Judge Clears Way for Building of Toxic Waste Incinerator

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge Thursday ordered state air quality officials to issue construction permits for California’s first large-scale commercial hazardous waste incinerator without requiring a full environmental impact report.

But Judge Kurt J. Lewin also ordered the incinerator’s developer, California Thermal Treatment Services, to include state-of-the-art antipollution equipment in the controversial toxic waste burner.

That provision will add about $6 million to the $29 million cost of the project and could delay it by more than a year, according to Stephen Grossman, president of the builder’s parent firm, Security Environmental Systems Inc.

But “naturally I’m elated,” Grossman said of the judge’s order rejecting the need for a full environmental study.

The ruling, which came after a monthlong deliberation by the judge, was the latest in a series of setbacks for local community leaders and lawmakers, who want the company to complete an exhaustive study before it builds the plant in the center of Vernon, an industrial city 3 1/2 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The critics directed much of their anger at first at the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which issued 21 permits for the project without requiring a full environmental report. But the AQMD reversed itself last December, saying it would not extend the permits without the study.

Security Environmental Systems Inc. then filed suit to force the agency to stick to its earlier ruling.

In a hearing last month, AQMD attorneys urged Lewin to reject the legal challenge on the grounds that additional information had been uncovered indicating that the proposed incinerator would emit more pollution than previously believed.

But Lewin said that the AQMD had not sufficiently proven its case, and that no new information was “readily available.”

Needs of Society

“It should be recognized that society is fast running out of alternatives for the disposal of the ever-increasing toxic substances that will be accepted by the facility,” the judge wrote.

“Construction of such facilities cannot be postponed indefinitely, nor can they be continuously relocated to someone else’s bailiwick.”

The incinerator, the first of its type planned for a major metropolitan area, would burn about 22,500 tons of hazardous materials yearly, including solvents, oils and infectious debris from hospitals.

The incinerator has received final approval from both the state Department of Health Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, neither of which has required an environmental report.

AQMD spokesman Tom Eichorn said he was disappointed in Lewin’s ruling, but that he did not know what steps the agency will take next.