Process for Sterilizing Mail Could Be Complicated, Costly

As the U.S. Postal Service contacts companies nationwide to ask about ways to sterilize the mail as a protection against anthrax, questions are arising about whether the effort would be too expensive and take too long to set up to be practical.

One of the most aggressive ways to sanitize materials, by using a high-energy process known as ionizing radiation, could add 5 cents per ounce to mailing costs, said one company in the industry, Food Technology Service Inc. of Mulberry, Fla. Moreover, it could take a year or more to set up the plants needed, several companies said.

“The problem is capacity,” said Jim Jones, a vice president of Food Technology Service. “The plants currently running are already full with the consumer products we buy every day: Band-Aids, catheters, baby bottle nipples, gauze bandages. And then when you look at the Postal Service, you’re talking about adding some pretty serious volume.”

Mark McLoughlin of Ion Beam Applications, a Belgium-based sterilization company, said it is not possible to quickly arrange to use ionizing radiation to sterilize all 608 million pieces of mail that the Postal Service handles each day. “There isn’t enough capacity in the marketplace,” he said.

Monday, postal officials said they might adopt sterilization systems that are now commonly used in the food industry to destroy E. coli, listeria and other pathogens found on fruits and meat. Many of those systems use ionizing radiation, which uses high-energy electrons that can kill pathogens both on and inside the products. Companies say the process does not leave a residue or make products radioactive.

Other systems use ultraviolet light, which can cleanse only the surface of an object, or substances such as ozone, which backers say is the lowest-cost alternative. The systems are common in health and industrial settings, where they have been used to clean medical devices, air in pharmaceutical labs and items such as contact lens containers.

Some sterilization companies said postal officials contacted them last week to ask about their products, their capacity and how quickly they could develop a system to handle mail.

But federal officials have not yet disclosed the cost or scope of their plan--whether they aim to sanitize every letter and package or only those at certain post offices or sorting facilities. And White House spokesman Ari Fleischer on Tuesday said ionizing radiation is only one technology being considered.

“They’re taking a look at its effectiveness, the number of facilities that it would be available to,” Fleischer said.

Fleischer also acknowledged that “it would take some time” to install a sterilization system at mail facilities. “It just depends on the type of machines, their availability and how widespread they make the judgment that it would need to be, if they go down that road,” he said.

President Bush on Tuesday announced that the Office of Management and Budget had set aside $175 million for “immediate relief, immediate safety at post offices around the country.” But the White House did not say how the money would be spent or whether it would be dedicated to a sterilization system.

Some companies said it would take a substantial effort to build the capacity to clean mail with ionizing radiation. The equipment is housed in plants with concrete walls as much as 6 feet thick.

Jones said it would cost about $4 million to build an ionizing radiation plant and get it running. As configured now, one of his company’s plants could handle only about 1 million pieces of mail a day.

“Imagine if you had to build 20 or 50 of these things through the country,” he said. “That in itself would add up to a big number.”

McLoughlin said his company sells a variety of sanitation systems but none could be quickly deployed to a mail facility. “We don’t have anything that you could plug in and start running,” he said.

A spokesman for SureBeam Corp. of San Diego, which offers sterilization products, said the company “is in discussions with various entities of the government.” At Steris Corp. in Ohio, a spokeswoman said the company is talking to “the appropriate authorities” about its technology.

One company, Pure O Tech Inc. of Escondido, Calif., said it has a better solution than radiation. The company sells several systems based on ozone, in gas and liquid forms, that neutralize bacteria by destroying proteins in the cell membrane and elsewhere in the organisms.

Trygve Duryea, a marketing executive with the 3-year-old company, said an ozone system would reach inside mail and would work for “fractions of a penny” per letter. He said that the Food and Drug Administration had approved one ozone product to sanitize foods and that another is used to remove pathogens from the water discharged by plant nurseries.