Car Shredder Takes On State Over Waste Issue

Blaming its troubles on “a few shortsighted bureaucrats,” an Anaheim firm under pressure to move a 40,000-ton mountain of hazardous waste has stopped making payments on state bonds that financed its automobile-shredding business.

Officials in the office of state Treasurer Jesse Unruh confirmed Wednesday that Orange County Steel Salvage missed two $25,000 monthly payments, for January and February, on $3.1 million in bond financing the firm received in 1980 from the California Pollution Control Financing Authority.

Company Chairman George Adams Sr. said in a Feb. 7 letter to the treasurer’s office that the firm “may not be able to make . . . any additional payments in the future” unless it finds an economical way dispose of its automobile shredder waste.

The firm has been the center of a two-year controversy over disposal requirements for a fine metal dust left from shredded automobiles and heavy appliances. The company’s troubles intensified earlier this month when state health officials confirmed that there are high concentrations of highly toxic PCBs in the waste pile.

Before discovering the PCBs--polychlorinated biphenyls--state health officials considered shredder waste only marginally hazardous because of its lead oxide. Health officials had supported attempts to relax disposal requirements so that California’s eight automobile shredders could deposit their residue in landfills that accept ordinary household garbage.

Now, however, health officials say they may ask that the Anaheim firm be prosecuted under the state’s Hazardous Waste Control Act, potentially subjecting it to daily fines of $25,000. The firm also is appealing a demand by the Anaheim Planning Commission that it remove all the stockpiled shredder waste immediately. A City Council hearing is scheduled March 18.

George Adams Jr., the firm’s president, said it would cost $150 a ton to ship the material to the nearest hazardous dump site, which is in Santa Barbara County. Automobile shredding would not be cost-effective if the company has to do that, added Adams.

“We may not shred cars anymore,” said Adams, who had threatened before that he may “walk away” and “leave the state with a used shredder on its hands.”

‘Hoping We Can Get Help’

Adams said the firm stopped making payments on its loan, and his father sent the two-page letter to the treasurer’s office because “we are hoping we can get some help.”

Since the state in 1984 started enforcing what was then a 2-year-old designation of shredder waste as hazardous, Adams says he has been victimized by bureaucratic confusion. At times when health officials said the waste could go to ordinary landfills, regional water quality officials would not allow it.

“There are 50 states in this great country of ours, and Southern California is the only portion in the world where shredder waste has been declared hazardous,” the elder Adams said in the letter to Manuel Mateo, chief of Unruh’s Trust Services Division.