Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 1, 1992 TAG: 9202010036
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE
DATELINE: FAIRLAWN LENGTH: Long
A BURNING ISSUE
Good old county dumps - municipal sanitary landfills, in bureaucratese - are becoming passe. They are too expensive and nobody wants them even near their back yard.In solid waste management circles, high-tech incinerators are one of the hot new items on the block. And the Radford Army Ammunition Plant wants to be the first to have one to burn household and hazardous garbage.
It is called "Incinerator 2000" - and for a reason. Arsenal officials believe it would take at least eight years to put all the pieces together and get everybody signed up.
Plans are sketchy right now, but they are convinced it would solve waste disposal problems for the arsenal and neighboring localities.
Baked trash a la New River Valley.
It will not be an easy recipe, however. Major obstacles include getting a few federal laws changed, putting $75 million up front, obtaining half a dozen permits and getting regional cooperation among governments accustomed to doing their own thing.
And it is sure to spark controversy in the New River Valley and beyond.
Although some believe incinerators are crucial to handling America's growing garbage pile, others consider them to be environmental disasters that merely shift the problem from the ground to the air.
Taking that into account, arsenal officials are testing the waters before spending a lot of time and money on planning, in case the idea sinks.
They have presented it to local officials, who have listened with mild interest. They also have run it by Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., and Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, both of whom seem to like the concept.
Boucher has arranged a meeting this month. with local officials and arsenal folks to see who is thinking what.
"I think this thing really needs political backing," said plant commander Dennis Duplantier.
And forgoing a grand announcement or big news conference, the arsenal has begun a quiet public relations and education campaign.
"I think it is important that this information get out," said plant manager E.K. "Skip" Hurley, a vice president of Hercules Inc., which runs the plant. "There's always going to be a difference of opinion."
Duplantier, Hurley and two arsenal engineers, Terry Lyon and Harold "Chip" Batton, acknowledge that the plan is still wrinkled in a number of places.
Here is what they do know.
The arsenal currently burns propellant waste three ways: Scrap propellant is burned in an incinerator; impure propellant is burned openly in flash pans; and other items tainted with propellant powder such as worker clothes, lumber and containers are burned in open pits.
Arsenal officials face an annual tab of $27.5 million to get rid of all their waste. That includes replacing or upgrading the existing propellant incinerator to meet federal law. Also, the state Air Pollution Control Board will someday ban the arsenal's practice of open burning.
The waste propellant is classified as hazardous because it is explosive. It is best not to bury or transport it because "you never know when it could go off," said an air board staffer.
Out in the civilian world, New River Valley governments are racking their brains to find the best and most inexpensive way to get rid of municipal garbage.
Arsenal officials think they have a solution for everyone.
The localities, Montgomery, Giles, Floyd and Pulaski counties and Radford, estimate that they generate about 375 tons of garbage a day. The arsenal produces about 20 to 25 tons of burnable waste daily .
The arsenal might mix it all together and then burn it. Or it might burn the household trash to generate enough heat to burn the propellant at 1,600 degrees.
This is one of the wrinkles of the plan.
The Environmental Protection Agency has set a goal for hazardous waste burners to destroy 99.99 percent of the toxic material.
Critics say the problem with mixing the two types of waste, or "cocktailing," is maintaining a constant temperature long enough to thoroughly burn the garbage.
Household trash contains so much different stuff - food, paper, metals and plastics - that keeping a constant temperature is difficult.
"Once you start mixing the two, you run into a lot of technical problems that largely cannot be solved," said Stephen Lester, a scientist with Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes in Arlington.
The hodgepodge of household trash creates another problem: air pollution. Sulfur dioxides, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and lead, all commonly produced in burning almost anything, are regulated by federal law.
Other specific toxins, including dioxins and furans, two of the known byproducts of burning municipal solid waste, are regulated by the state.
But Lester and others claim that burning cans of Raid, Styrofoam cups and other junk together creates new and even unknown compounds.
Arsenal officials stressed that Incinerator 2000 would be built under hazardous waste specifications requiring the best available technology to control pollution.
Further, it would burn only arsenal hazardous waste.
"We have no intention of having this be a hazardous waste incinerator for any other outside waste," Hurley said. Federal law prohibits private operators of federal facilities from accepting outside hazardous waste, he noted.
And the localities probably would prevent that from happening as well, Duplantier said. "We see a community board to operate it. We may not even run it."
But that is another detail to be worked out.
Then there is the ash, one of the most troublesome results of burning rubbish. Incinerator 2000 would generate about 41,000 tons of hazardous ash yearly that would have to be buried in a hazardous waste landfill.
The federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act bans cocktailing mostly because it generates more hazardous waste than necessary, said EPA spokeswoman Susan Lamont. And finding dump sites for hazardous waste is one of the hottest political issues going.
If arsenal officials can get the law changed, they will face that very problem.
"Right now we're making hazardous waste [including ash] and we're taking it to Indiana's back yard," as well as to Ohio and Michigan, Duplantier said. There are no commercial hazardous waste dumps in EPA Region III, which includes Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Washington.
One possibility would be to use the ash as building material for roads, an approach that is used in some parts of the world but has not been widely tested.
Another would be to build a hazardous waste dump as part of the New River Resource Authority's proposed landfill at the Matson property in north Pulaski County, Duplantier said. The authority disposes of trash from Pulaski County and Radford.
Jerry White, an authority board member and Pulaski County chairman, said he first learned of that idea from the newspaper. "Well, I thought that was certainly a bold assumption on someone's part," he said.
The authority board has not heard the presentation as a group, White said, and has not agreed to join the project, much less bury the ash.
As for the New River Valley's recycling efforts, Incinerator 2000 could include a front-end phase to separate and sort bottles, metals, aluminum and so on, but that has not been worked out yet.
Environmental questions aside, the bottom line may decide the fate of Incinerator 2000. It is expensive.
To build the thing, the localities would likely have to sell bonds. Their share would be based on the volume of trash produced: $25 million for Montgomery County; $13.5 for the New River Resource Authority; $6.5 million for Giles County; and $2.5 million for Floyd County.
The arsenal's up-front contribution would be about $27.5 million. Arsenal officials hope to get a slice of the peace dividend for the project, which they say can be an economic development boost.
As a waste-to-energy facility - steam is produced to run an electricity-generating turbine - the incinerator would sell power to the arsenal.
User fees would cover the remaining operating costs. The Army would pay $29 a ton, having paid most of the construction cost, and localities would pay in the range of $66 per ton for operation and bond repayment.
That is about on par, or perhaps more than future fees local governments are facing at their own landfills.
Could Incinerator 2000 solve their problems?
"They like it," Duplantier said, but "no one can say OK because someone has to come up with the money." He said one of the original boosters of the concept is Charles Maus, director of the New River Resource Authority.
Maus himself would not say if he liked the idea, just that it was an option. "Everybody's just looking to see how they can develop this thing from a government and technical viewpoint," he said.
Montgomery County leaders see it the same way: It is only one alternative. Other choices for the county are to build a new landfill, to expand the old one, to join the authority or to join a new regional dump in Roanoke County.
"The incinerator looks like an interesting concept," county Supervisor Henry Jablonski said. "You're not merely throwing something away."
But like other valley officials, Jablonski said there are too many unanswered questions - especially about the dollars - to make even a preliminary decision.
"Given the lack of landfills and the cost of landfills, it may be as good as any other means," said Giles County Administrator Kenneth Weaver, but the initial expense is daunting. Giles now spends $400,000 a year on solid waste disposal.
Jerry White wondered about the health and environmental problems.
"Depending on what experts you talk to . . . it's such a mixed bag of ideas on how safe or unsafe the whole incineration process really is," he said. "As an authority member, I guess I would have to say I'm against it until shown or proven that I should be for it."
This is not the first time valley officials have pondered the idea of incineration.
In 1980, the New River Valley Planning District Commission had studied the idea of a regional waste-to-energy facility. But several of the industries that would have purchased the steam or electricity closed.
Seven years later, the commission did a similar study for Montgomery and Floyd counties. The resource authority conducted its own study. Both concluded they did not have enough garbage to make it work.
In Montgomery County, public opposition reached a boiling point before the board even thought about taking a vote, Jablonski said.
This time around, there is bound to be some of the same citizen heat.
Pete Castelli, a Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes representative in Floyd County, said he already has received a few phone calls about the arsenal's idea.
"Who says bigger is better?" he said. "It's a very bad idea."
First, incinerators do not eliminate the need for landfills because the ash still has to be buried, even though it is more concentrated than trash. And there has to be a backup dump in case of an incinerator shutdown.
And second, to be cost-effective, incinerators have to burn huge amounts of garbage. That flies in the face of recycling and source reduction, Castelli said. "If there's not as many places to dump it, burn it or bury it, people will be forced to reduce packaging."
John Lester, a state Air Pollution Control Board inspector in Roanoke, said he thinks Incinerator 2000 is a good idea. It is a monitored process, rather than burning the stuff in the open where they do not know how bad emissions are because they cannot be measured, he said.
Paige Hunter, his co-worker and an air toxics engineer, agrees. "If properly controlled, it would not endanger the community any more than what they are currently doing."
Waste Facts\ \ As of April 1991, 136 waste-to-energy plants in 36 states were handling nearly 16 percent (29 million tons) of the estimated 185 million toms of trash generated in the United States.
\ Nearly 100 facilities in the U.S. are currently in various stages of planning, construction or permitting. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that by the year 2000, more than 300 plants will handle one-forth of the nation's solid wastes.