Silver State files suit against Enviromed

Bill Gang

Friday, Feb. 20, 1998 | 10:40 a.m.

A lawsuit filed Thursday had the smell of a trash war brewing.

Silver State Disposal Service has contracts with the county and various municipalities to collect their trash and dispose of it in their Apex landfill north of Las Vegas.

But the lawsuit contends that Enviromed is encroaching on its trash turf by luring away customers with bio-medical waste that must be specially treated and handled.

The medical waste from doctors' offices, clinics and hospitals includes needles, syringes, used surgical instruments, blood byproducts and even human body parts, according to Silver State's attorney John Moran Jr.

Moran contends that the way Enviromed handles the waste it collects is "a health hazard" because it sometimes involves open air transport to waste sites in Arizona, exposing citizens to "HIV, hepatitis and all kinds of things imaginable."

He said he has evidence that some medical waste was disguised by mixing it with construction waste.

Enviromed's Chief Executive Officer Dennis Dancik bristled at the allegations and promised that it would be filing its own lawsuit against Silver State.

Despite Moran's claim of the mishandling of waste, Silver State's lawsuit focuses on the allegation that Enviromed illegally lured away customers that legally belonged to Silver State's sister company, Environmental Technologies of Nevada.

"Since 1995, Enviromed has actively and wrongfully ... coerced the medical waste generators into contracting with Enviromed through misrepresentations and untruths," the lawsuit stated.

Those misrepresentations, according to the legal document, include claims that Enviromed's waste elimination process is cheaper, safer and quicker than that of Environmental Technologies and that waste is properly sterilized.

"Enviromed's alleged medical waste elimination process is technologically improbable and, at a minimum, incapable of processing a finished non-contaminated product," the lawsuit contends.

Moran alleged that Enviromed also is illegally recycling products when only Silver State has the right to do that in Clark County.

Dancik countered, "They want to protect a monopoly ... but we've knocked them out of the medical waste business. That's the reason for the lawsuit."

"They cut us off from the Apex landfill two years ago and we have to ship our waste to Arizona."

Silver State's lawsuit seeks unspecified money damages and asks for a temporary restraining order and injunction to prevent Enviromed from "interfering with Silver State's exclusive rights under the franchise agreements" with Southern Nevada governments.

No hearing has been set in the case that has been assigned to District Judge Stephen Huffaker.