A publication of Work On Waste USA, Inc., 82 Judson, Canton,
NY 13617 315-379-9200 May 16, 1991
Correction to Waste Not #149: Enscos hazardous waste
incinerator was fined $251,633 on April 16, 1991 (not April
26, 1991).
NEW JERSEY: FIRE AT FOSTER WHEELERS NEW 1,000 TPD
TRASH INCINERATOR IN THE CITY OF CAMDEN. Foster
Wheelers $108 million incinerator went on line on March
25. A power outage caused a fire in a trash chute at the
South Camden incinerator on Morgan Boulevard...the fire started
after a power outage at 11 p.m. Saturday. Plant manager Newt
Wattis said the power was restored by 2:30 a.m. yesterday, and
one of the plants three boilers, which measure 14 feet wide
by 18 feet long by 100 feet tall, was operating by noon yesterday.
The other two boilers are expected to be back on line today,
Wattis said. Purves [director of Camdens Pollution Control
Financing Authority] said the plant is designed to rely on the
electricity it produces as a backup during an outage. But that
didnt happen on Saturday...Wattis said he wouldnt
characterize the fire as a failure of the plants backup
systems. He said trash had clogged the door of one of the chutes,
called hoppers, that feed trash into the boiler pits, where it
is burned. Purves said the plant is required to shut down during
a power outage, just as it did Saturday night. However, the boiler
pit fires continued to burn. Fire escaped one pit and climbed
upward into its hopper. Plant employees were unable to close
the door to the pit manually and the fire burned for more than
four hours, Purves said. The plant filled with heavy smoke, workers
were evacuated and the fire department was called. Wattis said
the door was closed manually when the trash volume fell below
the level of the door. He said the plant shut down safely despite
the problem. These were not normal circumstances,
Wattis said. Jackie Donahue, a spokeswoman for Public Service
Electric & Gas Co., said the power outage was caused by a
failed cable that feeds electricity to the incinerator. She said
many large operations, like the Camden County Municipal Utilities
Authority, plan for such failures by having a backup cable. Any
kind of big plant usually does have a backup, but at the Resource
Recovery Plant they have just the one cable, Donahue said.
She added that business must purchase their own cable lines,
and its very expensive....Purves said the fire
posed no threat to residents. This facility will probably
go another 20 years and that problem would never happen again,
he said... Courier-Post, NJ, 5-13-91. (See
also Waste Not #92.)
TRASH INTO CASH:
WASTE MANAGEMENT INC.S ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES &
MISDEEDS:
A 30-page abstract of a soon-to-be published Greenpeace Encyclopedia
of Waste Management Inc.
By Charlie Cray (Greenpeace Chicago Office) -- Abstract available
for $5 from
Greenpeace, 1436 U Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009. Tel:
202-462-1177.
Greenpeace urges divestment from Waste Management Toxic
Stock. Anyone who needs information on WMI will find it in
this publication. The following is from the abstract of the encyclopedia
on WMI which will be published by Greenpeace later this
summer. Waste Management Inc. is the worlds largest
waste disposal company. Its annual revenue grew from 76 million
dollars in 1971 to six billion dollars in 1990. It ranks 19th
in the Fortune 500 list of the largest diversified service companies
in the U.S. It hauls garbage from almost eight million households
in the U.S., in over 1350 communities. It operates over 128 landfills
in at least 36 states...According to a Prudential-Bache securities
analyst, WMIs subsidiary, Chemical Waste Management (CWM),
is the largest hazardous waste disposal company in the U.S. CWM
controls up to one-third of the entire U.S. commercial hazardous
waste treatment and disposal capacity...WMI also controls the
largest nuclear waste disposal firm in the U.S. (Chem Nuclear),
owns 49% of the U.S.s largest asbestos removal company (Brand
Industries), and owns 55% of the U.S.s largest garbage
incineration firm (Wheelabrator Technologies). Waste Managements
growth is achieved mainly by devouring its competitors -- smaller
waste haulers, and disposal firms -- from the streets of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, to Venezuela. In some cases their tactics -- which
reportedly include bid-rigging, predatory pricing, price-fixing
and even alleged physical threats -- have resulted in criminal
and civil suits...WMI has become one of the main corporate financiers
of U.S. congressional campaigns in the United States. The WMI
Employees Better Government Fund was the seventh largest
corporate political action committee (PAC) during the 1988 U.S.
elections, giving over $430,000 to candidates for U.S. Congress
from 1987 to 1988. Untold additional funds went to politicians
from WMI subsidiary PACs, and directly from WMI stockholders,
employees and their relatives...At least seven former top EPA
officials have been hired by WMI and CWM. For example, Walt Barber,
a CWM vice president, once was the acting administrator of EPA;
Gary Dietrich, a WMI consultant, once helped write solid waste
disposal regulations for the EPAs Office of Solid Waste;
Jeffrey Miller, a WMI attorney, once directed EPAs enforcement
division; and Joan Berstein, a CWM vice president, once was EPAs
General Counsel...WMIs corporate grants to environmental
and conservation groups totaled more than $892,000 between 1987
and 1989...Greenpeace estimates that WMI has paid over $43,000,000
since 1980 in fines, penalties and out of court settlements for
admitted and alleged violations of [U.S.] environmental laws at
its dumpsites...At least 45 WMI waste sites have been found
out of compliance with federal or state environmental laws at
its dumpsites...By the end of 1989, WMI was listed as a Potentially
Responsible Party at 96 sites on the U.S. Superfund National Priority
List, while its subsidiary Chemical Waste Management was listed
for 25...One U.S. EPA official has estimated the potential cost
of cleaning up WMIs contamination at over 2.4
billion dollars...In 1990, an investment analysis firm quoted
in Fortune [Feb. 12, 1990, p. 27] magazine gave WMI its
worst environmental rating...In 1989, CWM was levied a proposed
fine of $4,475,000 [they paid $3.75 million]
--one of the highest EPA fines ever in the US-- for numerous
violations at the Chicago [haz.waste] incinerator...CWMs
other major toxic waste incinerator is located in Sauget, Illinois.
Dirty operations there, too, have forced the state of Illinois
to fine CWM for environmental violations. In February 1990, Illinois
fined CWM $250,000 for operating the incinerator for four days
without a stack gas hydrocarbon monitor, and other violations,
such as burning waste faster than permitted. Operations began
at CWMs newest incinerator, in Port Arthur, Texas, this
year. CWM plans to eventually burn three times as much wastes
at this facility than any other CWM incinerator complex....At
least 10 garbage incinerators in the U.S. are currently operated
by WMI and Wheelabrator...WMI operates at least seven medical
waste incinerators, and plans to own a total of 18 in the U.S...Since
1988, CWM has become a supplier of solvent waste fuel for many
cement kilns in the U.S. and for a WMI-owned incinerator in Mexico.
The companys West Carrollton, Ohio, solvent fuel blending
plant received over 108 million pounds of chlorinated solvent
wastes from 26 states in 1989. CWM currently operates fuel blending
facilities in Newark, NJ; Azusa, CA; Henderson, CO; and Tijuana,
Mexico...
MERCURY: ...Researchers who study the methymercury
problem point to combustion pollutants in the air as the primary
source of mercury in most highly contaminated lake fish, says
Greg Mierle, a biophysical ecologist at the Dorset [Ontario, Canada]
Research Center. Yet as recently as a decade ago, scientists
had all but discounted air pollution an an important source of
the metal. Why the turnabout? The few tests conducted in the
early 1980s to measure mercury in rainwater turned up only scant
amounts, Mierle recalls. Because mercury contamination plagued
so many lakes - including ones in remote, nonindustrial regions-
some researchers reasoned that the metal must have come from natural
geologic deposits. The problem, Mierle says, is
that the analytical techniques used in the early 80s were
not very good. That realization led Mierle and his co-workers
to spend several years improving mercury assay methods. The Dorset
team then set about measuring all of the mercury entering one
Ontario lake, as the metal trickled in with rain and with drainage
from surrounding lands. And somewhat to our surprise, Mierle
says, it turned out that the direct deposition from rain
accounted for about half the mercury coming into the lake.
He adds that these data, published in the September 1990 Environmental
Toxicology and Chemistry (ET&C), also indicate that theres
more than enough mercury in rain falling on the watershed [lands
draining into the lake] to account for what enters the lake from
runoff. The scary thing, Mierle says, is that the very
low levels of mercury typically found in rain can cause
such dramatic contamination. Industrial mercury fallout, generally
measured at only a few parts per trillion in rain, could add as
little as 0.3 gram of mercury a year to a 25-acre lake, according
to the August EPRI report. Yet this is more than
enough to account for all the mercury that were seeing in
fish and other biota, Mierle says. According the
John W.M. Rudd of the Freshwater Institute in Winnipeg, Manitoba:
Since combustion pollutants can not only acidify surface
waters but also enrich their mercury concentration, Rudd suspects
that acid rain packs a double whammy. In some of our experiments,
he says, if we both decreased [a water's] pH and increased
its mercury concentration, we got kind of a double effect
on methylation rates, compared with the effect of either factor
alone... Science News, 3-9-91, pp 152-156.
A copy of this article is available from Waste Not.
Please send a SASE.
WASTE NOT # 151 A publication of Work on Waste USA,
published 48 times a year. Annual rates are: Groups & Non-Profits
$50; Students & Seniors $35; Individual
$40; Consultants & For-Profits $125; Canadian
$US45; Overseas $65. Editors: Ellen & Paul
Connett, 82 Judson Street, Canton, NY 13617. Tel: 315-379-9200.
Fax: 315-379-0448.