Dow Pays a $117,000 Fine for Hazardous-Waste Infractions
Dow Chemical Co. USA has paid a $117,000 fine after being cited for breaking state health laws by burning and storing hazardous waste at its Torrance polystyrene manufacturing plant.
The March 31 citation also charged Dow with 11 other violations, including failure to label hazardous waste containers properly and failure to make emergency arrangements with Torrance Police and Fire departments.
The bulk of the fine was for treating hazardous waste without the proper permit and for the storage of wastes in Torrance that came from a Dow facility in Long Beach, officials said.
Fred Smalling, Dow manager of safety and environmental affairs, said the company maintains that its permit did allow burning of waste, but Dow has paid the fine rather than get entangled in litigation.
“At no time do we feel that we improperly handled our hazardous waste or endangered the surrounding public,” he said.
State Department of Health Services spokesman Jim Marxen said the violations did not directly threaten public health. He said the two major violations involved failure to have the proper permits for what Dow was doing.
With the approval of the state Department of Health Services, Dow is continuing to burn waste at its Torrance plant, in the 300 block of Crenshaw Boulevard, while applying for a permit that specifically allows incinerating some of the wastes produced there.
The incineration issue concerns hydrocarbon wastes, including styrene, partially polymerized styrene and ethyl benzene, which are produced during the manufacturing of polystyrene. Smalling said the plant makes “several hundred million pounds” of polystyrene a year, commonly used in packing material and food containers.
He said that the waste from the polystyrene process, which can be as much as 576,000 pounds a year, has been burned to heat a plant boiler ever since the Department of Health Services issued a permit to Dow in 1983 covering the processes at the plant. The permit states that “recovered hydrocarbons” would be used as boiler fuel.
But during an inspection on Feb. 16, 1989, health services inspector Teena Suzuki, took note that the wastes were burned. Suzuki said she considered Dow’s burning of the waste chemicals “a form of treatment,” for which Dow did not have a permit and she cited Dow for it.
Passed Inspection
However, Smalling said that the plant passed a health services inspection in 1987 without any similar citation and that it has complied with limitations on air pollution imposed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Suzuki said that Dow officials had pointed to the earlier inspection and the language of the 1983 permit when informed that a citation was going to be issued.
Marxen said that treatment must be specifically addressed in a permit. “If Dow had wanted treatment, and we had agreed to treatment, it would have said ‘treatment.’ We have nothing against the boiler unit” but it needs a treatment permit and the inspections that would follow, he said.
Asked why the Department of Health Services had not cited Dow after its 1987 inspection, Suzuki said: “Some inspectors will see things that others don’t.” She added that the 1983 permit may have been faulty in including the language that Dow cited as authority to burn hazardous waste.
The storage issue arises because Dow’s permit only allows the company to store hazardous waste at the Torrance facility that is generated there.
Smalling acknowledged that Dow had been storing hazardous waste generated at a Dow bulk liquid storage terminal in Long Beach. That material was not burned in Torrance but was shipped, along with other waste chemicals from the Torrance operation, to Louisiana or Texas where Dow has incinerator plants.
The hazardous waste from the Long Beach facility consisted mainly of used filter cartridges, samples, styrene, ethyl benzene, partially polymerized styrene, acetone, and methylene chloride.
Smalling said Dow used the Torrance plant for storage because “the Long Beach terminal is an arm of this operation. We looked at it as a satellite site.”
Suzuki said: “They misinterpreted the permit on the storage.”
Smalling said that Dow now sends waste directly from the Long Beach terminal to its incineration plants in Louisiana and Texas.
“In the interests of resolving the problem and getting on with correcting any deficiencies we may have had and assuring that the public health and welfare is maintained in the most efficient manner, we are going ahead with the corrections,” said Smalling.
