space Press Releases, News Stories

by Florangela Davila, Seattle Times staff reporter

Envirosafe Services of Idaho Inc., based in Grand View, was one of three U.S. companies vying to treat and then pulverize and bury some 5,000 tons of mercury-laden waste from the company.

But Envirosafe officials said yesterday that the company was withdrawing from the project. That decision arrived two days after local environmentalists and longshoremen, in a series of phone calls, protested and managed to halt an initial shipment in southern Taiwan destined for the Port of Tacoma.

For months now, Formosa Plastics Co. has been working to ship the waste that first caused a furor when the company secretly dumped it in Cambodia last year.

The waste, a byproduct from making polyvinyl chlorine pipe, arrived in a small port city in bags, where it was snatched up. Several people who came into contact with the waste died, triggering mass panic and accusations Cambodian port workers had accepted bribes to allow the shipment.

Taiwanese authorities demanded that Formosa clean up the site and repackage and dispose of the waste according to the strictest of standards. But because Taiwan does not have facilities to treat the waste, authorities are seeking a repository in the United States.

Given so much scrutiny of the shipment, Taiwanese authorities also have said they will first seek approval from the U.S. before the waste would arrive here. U.S. law doesn't mandate such approval, and in general, the U.S. does not prohibit importing hazardous waste. It does, however, ban specific substances. This shipment has become a symbol of a much larger issue: what this country's policy ought to be when hazardous waste is concerned.

Waste-disposal companies in Nevada and Texas still are competing for the Formosa shipment, according to officials in regional EPA offices for those areas.

The EPA has not given its approval to Formosa and has not fully characterized the levels of toxic substances in the waste.

Two locally based environmental groups - the Washington Toxics Coalition and the Basel Action Network - say the waste contains mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which are banned in the U.S.

This week, 10 containers holding crushed barrels that had held the waste were being packed onto a ship scheduled to arrive in Tacoma on Aug. 5, said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network.

EPA officials said the shipment comprised solid, not hazardous, waste.

But when environmentalists received word of the shipment from a Taiwanese journalist, they quickly mobilized and called the longshoremen's union in Tacoma. That set off calls to the shipping agent that eventually halted the shipment in Kaohsiung Port.

U.S. Ecology in Nevada and Waste Control Specialists in Texas have notified the EPA that they're seeking to receive the waste.