Gobbling Up Toxic Waste Is a Banquet for Tiny Bugs : Pollution: Huntington Beach firm promotes hungry microorganisms as one way to clean up pesky dumps.

Joseph Mathewson has some hungry bugs that he thinks can save businesses lots of money. Not all businesses, to be sure--only those which find themselves facing a problem that’s increasingly prevalent in Orange County and around the country: soil and water contamination.

Mathewson and his small Huntington Beach-based company, Protek Environmental, specialize in cleaning up toxic-waste problems with an army of chemical-eating microorganisms, a process known as bioremediation.

The technique is straightforward enough. Microorganisms that feed on organic chemicals are introduced into contaminated soil and cultivated with water and fertilizer. After many months of munching, the pollutants will be gone, and the bugs left to die.

Bioremediation is not a completely new technology, but it has attracted new interest in recent years as the waste problem has grown. Advances in molecular biology--including controversial genetic-engineering techniques--have raised the hope that bugs can be found or developed to eat wastes that could not be consumed before.

And bugs can be a lot cheaper than the traditional methods of cleaning contaminated land, that is, hauling the dirt off to fast-disappearing toxic-waste landfills, or burning it in special incinerators, or isolating it through solidification.

Protek claims that with heavy use of bioremediation, it can clean the Ascon toxic dump site in Huntington Beach--one of the county’s most notorious hazardous-waste sites--for less than half the sum that cleanup firms using other methods would charge.

That’s the kind of thing Ascon Properties Vice President John Lindsey likes to hear. His company is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a result of the extensive contamination discovered on the 39-acre parcel purchased by his firm in 1983, and he’s trumpeting Protek’s $25-million cost estimate in hopes of persuading the city to help out with the cleanup.

The Ascon site is a classic illustration of how waste problems can sabotage the best-laid business plans in fast-growing areas such as Orange County. The long-existing dump, suddenly valuable at a time of rapidly rising land prices, was purchased for $600,000, and the buyers planned to clean it up and build housing.

But the buyers didn’t know that a variety of hazardous chemical waste had been illegally dumped at the site. Since that discovery, the possibility of building houses has slipped ever-farther into the future as Ascon Properties negotiates with state regulators and litigates with the sellers over the cleanup process.

The company recently passed one hurdle when the California Coastal Commission approved a plan for 630 condominiums on the site once it is cleaned up. But it will still be many years before anything is built there, and questions remain as to whether people will be interested in living on a cleaned-up toxic dump site.

Mathewson said the Ascon cleanup would be “the biggest project ever done by bioremediation.” Already, he claims, Protek has done the biggest job ever in California: the cleanup of 47,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil at Ameron Pipe & Fabrication in South Gate.

But not everything at Ascon can be cleaned by bioremediation, and, in fact, the technique is hardly a cure-all for the hazardous-waste problem. For one thing, it is at present used primarily for cleaning up oil, diesel fuel and related lower-level contaminants. More complex toxic chemicals such as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, and poisonous heavy metals such as chromium, mercury and lead, are not so easily digested by a barrage of bugs.

Protek and other companies, including Ecova Corp. in Redmond, Wash., and large waste-management companies such as O.H. Materials and IT Corp., are working on microbial strains that will gobble up all manner of poisons. So are researchers at a number of universities, including UC Irvine. And many scientists believe that genetic engineering techniques will yield especially hardy and voracious waste-eaters.

But state and federal regulatory agencies, which must approve hazardous waste cleanup programs, remain skittish about experimental bug use. Under the federal government’s much-criticized federal Superfund program for hazardous waste cleanup, bioremediation has been part of solution on just a handful of projects.

Microbes also tend to be slow eaters, which is part of the reason that regulators hesitate to approve their use for the more dangerous sites. Lindsey of Ascon said that under the current Protek proposal, cleanup by bioremediation would take more than the three years that the company has targeted for having the site ready for construction.

Still, industry optimists believe that the huge cost advantages of bioremediation will ultimately lead to widespread use of the technique. John Kinsella, vice president for operations at Ecova Corp., estimates that 15% to 20% of the money now spent on waste cleanup goes to bioremediation, and he expects that percentage to increase dramatically over the next five years.

“The engineering firms have become interested in what we are doing,” Kinsella noted. “We are taking the risks, and now they are hedging their bets.” His company has developed bioremediation solutions for pesticide and wood-solvent contamination.

And with the cost of cleaning up all the waste sites in the United States estimated at anywhere from $100 billion to $300 billion, “the potential is enormous,” said Robert Nicholas, a Washington lawyer who specializes in regulatory issues associated with bioremediation. “The problem is finding the right organisms.”

Or as Joe Mathewson would say, the right bugs.

HOW MICROBES ARE USED TO CLEAN UP TOXIC WASTES

With a process called bioremediation, bacteria are used to eliminate contaminants such as oil from the soil.

1. After site is investigated, a remedial action plan is prepared which details the cleanup goals, the method to be used, and how the process will be monitored.

2. Once bioremediation is selected as the cleanup method, the first step is to excavate the contaminated soil into an open treatment “cell”. The cell, a shallow basin, is constructed on site and has a liner to keep soil and contaminants contained.

3. The soil is prepared for bioremediation and sampled. Then nutrients and microbes, which have been stored in a “bug-bank”, are injected in the soil.

4. Moisture, nutrient and oxygen levels are monitored and optimum conditions maintained as the buds eat the contaminants. When the prescribed level of cleanliness is attained, the soil can be put back into the excavated hole.