State Loses Track of Toxic Waste Shipments

A simple computer glitch has rendered the state of California unable to track whether U.S.-owned companies in Mexico are returning their hazardous waste to the United States, as is required by Mexican law, a state health official testified Monday.

Speaking before a legislative hearing in San Diego, John J. Kearns, the regional chief at the Long Beach office of the California Department of Health Services, said that the state’s computerized tracking system cannot distinguish between toxic waste that originates in California and toxic waste that is imported from Mexico by a California-based company.

A chemical waste management company based in Azusa, Calif., for example, could send waste from its branch in Tijuana back into the United States. But the computer would register that the waste was sent from Azusa, Kearns told Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), who chaired the hearing on toxic waste exportation.

“That’s where our system is breaking down,” Kearns said, adding that he expects the computer programming problem to be solved by early next year.

“So we really don’t know how much waste is being imported, do we?” Torres asked.

“No, we don’t,” Kearns replied.

Kearns’ remarks set the tone for the three-hour hearing, during which several local, state and federal environmental and health experts spoke of limited cooperation among agencies and minimal sharing of information, as well as outright confusion over whose jurisdiction prevails.

The hearing focused on California’s apparently increasing practice of exporting its toxic waste to other states and countries, including Mexico. Torres gave special attention, however, to how the hazardous refuse from the approximately 450 Tijuana border plants--known as maquiladoras-- is affecting San Diego County’s air, land and water, especially the underground aquifers that provide both Mexico and California with water.

The plants, owned by companies in United States, Japan and other countries, assemble everything from toys to video games to vehicle parts to foodstuffs, but they also create a considerable amount of toxic trash, including solvents, heavy metals, plastics, dyes, paints and resins. The precise volume of such wastes is unknown, and Torres’ indicated during his inquiry Monday that he thinks watchdog agencies could do more to try to quantify the problem.

“I am concerned about the lack of responsiveness at some agencies,” he said. “Agencies aren’t working together.”

Last year, the Mexican government passed a sweeping new set of environmental laws--based largely on U.S. statutes--that require, among other things, that waste generators report and track hazardous materials, and that they submit plans detailing methods of disposal.

Mexican law also requires most maquiladora waste to be shipped back to its country of origin--usually the United States. For each shipment of a waste product, companies must file a manifest, good for one year, to show where a specific toxin is sent.

But, in the last 12 months, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has received only 25 manifests, according to Kathleen Shimmin, chief of the office of health and emergency planning with EPA’s regional office in San Francisco.

“I don’t believe we are seeing the whole picture,” Shimmin said, adding that she believes some California companies are illegally dumping in Mexico. She cited one incident in which a California company was exporting spent solvents to Mexico labeled not as hazardous waste, but as a product. “We believe that type of transport is happening, but we haven’t been able to issue citations.”

Kearns also acknowledged that California has incomplete records of how much hazardous waste it ships out of state. If the shipper uses an out-of-state manifest form to record the transfer, he said, California has no way to enter that information in the data base. Records of those transactions that are received are filed by hand, he said, but there is no requirement for out-of-state facilities to file those records in California.

By one estimate, data entry problems occur on 25% of manifests received, resulting in significant underreporting of how much waste is going where, according to Eric Newman, an attorney for Chemical Waste Management Inc., which has a plant in Tijuana.

Newman testified that, among the top eight states that import California waste--New Jersey, Utah, Idaho, Texas, Kansas, Arizona, Nevada and Louisiana--several claim to have received more waste than California has a record of sending.

In 1987, for example, California records show that it sent more than 4 million tons of hazardous waste to Nevada. But Nevada records show that it received more than 28 million tons of waste from California, according to figures Newman provided.