HAZARDOUS WASTE
Faced with dwindling choices, companies must seek new ways to manage it
The environmental affairs manager of a large U.S. chemical company got some good news. A fertilizer business located near one of the company's advanced materials plants was interested in buying some of the plant's hazardous waste, which contain an acid used to make fertilizer. The chemical plant manager notified the state's environmental protection agency; since the acid was now going to be used as a product in another process, the plant figured it would no longer be considered hazardous waste.
The state's response was disheartening. The company was told that, according to federal rules, if all the plant's waste was going to be used as raw material, it could be delisted from hazardous waste classification. But because the fertilizer business wanted only half of that particular waste, declassification was not an option. The only alternative was for the fertilizer company to identify itself as waste treatment plant. That meant permits would have to be obtained and public hearing would have to be held, steps that could cost between $25,000 and 460,000. Not surprisingly, the fertilizer company decided against making the purchase, since any cost savings it would have reaped from using the waste material would be automatically wiped out.
"You just move the waste around," says the environmental affairs manager. Somehow, he complains, there must be a way to "break the cycle."
Environmental managers throughout the chemical industry know exactly how he feels. They complain that even wastes treated to very dilute levels cannot shake the "hazardous" classification, and that scarce disposal capacity is being used up to contain those wastes.
And, in general, the environmental managers are worried about where hazardous wastes will go. Despite industry's efforts to step up waste minimization, some industry observers anticipate a capacity crunch in some treatment and disposal methods during the next couple of years. Proposed federal regulations will significantly widen the scope of materials that fall under the jurisdiction of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). But the number of permitted commercial land disposal facilities is rapidly dwindling, and, in some cases, the federal restrictions on land disposal will cut the amount of waste that can go to such sites. Meanwhile, commercial incineration - an attractive but expensive alternative to land disposal - may not be able to pick up the slack. And progress in the development of sorely needed on-site treatment facilities, such as incinerators, has been hindered by community opposition.
Grousing about RCRA is nothing new for chemical companies. But regulatory laments voiced recently by environmental staff members throughout the industry have a different ring. For one thing, industry is proposing several regulatory remedies of its own. The Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to propose a mechanism for getting hazardous wastes that have been treated to a certain level to be considered non-hazardous. Some managers also support legislation that would mandate the construction of additional disposal capacity. And some of the proposed waste minimization legislation has won limited industry support.
How responsive Congress and EPA will be to industry's concerns remains to be seen. The legislative debate on reauthorization of RCRA has taken a backseat to action on amendments to the Clean Air Act. And while Sen. Max Baucus (D.,MT) has, as he did last year, submitted a reauthorization bill, most observers note that serious discussion of RCRA reauthorization probably will have to wait till Congress passes a new clean air bill, not likely untill sometime next spring. Nevertheless, the concerns developing now among hazardous waste generators indicate that industry is entering a new and far more challenging era in the management of hazardous wastes.
To some degree, those challenges rise from a number of impending regulatory deadlines. Some of those put an end to special variances of extensions industry has received, while others institute more stringent treatment requirements for waste disposed of at landfills and affect the range of waste considered hazardous. In one way or another, all the regulations increase RCRA's scope, raise the volume of waste that can be regulated under it, and worry industry with fears of severe shortages of treatment and disposal capacity.
Landbans. Some of the toughest and most troublesome of these regulations are the land disposal restrictions. These "landbans" limit the type of waste going into the landfills according to a schedule in the 1984 amendments to RCRA. Under that statue, EPA had a number of different deadlines by which it had to establish the Best Demonstrated Available Technologies (BDATs) for treating various classifications of hazardous waste. The first land disposal restrictions - on solvents and dioxins - became effective November 1986. The final landban will become effective the next May. Once the material is treated to EPA specifications, it can be landfilled or placed in surface impoundments.
The catch is that the agency's determinations have to be made before the final landban. If by then no BDAT has been set for certain types of waste, they will be automatically and completely banned from land disposal.
Three-stage implementation of the landbans, the second of which went into effect in June, has so far "cushioned (industry) from the full effect of those regulations," says Richard Olson, Dow Chemical's environmental manager for regulatory affairs. solid waste. But in May 1990 the third segment will come into play. This last group involves some currently listed hazardous wastes, including inorganic sludges and some organic wastes, and a number of commercial products. It also includes a significant group of wastes classified as hazardous because of inherent characteristics. Finally, the 1990 deadline includes a substantial amount of waste listed in the earlier landbans for which EPA has not yet come up with BDATs.
Michele Wilson, EPA's chief of the regulatory development section of the land disposal restriction branch, says the agency will publish treatment standards for listed and characteristic waste by about mid-November. There is no question, says James Petros, Union Carbide's director of health, safety and environmental affairs for its industrial chemicals division, "that the material affected by the May 1990deadline is the largest collection of waste in the landbans."
In general, the landbans means increased use and demand for waste treatment and could lead to a serious capacity crunch for those treatments, particularly incineration of solids. Chemical companies, says Philip Palmer, Du Pont's principle consultant for solid waste management in the company's engineering department will have to scramble to find new capacity to handle affected waste streams.
Indeed, says carbide's Petros, "no one knows for sure how the various treatment capacities will be able to meet the demand after May 1990." A number of variables will affect treatment capacity, such as how much the chemical industry is able to reduce waste and the amount of waste generated by various remediation activities, he explains. Petros agrees there will be a capacity crunch, but how "significant" it will be remains to be seem."
Du Pont's Palmer also points to a "tremendous amount of confusion" associated with the landfill restrictions. He says, for example, that EPA has set standards on a waste-by-waste basis, mandating the use of BDATs for each waste. But chemical companies often deal with mixed waste - such as residue from the treatment of many different waste streams - that, says Palmer, presents "a witch's brew of complex requirements," involving treatment and analysis.
Corrective Action. Within the next two months, EPA is scheduled to propose regulations that would for the first time spell out how to agency will implement the corrective actions mandated by 198 RCRA amendments. But while companies are eager to see specifics of the regulations. EPA says corrective action is already on the rise. Recent permits for landfills and incinerators have increasingly triggered corrective action. According to the law, any facility that obtains a RCRA permit - even for storage tanks - must address any past or current waste problems at the facility. Additionally, EPA has increasingly acted on its authority to order corrective action at facilities that have not yet received a permit.
Actual remediations associated with RCRA corrective action are not yet being done on a large scale. But Du Pont's Palmer says the pace "is picking up, and it is going to exacerbate the landban problem."
Other observers also note the quickening pace of RCRA corrective action. "RCRA corrective action is here . This year the momentum is really gathering," says Kent Patterson, managing partner and chief operating officer of Environmental Resources Management (Exton, PA). Patterson points out that because the chemical industry typically manages so much of its own waste on-site, it is, in particular, facing a great deal of remediation. "This is a real program, and it's going to roll ahead. Companies should be taking a pro-active stance," he advises.
Matthew Hale, EPA's deputy director for permits and state programs, estimates that about 5,500 sites - including landfills, incinerators, closed facilities and storage units - could potentially be affected by RCRA corrective action. And while the cost and extent of those actions is still "anyone's guess," Hale says about 70% of the facilities that have been granted RCRA permits, require some investigation to determine whether remedial action is necessary, Remediations run the spectrum, he says, from the simple removal of selected waste materials to the cleanup of Superfund proportions.
So far, reports Hale, EPA has done more than 1,500 assessments, the preliminary investigation stage. The agency has ordered about 530 actual investigations, about 110 for facilities with interim status and an additional 420 for those with permits. While most are still under examiation, about 40 have been completed, and in roughly seven cases, a remedy has already been implemented.
Estimates of the overall cost to industry, however, range from bad to worse. According to a study completed by CMA last year, even in the most reasonable scenario, industry's cost for implementing RCRA corrective action could be $16 billion-$27 billion. If, for instance, the agency mandates incineration for all hazardous wastes, the price tag could soar to $39 billion-$65 billion.
Observers stress that chemical companies must be technologically prepared for the remediation phase of RCRA corrective action. Robert Zoch, president and chief executive officer of environmental services company, ENSR (Houston), points out, for instance, that in some cases bioremediation will be applicable and the most cost-effective solution. But, he adds, while less expensive than incineration, bioremediation also requires a great deal more lead time for implementation.
The prospect of corrective action has proven so daunting to some companies, say some observers, they have decided to avoid RCRA permits entirely. For example, they might decide not to store waste but have it picked up more frequently instead.
New characteristic. In the coming months, EPA also will add to the criteria currently used to determine whether waste should be classified as hazardous. Right now, characteristics that flag hazardous materials include corrosivity, ignitability and reactivity. The agency is now in the process of expanding toxicity characteristics on the list. Final regulations are expected sometime this fall. The new rules will affect both waste water and chemical residues, putting a large amount of waste under RCRA for the first time.
"The rules could double the amount of regulated hazardous waste," says Carbide's Petros. Industry sources say a preliminary draft of the new rules included 31 organic compounds, but eventually the list may expand to several hundred.
In addition to increasing the volume of waste, the new rules also pose significant technical problems. "It means a company managing hazardous wastes has to go back and look at its whole system," says David Carrol, CMA's director of environmental programs. Waste streams from the same treatment plant that have been segregated as hazardous and non-hazardous may now all fall into the hazardous category.
Industry sources and observers alike are not sure how effective those rules will be. One observer points out that even when he Occupational Safety and Health Administration tries to come up with acceptable exposure limits for certain toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, it often concedes that it is short on data. She notes that, likewise, the toxicity data to make well-informed comparable judgments on hazardous waste may not be extensive enough.
Symbol. Nevertheless, EPA is going ahead, and the new rule has come to symbolize for the chemical industry a worrisome general trend in RCRA regulations. Sources say that under current laws, no matter how dilute a waste stream is, if the material was once considered hazardous, in most cases it is always considered hazardous and must be handled as such.
Cabot has a dilute steam of hydrochloric acid that is classified as hazardous, notes corporate director of regulatory affairs, Donald J. Robinson, only because of its low pH. "It keeps being branded as though it's toxic and ugly," he says, when in reality the stream is very dilute. Delisting the acid would require a change in EPA's use of pH as a criterion for determining hazard, a use Robinson perceives as generally acceptable. But right now, delisting would be the only way the waste stream could be reclassified as non-hazardous.
"EPA should in some cases let nature take its course," says Robinson. "No one will tell the agency that it is ok to take a more passive posture on this. People won't settle for anything between a contaminated site and being able to drink the water."
Much of the blame falls on RCRA's Mixture and derived from rules. According to Dow's Olson, those rules, in essence, mean that "once you manage it, you never stop managing it." Olson spent solvents in an incinerator and burn them. What's left is scrubber water and ashes, which are termed hazardous so they are biologically treated. The sludge left from that process is still considered hazardous. Declares Olson: "You never get out of the loop."
To provide a way out of that cycle, CMA has petitioned EPA to propose rules on de minimus exclusions for RCRA. Those exclusions, Olson says, would allow some of the very dilute waste streams industry is producing to be let out of RCRA regulation. "The agency has said it would like to focus on truly significant hazards," says CMA's Carrol. Such rules would be one way to sharpen that focus.
To some extent, the agency agrees. "It's a capacity issue on one side," says Steve Cochran, acting chief of listing at the office of Solid Waste. "There's obviously much more hazardous stuff; you shouldn't be taking up (disposal) space with this."
But industry sources say the reading they have been getting so far on how the agency may interpret such exclusions is not encouraging. Olson says it seems the agency is going to set a health based level for total content analysis, which he does not believe is necessary. "There's no sense in regulating waste to a level where it's OK to eat and drink."
EPA, however says there is a lot of sense in it. Cochran notes that wile the proposed rules, not expected to come out before year end, may change the agency is leaning towards provisions that would be self-implementing. That means a company would have to submit to the regional agency office a demonstration package that exhibited specific parameters proving that the waste in question should no longer be considered hazardous.
"You have to be able to eat the waste," Cochran contends. "If we're going to let these people out (OF RCRA's hazardous classifications), we have no control over them anymore." He says that if a playground were built over a waste dump, children could conceivably eat the dirt.
-Ellen Goldbaum and David Rotman with Lisa Tantillo
Source : Chemicalweek, 23 Aug, 1989
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