space Press Releases, News Stories

by Al Gibbs, Tacoma News Tribune

Formosa Plastics Group has tried to dispose of the waste in Taiwan and in Cambodia. Now it apparently plans to ship more than 350 20-foot cargo containers of the material through Tacoma on its way to an Envirosafe Services of Idaho Inc. plant near Boise.

"This is a massive amount of waste," said Jim Puckett of the Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange and the Basel Action Network, both environmental groups in Seattle. If it is allowed to continue, "we could become the pay toilet for the Pacific Rim."

While environmentalists fear the precedent that could be set with these shipments, government regulators said the shipments would not be inherently dangerous.

Containers apparently would be trucked from Tacoma's docks to Grand View, Idaho, in the high desert near Mountain Home Air Force Base, where it would be encased in an impervious material and buried.

The travel route to Idaho is uncertain, and Envirosafe officials in Idaho could not be reached for comment.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying what it should do about the shipments, and it plans public hearings before making a recommendation to Taiwanese regulators, said Dave Bartus of EPA's Seattle office.

But there are no explicit U.S. laws forbidding the import of hazardous wastes.

Federal law "has relatively little to say about waste exports or imports," Bartus said.

"And Taiwan is not recognized (by the United States) as a sovereign nation, so there are no bilateral agreements" on the subject, Bartus added.

Still, he said, Taiwan's environmental protection ministry has asked for EPA's evaluation of the shipments.

"It's fairly clear it will not be shipped unless they get a U.S. EPA OK," Bartus said.

Other toxic materials are contained in the waste, which is a compacted combination of graphite pellets, brine sludge from the chlor-alkali manufacturing process and dirt contaminated when the waste was dumped in Cambodia, Bartus said.

About 5,500 tons of sludge and 2,200 tons of soil are included, he said. All contain mercury used in the chlor-alkali process.

Mercury in even tiny concentrations is a highly toxic substance that can cause birth defects and deformities, and brain and kidney damage. People can be harmed by eating fish that have lived in contaminated water. Mercury is not considered a carcinogen.

The EPA sets a safety limit of no more than 2 parts of mercury per 1 billion parts of drinking water. The Food and Drug Administration limits mercury to 1 part per million of methylmercury in seafood.

Hazardous materials are shipped through ports like Tacoma's all the time, said Lou Paulsen, the port's risk manager. "We handle a lot of things."

Bartus said the proposed shipments are not inherently dangerous. "They're not in a form that would kill people or be easily spilled," he said.

But Puckett argued that allowing the shipment could set a dangerous precedent for Asian nations to ship their wastes to the United States instead of encouraging cleaner industries at home.

"The implications are enormous," he said. "We shouldn't have free trade in toxic waste."

This is not the first time that the possibility of potentially hazardous cargo moving through the port has drawn fire from environmental activists and others.

In 1995, local objections stymied efforts to ship spent nuclear fuel rods from nuclear reactors in Asia to Idaho for storage. For reasons unrelated to local protests, the rods ended up moving through Concord, Calif.

In December, Formosa Plastics dumped 3,000 tons of mercury-laced waste in Cambodia, exposing scores of people. Local authorities blamed the dump for five deaths.

Formosa Plastics denied the material was dangerous and said it would conduct its own tests before responding to a Taiwanese government request to to ship the waste back to Taiwan.

It could not be determined whether the same material is now designated for Tacoma.