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by AL GIBBS, The Tacoma News Tribune

"This is an order of magnitude less toxic than we usually handle," said Mike Spomer of Envirosafe Services of Idaho, Inc., based in Grand View, south of Boise.

"This is not a dangerous material. It's not a lethal toxin."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating conditions it might impose on shipping the 5,000 tons of material. There is no federal law that would explicitly ban the import.

On Wednesday, environmentalists led by Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network and Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange in Seattle criticized the shipment of more than 350 20-foot containers of the material from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, through the Port of Tacoma to Idaho.

Taiwan has no hazardous waste treatment or disposal facilities.

Puckett charged that the material might endanger the environment along the ocean and land shipping route, and would set a dangerous precedent that could lead to the U.S. becoming a dumping ground for hazardous wastes from the Pacific Rim.

He could not be reached for comment Thursday.

But Spomer bristled at both suggestions.

He blamed public reaction when the decade-old material was illegally dumped in Cambodia six months ago. Several people died in a panicky evacuation from the site.

The deaths of two others were initially blamed on mercury poisoning, but the World Health Organization later said none was involved.

"If the Cambodian incident hadn't happened, this probably wouldn't even have been noticed," Spomer said.

"I don't want to make light of it, but this is like stuff we handle every day, and it's in lower concentrations."

The Idaho plant processes about 150,000 tons a year of hazardous wastes. The Taiwanese waste will be ground up to a powdery form and treated by adding other materials to it. It will end up like beach sand, and will be buried.

Banning hazardous waste imports to the United States, which Spomer said has the best technology to safely handle it, is foolish, he said.

"We're in a global economy," he said. "We have the equipment and expertise to treat this. Thinking it will go away is just burying your head in the sand."

The sludge came from a first-generation chlor-alkali plant owned by Formosa Plastics Group. It has been stabilized and, mixed with other substances, most closely resembles concrete blocks the size of a desk, Spomer said.

Companies that still operate such older-technology plants in the U.S. have learned how to safely handle and dispose of their waste, said Larry Landry, manager of the Pioneer Chlor-Alkali Co. plant on Tacoma's Tideflats.

"The wastes we're dealing with, they're not inherently dangerous," Landry said. "You're not going to open a container and keel over dead.

"(But) it clearly is a hazardous material."

Marc Stifelman, a toxicologist with the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed.

Although he said there is "some uncertainty" over exactly what chemical type of mercury compound is involved in the waste, he described mercury poisoning as involving "fairly large (exposure) over a long time."

There is probably little danger, for example, should an accident send the material out of a container and into the Columbia River on its trip to Idaho, Stifelman said.

"Under the worst case, probably nothing would happen dramatically, but you wouldn't want to leave it there."

"Even if it spilled on the ground, we'd just get a loader and put it back in the container," Spomer added. "I think safety is a non-issue as far as travel is concerned."