If Clean Harbors Aragonite were a drunk driver, the Tooele County hazardous waste incinerator would have been taken off the road years ago.

Instead, the plant is an alleged serial violator of its state waste handling permit, racking up monetary penalties nearly every year for a decade — a total of more than $1 million.
And more are on the way.

Fines for violating environmental regulations are intended to deter future bad behavior, but activists are wondering whether the incinerator’s owners are getting the message.

Last month the Utah Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste reached a proposed agreement with Clean Harbors Aragonite LLC to resolve 21 violations documented in 2012. Under a deal that is subject to public comment through Oct. 17, the company will pay $71,155.

While those penalties were being negotiated, the division last April slapped Clean Harbors with a 32-count notice of violation — the company’s tenth since acquiring the plant in 2002 — based on inspections completed in 2013.

Officials with the plant’s corporate parent in Massachusetts downplayed the alleged violations as “administrative in nature.”

“There’s no significant risk to human health or the environment,” said Phillip Retallich, Clean Harbors’ senior vice president for compliance and regulatory affairs. “Our incinerator is state-of-the-art. It always achieves the rigorous compliance requirements for the Clean Air Act’s high-temperature emissions.”

Most of the allegations target reporting errors, failure to properly track and categorize waste, and other record-keeping violations.

“Having an inaccurate waste characterization could lead to mismanagement of the waste, such as placing flammables in places not designed for those hazards or placing incompatibles near each other, or it could result in excessive emissions,” Utah environmental regulators wrote in a report.
Retallich emphasized the firm has never admitted any allegations, but still pays the fines.

While regulators agree the public should not rush to conclude Clean Harbors is a public health menace, environmentalists are less charitable.

“It’s a dizzying array of violations,” said Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. “It depicts a facility that isn’t nearly as safe as it should be. It paints a picture of significant hazards for the employees. It’s indicative of an attitude that is way too lax toward the material they are handling.”

Moench noted the records show the Aragonite incinerator processes dangerous materials like asbestos-bearing vermiculite and last year suffered 10 “bypasses,” where potentially carcinogenic smoke is released directly into the atmosphere.

“Those events can be extraordinary in terms of release of toxic emissions,” Moench said.

To be fair, the Aragonite plant’s alleged missteps have never included illegal discharges of pollution or covering up offenses, according to a 19-page compliance history compiled by the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.

A massive firm providing a variety of industrial services at locations across the nation, Clean Harbors is licensed in Utah to burn numerous hazardous materials, including infectious medical waste, pharmaceuticals and corrosive chemicals.

“Each requires different burn parameters, feed rates and so forth. They stage and batch it just right,” said Scott Anderson, director of DEQ’s hazardous waste division. “It’s a highly technical facility with one of the most prescriptive permits in the nation.”

His Royal Highness, the Duke of Kent yesterday (8 October) officially opened SITA consortium’s energy-from-waste (EfW) facility at Billingham, Teesside.

Built as part of the SITA UK, Lend Lease Infrastructure (EMEA) Ltd, and I-Environment Investments Ltd (ITOCHU Corporation), the facility forms part of the consortium’s 25-year waste management contract with the South Tyne & Wear Waste Management Partnership (STWWMP), which comprises Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland councils. Construction of the facility at took three years and was completed in April of this year.

Aerial view of the Billingham site. The new facility (comprising lines four and five) is situated on the left.

Situated adjacent to SITA’s existing three-line EfW facility in Billingham, the two-line plant (pictured, bottom left) can process up to 256,000-tonnes of residual waste per annum, of which, 190,000 tonnes will come from the STWWMP. After being filtered of recyclables, the residual waste will be burnt at high temperatures to produce sufficient electricity to power around 30,000 homes.
It is hoped the facility, which is operated by 42 full-time staff, will allow the three councils to reduce their reliance on landfill and boost their recycling rates. (A further 24 jobs have been created in the operation of three new waste transfer stations developed at Wrekenton in Gateshead, Middlefields in South Tyneside, and Hendon in Sunderland. These allow the waste to be sorted for recycling before loading the residual waste into larger vehicles for transport to Teesside.)

‘Delivering a sustainable source of energy’

Edward Campbell-Preston, SITA UK Graduate Engineer, shows HRH The Duke of Kent the furnace

Speaking of the visit, David Palmer-Jones, Chief Executive Officer for SITA UK, said: “The South Tyne & Wear Waste Management Partnership’s investment in this new infrastructure shows how local authorities can meet their commitments to divert waste material from landfill and, at the same time, deliver a sustainable source of energy. SITA UK is delighted to play a part in helping the North East put its waste to good use.

“On behalf of SITA UK and the South Tyne & Wear Waste Management Partnership, I am delighted and honoured to welcome His Royal Highness to formally open our new energy-from-waste facility.”

Councillor Peter Mole MBE, Chair of the STWWMP’s Joint Executive Committee, added: “These new developments are the realisation of our very ambitious plans to significantly reduce our reliance on landfill and provide our residents with a greener waste management service. Thanks to these new facilities, we are proud to be able to say that we now divert over 95 per cent of our waste away from landfill and, instead, put it to good use – either by recycling it into new products and compost or treating it to produce electricity. In fact, even the ash that comes from burning the waste is recycled into building materials.”

The opening of the new facility was welcomed by Resource Minister Dan Rogerson, who said: “We are diverting more waste from landfill year on year and I am pleased that South Tyne & Wear Management Partnership’s energy from waste facility is officially up and running.

“As we continue to move towards a more circular economy it is good to see Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland local authorities working together to deliver this commendable example of effective, efficient waste management.”

The £727-million contract was one of the first waste private finance initiative (PFI) projects funded by banks to reach financial close under the competitive dialogue process. The funders include the Green Investment Bank, Credit Agricole, BBVA and Natixis.

SITA has recently submitted planning permission to build a sixth processing line at the same site, and is in the process of building a separate EfW facility in nearby Wilton, as part of SITA Sembcorp’s 30-year Public Private Partnership (PPP) contract with the Merseyside Waste Disposal Authority (MWDA).

Residents of the southern Bulgarian city of Smolyan have staged a brief road block to oppose plans to build a biomass-fired thermal power plant.

Residents of the Ustovo district of Smolyan blocked traffic along the Smolyan – Madan road for some 10 minutes on Monday, according to reports of the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency and Capital Daily.

The protesters demand a clarification by the municipality and the respective competent authorities on the environmental impact of the project and the legality of the permits issued so far.

Nikolay Melemov, Mayor of Smolyan, announced Monday that the permit for the designing of the site had been issued by the Smolyan Municipality in 2011 and the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of the plant had been approved after that.

He vowed to review the paperwork surrounding the project and to appeal the EIA in the case of detecting irregularities.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, green waste is very much on the political agenda. According to Tulsa World, the city’s trash board voted this week to pursue a plan to collect and incinerate it rather than invest in an active composting facility. Proponents of the composting plan are deeply disappointed by the vote.

City Councilor Karen Gilbert says, “That [vote] sets us further back from the original plan of having an active composting, mulching facility,” Gilbert said. “It’s frustrating that we start off with an investment, but then we don’t follow through with the priority of that investment.”

Those in favor of the incinerator approach complain that the city can’t afford the cost of the proposed composting facility and that is costs too much money to separate out the green waste from the rest of the city’s trash. Doesn’t it seem as though the situation in Tulsa is a microcosm of the entire “global warming/climate change” debate going on around the globe?

Green waste consists of two components: yard waste, such as leaves and grass clippings, and food waste. Disposing of them requires different strategies but taken together, they account for a significant proportion of all the waste going into US landfills every year.

According to GreenWaste.com, about 75% of solid waste is recyclable, but at present only about 30% actually gets recycled. 21.5 million pounds of food waste gets sent to our landfills every year. If that food waste were composted, the reduction in harmful emissions into the atmosphere – mostly methane – would be equivalent to taking 2,000,000 cars off the roads in America.

In Washington State, a local prison is vermicomposting all its food waste and saving about $8,000 a year in disposal costs. The compost then gets spread on the prison gardens to help grow food for the kitchen. At North Carolina State University, an ambitious program to collect and compost empty pizza boxes is on track to process more than 370 tons of the containers in its first year. And in Massachusetts and Seattle, new laws mandate composting of food wastes.

In Sweden, 99% of all trash is recycled, composted or burned. Sweden does not have the amount of open available land needed for large landfills. It also does not have the abundance of natural resources that the United States does. So it operates a number of large incinerators that provide electricity and heat for government buildings. Critics say that burning only adds pollutants to the atmosphere, but that nation’s political leaders maintain that modern technology removes virtually all of the harmful emissions and the electricity generated goes a long way towards meeting Sweden’s power requirements.

The best conclusion to draw from all this is that local needs will govern how trash – particularly green waste – gets handled by various communities. There is no “one size fits all” solution. One could argue that Tulsa is taking the easiest way out and looking only at short term costs versus long term benefit. But the real answer is provided by Göran Skoglund, an official with the municipal power facility in Helsingborg, a city in southwest Sweden. He says he hopes the supply of waste to keep the city’s incinerator going will disappear. “This sounds strange…[but] that would be great for this planet. It’s not sustainable producing the amounts of garbage that we do.”

And that’s the take away from this story. Ultimately, it is not about burning vs. composting vs. recycling. In the end, it is about reducing the amount of waste that people generate. That’s where the focus of the political debate about waste products should be.

RUBBISH disposal is a lucrative business in urban areas, so much so that we have companies that are eager to propose incinerators to help us deal with the problem.

After all, Japan and Germany are big-time users of this technology, so it has to be good right?

In 2004, the Kuantan Municipal Council built an incinerator for research and development purpose.

That incinerator design consumed about 120 litres of diesel to incinerate only one tonne of waste, due to the high water content of local waste.

That is essentially the difference between Japan and us when it comes to incinerator technology — Japan does not waste good diesel to burn rubbish like we would.

In order to utilise this technology properly, we really need to separate our rubbish first. Otherwise, burning wet rubbish requires adding fuel to the waste and that means we are burning money to dispose of waste.

It should be no problem to force Malaysians to start separating their rubbish, as a provision has been included under the Solid Waste and Public Cleansing Management Act for this purpose.

The clause just has not been activated by the Urban Wellbeing, Housing and Local Government Minister.

However, rubbish separation is not just a responsibility for households but markets, restaurants, factories, shopping malls and office towers too.

Most businesses would not have the means to enforce rubbish separation, and there is that tricky issue about being held responsible for the mess if someone decides to dump unsorted rubbish into your wastebin.

This is a headache our Government will have no answer for because there are only so many things laws can deal with.

People’s attitudes need to be changed for rubbish separation to work, and we just do not have that sort of civic consciousness in our society.

So, we have a problem separating rubbish at source but our Government is still keen on incinerators. Will that be a problem?

Well, we already have several incinerators operating in Malaysia — located in Langkawi, Pangkor, Tioman, Labuan and Cameron Highlands, to name a few.

According to a Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) study on incinerators done in 2013, incinerators “had failed due to faulty design, improper operation, poor maintenance, high diesel usage and waste characteristics, due to high moisture content of 60% to 70%.”

The existing incinerator operators know this is a huge problem and seek to mitigate it by separating the rubbish as best they can.

For example, the Pangkor incinerator operator segregates moist food waste and dispose of it at an adjacent landfill but the process is not perfect as the waste is already mixed by the time it gets to the incinerator.

This in turn causes the burning to be imperfect and smog is released into the air.

When it comes to incinerators in general, of equal concern is the residual ash from the burning process with possible by-products of toxins depending on what sort of rubbish got burnt (we would not know since rubbish segregation does not happen here). Does our Government have a programme to store and contain such waste in a safe area?

The same UKM study actually notes the following: “research has shown that in communities where incinerator plants are built, its long-term effects come in the form of reproductive dysfunction, neurological damage and other health effects are known to occur at very low exposures to many of the metals, and other pollutants released by incineration facilities.”

Are the authorities and all the proponents for incinerators really sure this sort of technology is suitable for the Klang Valley given the problem we have of even separating and sorting our rubbish?

What do we do when the incinerator has reached its capacity and unable to cater to escalating waste due to population growth?

Do we build more incinerators or do we advocate a sustainable method of reducing waste through Zero Waste Management when the amount of waste is reduced significantly and substantially?

There are private companies that are eager to explore such methods of turning our waste into useful products if they are given the chance.

Example technology includes anaerobic digestion that is a simple, natural breakdown of organic matter, which produces biogas — a fuel that can be burned to produce both heat and electricity — and methane, a substance that can be used as vehicle fuel.

The process produces a by-product called digestate, which can be used as fertiliser as it is rich in nutrients.

Indeed a whole new industry can be spawned from such recycling initiatives, which can be equally lucrative, as the by-products are actually useful.

But such possibilities are being overlooked in favour of implementing incinerator technology where we will be using fuel to burn away the rubbish.

Whatever it is, so long as the process is not looked at in detail and the issues I have highlighted not resolved, our Government can expect to face resistance from each and every resident group where the project is proposed next.

> Mak Khuin Weng cannot afford to send our politicians overseas for ‘lawatan sambil belajar’ trips, so he hopes this article would suffice in terms of his advocacy for recycling.