State lawmakers from Wayne County are outlining plans to prevent future loads of out-of-state radioactive or hazardous waste from being dumped in Michigan’s most populous county, but they face obstacles.
State Sen. Darrin Camilleri, D-Trenton, and Rep. Reggie Miller, D-Van Buren Township, both said they will be introducing bills to stop waste haulers from choosing Michigan as a place to dump their most toxic stuff, such as the load of contaminated soil and rubble removed from a former Manhattan Project storage site in western New York.
They want to ban radioactive material, raise the fees Michigan charges for loads of hazardous waste, and enact stricter rules for operating hazardous waste dumps and injection wells.
“I think people are angry and they’re frustrated and they don’t want our community to be the place where the country sends their trash,” Camilleri said. “We’ve heard this for a long time. We have a lot of landfills in the southern Wayne County region and I think it’s important for us to evaluate whether or not that’s the type of community we want to be.”
But they face a road block to ban out-of-state waste entirely. A 35-year-old dispute over a St. Clair County landfill that reached the U.S. Supreme Court imposed a constitutional hurdle in state lawmakers’ fight to get commercial toxic waste disposal out of Wayne County.
At the time, Michigan law said a county had to explicitly authorize a landfill to receive solid waste generated in another county, state or country. St. Clair County’s plan didn’t authorize out-of-county dumping, so it denied Fort Gratiot Sanitary Landfill’s request to accept waste from outside the county.
The landfill sued the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, which regulated landfills at the time. It argued the state law’s restrictions on waste imports was invalid under the Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce between the states and prohibits states from enacting policies that favor their own economies.
The nation’s highest court agreed in a 7-2 decision, determining Michigan’s solid waste law discriminated against interstate commerce by allowing counties to isolate themselves from the national economy.
“The U.S. Constitution controls the free flow of commerce unless Congress otherwise dictates,” said Art Siegal, a Detroit environmental attorney who said he filed a brief on behalf of a national solid waste management association in the Fort Gratiot landfill case. “Here, Congress has not, so therefore the states are not permitted to step in and regulate the flow of materials.
“Can they regulate the actual handling, disposal and treatment of those materials? Yes, and other things too, related to the business of the operation.”
Camilleri described his ideas for maneuvering around the Commerce Clause while trying to reject hazardous waste coming into Wayne County. He said he would pursue a ban of radioactive material, a ban on new hazardous waste landfills and injection wells, stricter post-closure rules and financial assurances and higher fees to discourage dumping in Michigan.
“I want to ensure that whatever action we take does not put us into a lengthy court battle,” Camilleri said. “I don’t want to cost us additional tax dollars in this pursuit, but I think there’s a ‘both and’ here.”
Banning manmade radioactive waste
The Manhattan Project waste coming to Van Buren Township’s Wayne Disposal facility, owned by Republic Services, raised alarm bells for community members who voiced concerns about the potential risk the material posed to their health and environment last week at a town hall in Van Buren Township.
Residents voiced similar outrage in February 2023, when waste from the high-profile East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment was sent to Republic Services’ Van Buren Township landfill and its hazardous waste injection well in Romulus.
“This issue is something that’s very near and dear to all the residents of Van Buren Township and the surrounding communities,” said Chris Donley, a resident of Van Buren Township. “(Wayne Disposal) is located 800 feet from Belleville Lake, which is a direct tributary to the Huron River, which in turn dumps right into one of our greatest resources, the Great Lakes.”
Donley said he worries that having radioactive waste nearby puts people at risk of developing cancer. Wayne Disposal is near many residential neighborhoods, schools and waterways, he said.
“Why on earth would you put this in a sensitive location such as this one?” he asked. “There’s other options available, in way less populated areas.”
Donley and other Wayne County residents traveled to Lansing on Wednesday to join Miller as she announced she had introduced a bill this week that would effectively ban radioactive waste from being disposed of in Michigan. She said it’s modeled after the New York law that kept the Manhattan Project waste from being disposed of within that state.
Miller’s bill, House Bill 5923, would prohibit the disposal of anything the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers “technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material.”
That includes materials made by concentrating or processing naturally radioactive elements such as radium, uranium, thorium or radon. Activities such as mining, oil and gas production and fertilizer production create those enhanced radioactive materials, according to the EPA.
Some of the material that Wayne Disposal will get from the Manhattan Project site in New York will meet the definition of “technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material,” said Liz Browne, EGLE materials management division director.
“The residents have told me again that they are worried and upset,” Miller said at a Wednesday morning press conference in Lansing. “They want something done about this radioactive waste that’s coming in from three states away to their backyards, and I feel the same way. We need to ensure that both the Great Lakes in Michigan and Michigan’s inland lakes will be protected from radioactive pollution, plain and simple.”
What other states charge
Both Camilleri and Miller said they also are working on bills that would increase the fees Michigan charges to hazardous waste landfills, which both lawmakers said they believe are far lower than other states’ fees.
Michigan charges hazardous waste landfills $10 per ton or cubic yard or a half-cent per pound of material disposed of, plus an additional $5 per ton surcharge on manmade radioactive material. It also charges hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities annual fees of $2,000.
New York charges assessments ranging from $27 per ton for land filling down to $2 per ton for on-site incineration, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Charges to hazardous waste fees generated $520,000 in 2023, funding 8% of the budget for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy’s Hazardous Waste Program, according to a report EGLE provided to the Legislature in April. The rest of the department’s money comes from the EPA, licensing fees and other state environmental funds, Browne said.
The Hazardous Waste Program is charged with permitting, inspecting, enforcing and overseeing the closure and cleanup for hazardous waste generators, transporters and treatment and disposal facilities.
In contrast, New York charges hazardous waste treatment, storage and disposal facilities $12,000 for up to 1,000 tons per year, or $30,000 for more than 1,000 tons, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
In addition, the state charges facilities between $100,000-$300,000 depending on their gross receipts tax, $10,000 for each incinerator or energy recovery unit, $24,000 for each surface impoundment and $3,000 for closure of a facility.
Ohio charges $9 per ton for off-site landfilling, $4.50 per ton for off-site deep well injection, $2 per ton for on-site deep well injection and $4 per ton of on-site landfilling, plus fees for storing waste and annual fees for different types of disposal facilities that range from $5,000 to $40,000.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed raising Michigan’s low “tipping fees” for non-hazardous solid waste early this year when she presented her budget proposal to the Democratic-controlled Legislature. The second-term Democrat suggested raising the fees to fund environmental programs, but tipping fee changes were left out of the final budget.
Camilleri introduced a bill in January that would raise state-levied fees on Class 1 commercial hazardous injection wells to $100 per ton or 0.417 cents per gallon of material. There is a commercial hazardous waste injection well in Romulus, which is in Camilleri’s district.
His proposed fee would be among the highest in the nation, Camilleri said.
“There currently is no fee that they have to pay at all, which has been the biggest problem that I’ve had with this facility in my community,” he said. “There is no direct benefit to our community whatsoever. And I don’t want there to be, but the fact (is that) we have to take on so much of this pollution, and my city and the city of Romulus have to prepare for worst case scenarios with emergency equipment and personnel in event of disaster, and have no financial resources to potentially take care of that situation.”
It’s unclear what kind of fee would deter companies from disposing of hazardous waste at Wayne Disposal, EGLE’s Browne said.
“There are not a lot of well-managed hazardous waste landfills in the country,” Browne said. “Wayne Disposal is a well-managed hazardous waste landfill, so companies are going to look for that. … I don’t know where you would have to put that number to make it be a strong deterrent, because there aren’t that many around.”
How Army Corps decided on Michigan
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is charged with remediating Manhattan Project sites around the country, where World War II-era scientists developed the atomic bomb and atomic energy technology.
The Corps is sending Manhattan Project waste to Wayne Disposal from six sites, spokesperson Jennifer Miller said. Those include the coming shipments from the Niagara Falls Storage Site in New York; coming shipments from the Harshaw Chemical Company Site in Cleveland; and ongoing shipments from the Luckey Site in Luckey, Ohio, the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in Middletown, Iowa, the St. Louis Downtown Site and North County Sites in St. Louis and the DuPont Chamber Works Site in Deepwater, New Jersey.
The Corps previously sent material to Wayne Disposal from three other Manhattan Project sites — Tonawanda Landfill Vicinity Property and Seaway Site in Tonawanda, New York; Middlesex Municipal Landfill and Middlesex Sampling Plant in Middlesex, New Jersey; and Staten Island Warehouse Site in Staten Island, New York.
The Corps again landed on Wayne Disposal for the first phase of cleanup at the Niagara Falls Storage Site in western New York after vetting the 20 licensed commercial hazardous waste disposal facilities in the U.S., said Neil Miller, environmental branch chief at the Army Corps’ Buffalo District.
From there, the Corps looked for facilities that can accept radioactive waste and asked those facilities if they were interested in accepting waste from the New York site. Seven were. The Corps inspected those seven for environmental issues and narrowed the list to five.
Of them, Wayne Disposal was the closest to New York. The other sites were in Utah, Idaho and Texas, Neil Miller said. A waste contractor ultimately chose Wayne Disposal, he said.
The material that will be trucked from New York to Michigan this month will have a radioactivity level of about 40 picocuries per gram of radium-226, Neil Miller said. For reference, he said the average concentration of radium-226 American soil is 1 picocurie per gram.
Michigan solid waste landfills are allowed to accept material with radioactivity up to 25 picocuries per gram, EGLE’s Browne said. They can accept material up to 50 picocuries per gram with permission from EGLE.
Commercial hazardous waste facilities, such as Wayne Disposal in Van Buren Township, can accept material up to 50 picocuries without special approval from EGLE. With approval, it can accept more radioactive stuff, but Browne said the department has never received a request for that.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission steps in to regulate high-level nuclear waste.
Browne said Wayne Disposal has to monitor the air for signs of escaping radiation, follow EGLE-approved designs for the safe disposal of the waste, take samples and open the facility to inspectors.
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Publish date : 2024-09-11 16:01:00
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