space Press Releases, News Stories

by MARC LIFSHER, The Wall Street Journal

The material, being packed in metal drums, is scheduled to be shipped by sea from the port of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, to Los Angeles and then be trucked to a hazardous-waste landfill in the Mojave Desert operated by Safety-Kleen Corp. of Columbia, S.C. A top Safety-Kleen official has been dispatched to Sihanoukville to make sure the waste is packed and loaded on a ship before a 60-day deadline imposed by the Cambodian government passes in early April. The waste should be in Los Angeles harbor by the end of April, Safety-Kleen says.

Word of the waste's transfer to California spurred environmental activists to protest to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California Gov. Gray Davis. "We request that you deny entry of this dangerous waste into California and forbid its disposal here," says Jane Williams of Rosamond-based California Communities > Against Toxics in a March 14 letter to Mr. Davis.

David Schmidt, a spokesman for the EPA's regional headquarters in San Francisco, says the Imperial County dump is authorized to take the type of waste that is on the Safety-Kleen documentation. But an EPA solid-waste specialist in San Francisco -- Kevin Wong -- concedes that his agency doesn't yet have all the details it needs to give final approval. "We haven't seen any data in terms of concentrate levels," he says.

State toxics officials, charged with enforcing both federal and state regulations, also note that they have almost no information about the Safety-Kleen material. "We're still trying to get our arms around what the numbers are," says James Spagnoli of the California Environmental Protection Agency. "There's confusion in the (state) Department of Toxic Substances Control what the levels are."

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documents describe the waste as "fixation cement cakes," containing mercury-bearing incinerator ash. The material earlier had been produced in the form of "brine sludge" by Formosa Plastics Corp. in Taiwan as a byproduct of a process that uses mercury to produce caustic soda ash for the manufacture of soap, paper, glass and synthetic fibers.

Tom Mullikin, Safety-Kleen's vice president for government and community relations, says the waste contains mercury at levels "significantly below" a threshold set by state and federal regulators for disposal in a "Class I" dump such as the company's Westmorland facility in Imperial County. Lab analyses, he says, show mercury concentrations of 0.012 parts per million. Federal regulations allow Westmorland to take concentrations of up to 0.2 parts per million of mercury.

But international environmental groups question the Safety-Kleen findings. According to a report from the Hong Kong Department of Environmental Protection to the Cambodian government, samples from Sihanoukville showed mercury concentrations at least four times greater than the U.S. limit for safe disposal in a landfill. (The lab noted, however, that its findings are not definitive because they are taking somebody else's word that the samples came from the Cambodian waste.)

The apparent discrepancy between the two reported levels and the generalized dearth of information about the Sihanoukville waste is raising suspicions among environmentalists. "It seems that Safety-Kleen has sold this thing as nonhazardous when everyone in the world said it's hazardous," says Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network in Seattle. The group works to monitor compliance with a 1989 treaty, the Basel Convention on hazardous waste trafficking.

According to EPA reports and widespread news coverage in Asia, concern about the toxicity of the Formosa Plastics waste -- consisting of crushed and bagged cement mixed with mercury and other metals -- arose shortly after the material arrived in Cambodia on a Taiwanese freighter last Nov. 28. The bags were deposited --illegally, Cambodian officials say -- in an open field near a village six miles outside of Sihanoukville, an oceanside resort on the Gulf of Thailand. Soon after, a stevedore who had cleaned the hold of the freighter died.

Although there was no proof that the death was linked to the waste, the death sparked widespread panic, which caused four more deaths from traffic accidents as Sihanoukville residents fled town. A sixth death, a man who reportedly slept on sacks that had contained the waste, has also been connected to the mercury dumping case, Dow Jones Newswires reported. The Cambodian government, responding to public outrage, ordered Formosa Plastics to remove the waste within 60 days.

For its part, Formosa Plastics -- which couldn't be reached to comment on the deaths -- has previously said that people came into contact with the waste because of mishandling by its original waste-disposal broker. Formosa Plastics turned to Safety-Kleen and the environmental consulting firm of Camp Dresser & McKee Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. "They chose us because they wanted to stand behind the strictest environmental regulations in the world," says Safety-Kleen's Mr. Mullikin.

For their part, environmentalists vow to fight efforts by Safety-Kleen and other waste companies to begin large-scale importations of hazardous materials to California disposal sites.

"We're not going to become the pay toilet for the Pacific Rim," says Ms. Williams, the Communities Against Toxics activist.