Toxic Sludge As Fertilizer

The Seattle Times
Sun, Nov 23 1997

A Connecticut company has been illegally selling ash from incinerated vehicle
tires to a Washington firm that processes it and resells it for use in plant
fertilizer. The ash is a good source of zinc, which helps plants grow - but it
also contains the poisonous elements lead and cadmium.

Millions of discarded tires from the East Coast ended up in fertilizer sold in
the West and three foreign nations, in violation of federal hazardous-waste
laws.

A black, toxic ash from a Connecticut tire-burning plant was the key
ingredient
in thousands of tons of fertilizer sold by a small Washington state
company over
the past three years.

Even in the loosely regulated fertilizer industry - where industrial
wastes are
routinely and legally repackaged as an aid to crops - regulators say the
practice by Bay Zinc Co. crossed the line.

As in other cases across the country where toxic wastes have been turned into
fertilizer, this was driven by money: a way for the waste producer to save on
disposal costs, and a way for the fertilizer producer to save on raw materials.
Bay Zinc, of Moxee, Yakima County, made plant food from more than 12,000
tons of
tire ash it received from Exeter Energy Co. of Sterling, Conn., between April
1994 and this August.

Officials in Washington and Connecticut only recently learned about the
operation, which they say violated regulations on the testing, disclosure,
handling and storage of hazardous wastes.

The Washington Department of Ecology has ordered Bay Zinc to stop taking the
tire ash and to dump 188 tons of unsold fertilizer into a hazardous-waste
landfill.

"We should have known about this," said Brian Dick of the Ecology Department.
"They should have told us sooner. I think some people have grabbed on to a
little bit of gray in the regulations."

On the other end of the pipeline, the Connecticut Department of Environmental
Protection has ordered Exeter Energy to stop sending the ash to Bay Zinc and to
put it instead into a hazardous-waste landfill. Officials there say they would
have cracked down a lot sooner had they realized Bay Zinc was turning the waste
into fertilizer.

Exeter Energy operates the largest tire-to-energy plant in the world, with a
3,000-degree oven consuming 10 million tires a year and leaving about 5 percent
of their weight behind as a residue containing zinc, lead and cadmium. The ash
is collected from particulate matter on a pollution-control device that works
like a huge vacuum bag and is called a baghouse. The ash is called fly ash or
baghouse dust.

For the past three years, the company shipped that ash thousands of miles
across
country by truck and rail to Bay Zinc's plant in Central Washington.

If the ash had been collected in one place, it would have made a pile 13 feet
high and the size of a football field. And there would have been 100 tons of
highly toxic lead in the pile.

Bay Zinc mixed the ash with sulfuric acid and water to produce fertilizer
granules sold to distributors who mixed it in blended products for farmers,
nurseries and home gardeners. The buyers were not told the fertilizer was made
from recycled waste.

The granules are 20 percent zinc, which is commonly used in plant food.
But lead
and cadmium, heavy metals of no benefit to plants or animals, are also
included.
They weren't listed on the label or tested by regulators in any of the 10
states
in which the product was sold.

The cadmium and lead come from steel belts in tires. The zinc had been added to
the tires in the manufacturing process as a binding agent.


Product or waste?

In a contract between Exeter Energy and Bay Zinc, the fertilizer company took
all responsibility for following environmental laws. But as the waste
generator,
Exeter Energy was legally responsible for reporting the hazardous waste.

"Two parties by a contract can't void out a federal law," said Ross Bunnell,
enforcement engineer with the Connecticut Department of Environmental
rotection.

At the same time, Bunnell said, Bay Zinc "really ought to know the rules
better
than a tire-burning plant." Bay Zinc has worked with hazardous-waste laws since
they were adopted by Congress in 1976 and holds a hazardous-waste permit.

Bunnell said Connecticut may act with "extreme gravity" against Exeter Energy.

Washington officials are taking a visibly softer approach toward Bay Zinc. The
Department of Ecology and the company have worked together for years to
encourage recycling of industrial wastes into fertilizer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency could step in if EPA decided
Connecticut or Washington authorities weren't responding properly. So far EPA
hasn't acted, but Bunnell said high-level EPA officials are watching the case.

Richard Camp Jr., president of Bay Zinc, said he thought the ash was
exempt from
hazardous-waste regulations because it was a product, not a waste.

Camp also points out that the fertilizer produced from tire ash is lower in
lead and cadmium than another product he sells that is exempt from regulation.
That fertilizer, called "Blu-Min Zinc," is made from even more hazardous dust
from pollution-control devices at two steel mills in the Portland area.

The EPA, under pressure from the steel industry, gave steel mills a special
exemption in 1988, and dust from the mills is not subject to toxicity tests.

But tire ash is. Since it starts out cleaner than steel-mill dust, Bay Zinc
uses the difference between its own products as a selling point: The tire-ash
fertilizer is called "Blu-Min Zinc LHM." The "LHM" means low heavy metals.

"As you can see, there are a lot of ironies in this world of fertilizer," said
Dick of the Ecology Department.


Camp insisted the tire ash makes a safe product.

"The stuff is too good, it's too valuable to up and throw it away," he said. "I
think we'll work this out, within the framework of the law."

The Seattle Times in July exposed the growing national practice of recycling
industrial wastes - many containing toxicants, dioxin and even radioactive
material - into agricultural fertilizers. Before The Times' series, few
farmers
were aware of the practice.

The potential dangers of using wastes in fertilizer are now under study and
debate across the country. Some people, such as Camp, say it's good recycling
with no harm. Other people say it hasn't been proven safe and regulators should
err on the side of safety.

There are no standards for toxic materials in fertilizer in the United States,
although many states - including Washington - are considering imposing
limits and labeling requirements.

There are already limits for materials classified by the federal government as
"hazardous wastes." Those standards are not specific to fertilizers, but apply
generally to disposing of hazardous wastes on the ground. The limits are based
on a leaching test for landfills.

Many hazardous-waste fertilizers have slipped through the cracks, with
producers
claiming they were products, not wastes.

EPA Assistant Administrator Timothy Fields recently clarified that many of the
toxic byproducts used in fertilizers are in fact hazardous wastes, and always
have been.

Some industries get rid of their metal-laced ash in a purer recycling process.
They send it to recyclers who zinc, sending the toxicants to metal smelters and
selling the zinc separately as pure fertilizer or animal feed.

But not Bay Zinc.

"They don't remove lead or cadmium," said Dick, of the Ecology Department. "All
the stuff that's there goes through."

Bay Zinc sold some of its tire-ash fertilizer this fall even as the state was
trying to work out a plan to deal with it legally. Dick said some of the
product
no doubt failed toxicity tests for land disposal, and fertilizer blends made
from it were probably illegal, too.

"I was very disappointed," he said. "Ecology in no way approved of that sale."

The state has asked Bay Zinc to hold on to records of everyone who bought the
fertilizer.

This graph moved here from elsewhere in story Bay Zinc sells its products in 10
states - California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana,
Oregon, Washington and Wyoming - and in Canada, Mexico and Australia.

Camp said he'd like to resume tire-ash shipments from Exeter as soon as
possible. But Exeter Energy manager Ken Wycherley said he wants to hire someone
to make fertilizer, removing more of the toxic elements, at the site of the
tire-burning plant. And Washington officials said Camp hasn't proved he can
make a legal product.

Stephen Artus, general manager of the nation's second-largest tire-burning
plant, Modesto Energy in Modesto, Calif., said he has always reported his tire
ash as a hazardous waste and recycled it in a process that removes the heavy
metals.

That costs the company $181 per ton of ash - far more than the $73 a ton Exeter
Energy was paying to dispose of toxic ash as fertilizer.

The difference adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

"I have no idea how they could do it that way," Artus said. "It was clear to us
that it had to be manifested (labeled and reported) as a hazardous waste."


Effects of cadmium, lead

Exeter Energy's tire ash and Bay Zinc's fertilizer both failed tests for
cadmium, which can be readily absorbed by plants and concentrates in leaves,
grain and fleshy fruits.

Scientists don't know how much cadmium is safe for human exposure. Some
say it's
OK as long as there is enough zinc to counteract the cadmium in plant or animal
tissue.

Others say cadmium is even more pernicious than lead or mercury,
accumulating in
the body and subtly toxic to virtually every system.

Cadmium builds up in the kidney. At high enough doses, it can cause lung
damage,
hypertension and heart ailments, kidney disease, chronic-fatigue syndrome,
Alzheimer's disease, reproductive problems and cancer. The Food and Drug
Administration says cadmium in our diet has held level over the past 20 years.
"It's found a little more frequently in terms of the number of foods," Dr. Mike
Bolger of the FDA said.

Canada, Australia and some European nations, unlike the United States, have
imposed limits on cadmium in fertilizer.

The tire ash also failed tests for lead content. The fertilizer failed one test
for lead and passed another, and Bay Zinc was allowed to take the passing
grade.

At high enough levels, lead exposure can cause cancer, birth defects, and a
range nervous system, especially in children.

Camp argues that the cadmium and lead in his products pose no danger
because the
fertilizer is spread so thin on cropland. He said he's doing a public service.

"We make a big deal of recycling newspapers and beer cans, but when it
gets into
real serious recycling, people get worried because it has a little bit of this
and a little bit of that," Camp said earlier this year.


Home fertilizers affected

Bay Zinc has been under increasing pressure since The Times' July
articles. One
major fertilizer retailer, Cenex Supply and Marketing, after checking its own
records, said it hadn't realized it was buying recycled hazardous wastes from
Bay Zinc. Another, IMC Global, is pressing Bay Zinc and other waste
recyclers to
disclose more details about their toxicity test results.

Bay Zinc's products are typically mixed with the more common plant foods
nitrogen, phosphorous or potassium in custom blends sold to farmers by the
truckload and to homeowners by the bag.

Some of the recycled tire ash may be included in retail fertilizer at hardware
stores. If a fertilizer has black zinc granules, it likely contains Bay Zinc's
product.

Most experts say fertilizer distributors can save a little money with
lower-cost
products such as Bay Zinc's in their custom blends, but the final customers,
such as farmers, pay the same as they do for purer zinc, which is white.

Farmers Michael Rogers in Grays Harbor County and Wade Sikorski in Billings,
Mont., say they should have been told where it came from.

"I'm shocked that this process has been, going on as long as it has, and that
there is little or no concern by our elected officials," Rogers said.

Some people are also concerned about lead or cadmium entering their bodies
through breathing the fertilizer dust.

"We always assumed that fertilizer was safe to handle, but now we know better,"
Sikorski said.


Bay Zinc owner holds influential positions

Richard Camp is a leader in recycling hazardous wastes into fertilizer. He
inherited the business from his father, who founded Bay Chemical Co. in Tacoma
in 1961.

Camp is also an influential member of state and national task forces on the
practice of recycling wastes into fertilizer. In recent months, he has
crisscrossed the country in defense of the practice.

Earlier this month, Camp attended an unpublicized, closed-door meeting of state
fertilizer regulators to argue against tougher standards or labeling of toxic
elements in fertilizer. Camp also volunteered to write The Fertilizer
Institute's position paper on lead, and serves on Gov. Gary Locke's task force
on fertilizer toxicants.

Camp has some strong supporters in the Department of Ecology in Yakima. His
regular inspector, Dick Granberg, says Camp has never had a major violation.
Dennis Bowhay, an expert in hazardous-waste recycling, said: "Bay Zinc has been
trying to develop a low-lead product for years. Just doing it on his own. My
impression of Dick is he has always been pretty far-thinking, looking ahead,
seeing the handwriting on the wall."


Bay Zinc and Exeter Energy both made good money from their arrangement.

Bay Zinc bought the tire ash for about $32 per ton, and Exeter Energy paid $105
per ton for cross-country transportation, to end up with the net cost of
$73 per
ton - cheaper than other disposal options.

Bay Zinc sold the fertilizer for $253 per ton by the truckload. The material,
with 20 percent zinc and 9 percent sulfur as plant foods, is at least 20
percent
cheaper than competing zinc fertilizers.

Bay Zinc's competitors say the
them at a disadvantage.

"We need truth-in-labeling of fertilizers," said Al Davis, executive vice
president of American MicroTrace Corp. in Fairbury, Neb.

"It's disheartening," said Kipp Smallwood, vice president for sales at CoZinCo
Inc. in Denver, Colo. "We are paying good money for clean, raw materials for
zinc and then doing everything we can to make it cleaner, and we find out that
other people are allowed to put hazardous wastes out there."

Duff Wilson's phone message number is 206-464-2288. His e-mail address is:
dwil-new@seatimes.com

Copyright 1997, The Seattle Times.

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