of hazardous materials, were concerned that lead oxide in the dust could leach from ordinary landfills and contaminate underground drinking water supplies.

When a bill by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) was passed, it allowed shredders to dump their waste in regular landfills intended for household refuse but did not require landfill operators to accept the material. Operators, charged by regional water boards to install safeguards to receive the waste, have been reluctant to incur the expense.

If PCBs are found again in the 10 samples taken from Adams’ property last month, state health services spokeswoman Murphy said the department will have to come up with a plan to contain it and dispose of it.

Contributing to this article was Times staff writer Kenneth F. Bunting.