Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 5, 1992 TAG: 9203050258
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
W.E. "Bill" Smith said Tarmac/Roanoke Cement Co. will appeal the federal action.
Tarmac's contract with a Roanoke contractor to build hazardous-waste storage tanks and to upgrade fuel systems at the Botetourt County plant snagged the EPA application, Smith said. The application was filed in August.
If an appeal fails, the company would be forced to file a far more complicated application with the federal agency, one that could take years to pass - or never succeed. The company had planned to begin burning hazardous waste this year.
John Lambert, a Roanoke public relations executive hired to represent the company, had no estimate Wednesday of how much the EPA action has delayed the waste-burning.
After an EPA employee was quoted on the agency's imminent decision in a news report Saturday, Tarmac sent a delegation to EPA's Philadelphia regional office on Monday to ask about it, according to Gary Gross, a staffer there.
Tarmac got official notice in writing Wednesday. In a nine-page letter, EPA said the pact with Roanoke contractor Breakell Inc. was not nearly detailed or definite enough to meet federal regulations.
The letter mirrors almost point by point many of the claims made in a Jan. 23 letter to the EPA from Gene Derryberry, a lawyer hired by Valley Concerned Citizens, local opponents of the waste-burning.
The letter to Tarmac from EPA's Philadelphia office, which oversees Virginia, listed the information missing from the company's application - including specifications, a construction timetable, drawings and documents. Derryberry had cited nearly identical holes in Tarmac's information.
Under rules that took effect last year, companies wanting swift federal approval to burn hazardous waste in a cement kiln or other kind of industrial furnace must be doing it already or have made firm plans to begin. Those plans were supposed to have been documented in Tarmac's application, including its contract with Breakell.
Gross, one of the EPA staffers handling Tarmac's application, said it was the first time his regional office - covering the District of Columbia, Virginia and four other states - had said no to a cement plant's proposal to burn hazardous waste. It has approved three other applications and four proposals are pending.
"We're elated," Wayne Weikel of Valley Concerned Citizens said Wednesday, "because this does give us more time to plan" opposition. He said the group will focus now on a public hearing next month on county zoning amendments that could prohibit the burning of hazardous waste.
Since its formation in September, Valley Concerned Citizens has grown from six people to an estimated 150 against the burning. They raised thousands of dollars for literature, advertisements and legal fees. They collected more than 3,000 signatures on petitions against Tarmac's plans.
Also at the request of the group, three Virginia politicians recently alerted the EPA to the organization's environmental concerns. Rep. Jim Olin, D-Roanoke, said Wednesday that he questioned Tarmac and the EPA about them. "Tarmac is going to have to satisfy EPA on every fine point," he said.
U.S. Sen. Chuck Robb, D-Virginia, wrote EPA administrator William Reilly last month for a response to the questions of the citizens' group, and U.S. Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, also asked the EPA for information about the Tarmac application.
The burning of hazardous waste by companies like Tarmac is a growing environmental issue around the country.
Once it was stuff that no one wanted, but now hazardous waste is being pursued as a lucrative fuel for kilns that make cement and other furnaces that produce aggregate building materials. Those industries are competing with commercial hazardous-waste incinerators around the country to capture the hazardous-waste market.
More than 25 cement and aggregate plants have burned it - some for many years. Now dozens more want to do it, and last year stricter new EPA regulations went into effect to police it.
Tarmac, for one, could earn fees from taking the waste and also save money on coal - its main fuel - by substituting about 45,000 tons a year with the waste.
The company wants to bring as many as 105 hazardous materials - including solvents and contaminated soils - to the 40-year-old cement plant. Most of it would come by rail to the plant on Virginia 779 in southwestern Botetourt County.
Tarmac's EPA documents show that the waste could contain carcinogenic heavy metals, although a Tarmac engineer gave assurances in recent months that those would come in small amounts and be rigorously controlled.
Tarmac and other cement companies contend that burning the waste in their 3,000-degree kilns is environmentally better than burying it in landfills or leaving barrels of it to rust around manufacturing plants. Tarmac officials say emissions from burning the waste would be no more harmful than those from burning coal. Sulfur emissions may decrease, they say.
The company's news release quotes Robert Mournighan of EPA's Thermal Destruction Branch as saying that if EPA standards are met by waste-burners, "there should be no negative effect on the environment or health hazard to the community."
But some national environmental groups like Greenpeace and local ones like Valley Concerned Citizens warn that the kilns' pollution controls will not protect people and the environment from potentially harmful emissions. Neighbors and two public health doctors also have expressed concern about emissions or spills contaminating Roanoke's water supply at the Carvins Cove reservoir, less than a mile away.
by CNB