Court Ruling Renews Alabama Waste Crisis

Ever since 70,000 tons of PCB-contaminated soil came rolling in from Texas in the late 1980s, the state of Alabama has feared that the impoverished “Heart of Dixie” might become the nation’s toxic dumping ground.

Those fears escalated last month when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Alabama may no longer impose a $72-per-ton fee on out-of-state dumpers. The fee had been intended to discourage the concentration of wastes in Alabama and to compensate the state for accepting risks that other states had avoided. But the court said the Alabama fee restrains interstate commerce.

BACKGROUND: Although more states are facing waste disposal crises, the number of operating hazardous-waste landfills is limited. The United States has only 19 such commercial sites. States also have erected barriers. Thirteen have enacted laws that could prohibit shipments of waste from elsewhere, and five others imposed fees or taxes on such shipments.

One result of all this has been an increasing tendency to move wastes to states that have room. And when Alabama became home to the so-called “Cadillac of toxic dumps,” it quickly became an importing state.

The Alabama landfill that prompted one of two cases on which the Supreme Court ruled is a sprawling, 400-acre facility owned by Chemical Waste Management Inc. It is near tiny Emelle, where weed-covered former farmland surrounds a population that is mostly black and unemployed. Sumter County, where Emelle is located, has one of the lowest per-capita incomes in Alabama.

Chicago-based Chemical Waste Management came to Emelle in 1978. The site has a capacity of about 21,457,000 cubic yards, equal to the combined capacity of 10 of the other states where such landfills exist. (Despite its huge capacity, there actually has been more activity in recent years at Chemical Waste Management’s facility at Kettleman Hills, Calif.)

What prompted the state fee is the fact that about 90% of the waste shipped to Emelle is generated outside of Alabama.

“If the short-term solution is just going to be, ‘Let’s ship it to Alabama,’ we thought the fee for out-of-state dumping was appropriate,” said Alabama Environmental Management Department spokeswoman Catherine Lamar.

Wendell Paris, a civil rights advocate, contended that the shipment of toxic waste to Emelle was “turning Sumter County into the pay toilet of America and local residents into hazardous waste junkies” who depend on the landfill for jobs.

IMPACT: The fee was inaugurated only after a long political battle, amid complaints that campaign contributions to state lawmakers from Chemical Waste Management were distorting the legislative process.

In 1989, 790,716 tons of waste had been buried at Emelle. In 1991, after approval of the fee, only 290,194 tons were buried.

But the company fought the fee, saying it was playing a key role in Emelle’s declining volume.

The Supreme Court decision striking down Alabama’s out-of-state fee left the door open for a revision of state law, in order to allow some protection against toxic dumping from afar.

But a new fee would have to be mandated by the Alabama Legislature, and political insiders have expressed doubt as to whether another bruising battle could be fought.