Outcry, politics halted mercury sludge

Monday, March 27, 2000 | 11:21 a.m.

An official of a company that wanted to bring 18,000 drums of mercury-contaminated sludge into Southern Nevada for treatment said the proposal was stopped because of political reasons and public outcry.

US Ecology, manager of the Beatty hazardous landfill 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, had not yet submitted a formal request to the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection to allow on-site treatment of the mercury. The company's announcement a week ago that it would not pursue the project surprised state officials.

American Ecology Vice President Steve Romano said it was a mixture of bad publicity and politics that weighed into the decision. Idaho-based American Ecology is the parent company of US Ecology.

Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., had opposed the treatment plan. Environmental groups such as Greenaction based in San Francisco planned to fight to keep the sludge out of the country. And the federal Environmental Protection Agency promised a detailed review, EPA Administrator Felicia Marcus said.

"You have to give them some credit for putting Nevada's interests above their economic interests," said David Emme, the state's solid waste director who would have had to review the treatment application.

"It was the views of Nevadans that were most important in this decision," Romano said.

But Bryan did not believe Nevada's concerns were the overriding factor for the hazardous waste company.

"If US Ecology had been listening to Nevada residents, they never would have made an application to put it in the state to begin with," Bryan said.

"There is no reason Nevada should make itself available to anything that would harm public health and safety," Bryan said.

US Ecology proposed to cook the sludge at high heat, then recover the mercury and sell it, Romano said. The drums are still sitting on a dock in Taiwan after Formosa Plastics Group dumped the sludge illegally in Cambodia in 1997. After two Cambodian dock workers died, apparently from mercury exposure, citizens rioted and forced the company to ship the drums back to Taiwan.

"It does not mean it is a good business decision," Romano said of ending the Nevada project.

"This is not a technical, scientific or regulatory issue as far as we are concerned," he said. "EPA's concerns were not legal. They were frankly political."

The EPA's Region 9 office in San Francisco took issue with that characterization.

"We are to make sure to the extent of our collective authority that this waste will have to jump through every hoop, to enforce the law thoroughly," EPA spokesman David Schmidt said. "It is regulatory. I think US Ecology should have known it wasn't going to be easy to bring in the waste."

Not only did EPA have concerns about the mercury, but possible PCBs or polychlorinated biphenyls, and dioxins that contaminate the sludge as well.

Bradley Angel of Greenaction said the move by US Ecology was a public relations disaster from the start. He noted that environmentalists and longshoremen teamed up to keep the sludge out of California a year ago.

"I don't believe for a second that US Ecology does anything from the goodness of their hearts," Angel said.

Mary Manning covers environmental issues for the Sun. She can be reached at (702) 259-4065 or by e-mail at manning@lasvegassun.com