Solid Waste Action Team,   http://www.lexingtonma.org/swat/HomePage.htm

1. Mass Recycle is having a Mass. Recycles Day on Nov. 15 with events taking place in the prior two weeks. The goal is to build consumer demand for recycled products and education. Deadline for registering an event (with Brian Taillon at 617-338-0244) is Oct.

2. [Note: The following two newspaper articles concern a class action lawsuit filed against the operator of a municipal trash incinerator in Ohio. While this lawsuit failed on legal technicalities, it does raise the question of whether Wheelabrator, NESWC, or the NESWC towns might not be placing themselves in the same position as the tobacco companies, i.e.. should plaintiffs find a successful line of legal attack the communities could be exposed to multimillion dollar liabilities. - John Andrews.]

South Side dioxin suit dismissed

Residents argued they were harmed by city trash plant

March 20, 1998

By Jim Woods Dispatch City Hall Reporter , Colombus Dispatch

The city of Columbus won a major legal victory yesterday with the dismissal of a federal lawsuit that claimed residents were harmed by dioxin spewed from the now shuttered trash-burning power plant.

Judge George C. Smith of U.S. District Court granted the city's motion for summary judgment, saying the class-action suit failed to prove residents were entitled to compensation under federal law.

The lawsuit sought damages for residents in a 13-square-mile area around the South Side plant. There were claims that plant emissions of dioxin -- a probable carcinogen -- caused illness, mental duress and lowered property values.

Mayor Greg Lashutka said he's pleased by the judge's decision.

"It confirms what I believe to have been what is right for our entire community,'' the mayor said.

Lashutka and Assistant City Attorney Dan Drake said the decision has vindicated the city's position that no harm was ever done to residents.

Drake said that countless studies, including one performed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, supported the city.

"We vehemently denied that any resident or property owner was ever damaged or exposed to damage because of the plant operations, and we're gratified that the court agreed with us in that regard,'' Drake said.

The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio also was a defendant in the suit.

Michael G. Long, director of the authority, said the decision is good news but said he won't comment further until he reads it.

The plaintiffs, John R. and Kathleen Myers and Bill Webb, have the option of refiling their complaint in Franklin County Common Pleas Court. Judge Smith declined to rule on a second city request for summary judgment on the basis of sovereign immunity -- that the city cannot be sued -- saying it was a matter for the state court.

The Myerses and Webb, who live on the South Side, were unavailable for comment.

Richard Alexander, the environmental attorney from San Jose, Calif., who filed the case, also couldn't be reached. John Zeiger, the local co-counsel, declined comment.

The suit, filed in January 1996, claimed that dioxin and a related class of chemicals called furans were created by burning trash.

Dioxin is a family of compounds that combine chlorine and benzene molecules.

Dioxin contamination caused the evacuation of the infamous Love Canal in upstate New York in the 1970s and Times Beach, Mo., during the 1980s.

A 1994 study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared dioxin to be highly toxic and a probable carcinogen.

The trash-burning power plant was once identified as a top producer of dioxin in the country. A 1992 stack test found levels of the chemical to be 500 times higher than what the U.S. EPA recommended.

The city of Columbus opened the Jackson Pike plant in 1983 and burned trash there for nine years. Columbus then leased the plant to the waste authority, which experienced financial problems that culminated in the December 1994 closing of the plant.

If the city had lost the case, there was the possibility of paying millions of dollars in damages. The federal government paid $70 million into a victims' compensation fund for those who lived near the uranium nuclear materials plant in Fernald, Ohio. The Columbus City Council in 1996 approved paying $250,000 to attorneys John W. Hoberg and Edgar A. Strause of the Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease law firm to assist with the city's defense.

Lashutka said he believes the money was well-spent. He also commended the efforts of City Attorney Janet Jackson and Drake.

The plant site may soon reopen. Columbus and Solid Waste authority officials have been negotiating a lease agreement with Superior Graphite, a Chicago-based company that refines graphite for industrial lubrication uses.

The proposed lease would pay $500,000 to the city. But that would cover only a small portion of the city's annual $18 million debt payment on the plant. The city still owes $170 million.

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Judge silent on dioxin, activist says

March 21, 1998

By Jim Woods Dispatch City Hall Reporter

While the city of Columbus may have won in the courtroom, environmental activist Teresa Mills says a judge's ruling didn't address whether dioxin emitted by the trash-burning power plant harmed residents.

Judge George Smith of U.S. District Court on Thursday granted summary judgment to the city, finding that plant neighbors were not entitled to damages under the federal Superfund law.

"I am really confused on how the city can say that it's vindicated,'' said Mills, a member of the Neighbors Protecting Our Environment organization in Grove City.

Mills said Smith's ruling is silent concerning the fundamental question of how the dioxin discharge affected the health of residents. The plant closed in December 1994.

"Do I feel people have been damaged by the trash plant? There's absolutely no doubt in my mind,'' Mills said.

But a joint study done by the Ohio EPA, the Ohio Department of Agriculture and the Ohio and Columbus health departments failed to establish a tie between the dioxin emissions and the incidence of cancer, said Mike Pompili of the Columbus City Health Department.

"The more I learned about dioxin, the more I realize what I did not know. .

. . It's an extremely complicated issue,'' Pompili said.

Dioxin -- a family of compounds that combine chlorine and benzene molecules -- has been identified as a probable carcinogen.

Paul Koval, air pollution toxicologist for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, said that dioxin emissions from the trash-burning plant's smokestacks were significant.

A 1992 stack test found levels of dioxin 500 times higher than what the U.S.

EPA recommended. Koval said dioxin releases into the atmosphere were being significantly reduced before the plant closed in December 1994 because of financial problems.

Pompili said that it's known that dioxin can be transmitted to humans through the food chain, and one aspect of the joint study examined where animals grazed in fields closest to the trash-burning plant.

No link could be found between dioxin emissions and cancer rates on the South Side, he said.

Mills said that the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta never did a medical monitoring study that could have better addressed the question.

Though the city won in federal court, Judge Smith left open the door for the plaintiffs to take their case to Franklin County Common Pleas Court. The federal judge declined to address the question of whether sovereign immunity protects the city from being sued on the issue.

Richard Alexander, the attorney from San Jose, Calif., who represented the plaintiffs, did not return phone messages.

The trash-burning plant never was a financial success and required huge subsidies. City Auditor Hugh J. Dorrian said the plant was the biggest financial disaster in city history.

The city still owes $206.5 million on the plant to be paid off through 2010.

The total cost for building the plant was $461,807,950.

Voters in 1977 approved the municipal bonds to pay for building the trash-burning power plant. Dorrian said he believes support for the plant was fueled in part by that year's harsh winter and high utility bills.

The trash-burning plant enjoyed the backing of then-Mayor Tom Moody and citizen groups such as the League of Women Voters, as well as bipartisan support on City Council.

Dorrian was one of the few to oppose the project.

"I just read the arithmetic different than they did,'' he said. "There was far too much speculation. I never felt that the financing was in a good position.''

The $18 million in yearly payments for the power plant could have been invested in other capital improvement projects, he said.

Superior Graphite, a Chicago- based company that refines graphite for industrial lubricants, has expressed interest in leasing a part of the shuttered power plant for $500,000 a year.

3. [Note: The following newspaper article describes the negative economic impacts that a trash incinerator has had upon an Illinois community. Of particular note are 1) The misleading economic claims advanced to justify the incinerator, 2) the attempt to make the incinerator profitable by obtaining a sizeable taxpayer subsidy, and 3) the negative effect upon real estate values - "Nobody wants to be next to an incinerator. It's not development. It's de-development." - John Andrews.]

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Poor Town That Sought Incinerator Finds More Problems, Few Benefits

Environmentalists, State, Neighbors Foil Cash-for-Trash Plan

By Jon Jeter, Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, April 11, 1998; Page A03

ROBBINS, Ill.-The first meeting was nearly a decade ago, but Barry Neal remembers it vividly. When you are in the business of burning garbage -- by the ton, no less -- it is not every day that a town rolls out the red carpet.

The mayor of this Chicago suburb summoned Neal to ask if the Pennsylvania company he worked for would consider building a mammoth garbage burner here.

In return for cash, jobs and a few college scholarships, this desperately poor, all-black town of 7,000 people was more than willing to provide a home for a new incinerator. In fact, Robbins courted it. And when environmentalists and other nearby suburbs argued that the burner was unsafe and mounted a campaign in opposition, Robbins fought back. At a hearing six years ago, scores of supporters showed up wearing painters' caps that read: "Yes. In My Back Yard."

And so, 15 miles south of Chicago's heroic skyline, the Robbins Resource Recovery Facility opened a year ago. Its white smokestack towers over an archipelago of aging communities "like the Washington monument of Chicago's south suburbs," says Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D), whose congressional district includes Robbins.

But things have not gone as planned. Months before the plant opened, environmental groups prodded Illinois lawmakers to repeal a generous tax subsidy for incinerators like it. Without that, the firm that owns the garbage burner, Foster Wheeler Corp., has been unable to turn a profit, and Robbins, in turn, has collected only a fraction of the money that town officials had been counting on as part of the deal.

As a result, the town is arguably worse off than before. The plant's location has strained further the uneasy relationship between Robbins and its more prosperous neighbors. Already barren of any real economic development, the town is saddled with a soaring, smoke-belching trash burner that shoos away commercial investment like a scarecrow guarding a cornfield.

"Nobody wants to be next to an incinerator," Jackson said. "It's not development. It's de-development."

This hamlet's futile efforts to salvage a future from other people's garbage offers lessons on environmental discrimination and the placement of disproportionate numbers of unwanted waste facilities, chemical plants and refineries in poor, minority communities. Complicated by history, contorted by racial suspicions, Robbins's struggle for solvency challenges pat definitions of victim-hood and capitalism.

"Everybody got all in an uproar when we said we wanted to bring Foster Wheeler in here," said Robbins Mayor Irene Brodie, a soft-spoken but blunt woman who lobbied for the incinerator. "They said it was bad for the environment and all, but hmmm. . . ." She paused for a second, then continued resolutely.

"Didn't nobody ever come out and protest the fact that we were poor? How come nobody ever protested that?"

The paradox of Robbins's deferred dreams is this: Outside the plant's gates sit burned-out, abandoned clapboard houses with narrow front yards that are used as illicit dumps by passersby. Like the aftermath from a hellish parade, streams of trash, rubber tires, broken furniture and plastic bottles lie scattered only a few feet away from a state-of-the-art, $385 million-dollar waste disposal. The city cannot easily afford to clean up the mess.

Founded in 1917, Robbins is the oldest all-black community in the North. Its municipal airport was the first in the nation owned and managed by African Americans, but a windstorm toppled the structure in 1931. The town has been snakebitten since, according to the old-timers here. It is, according to U.S.

Census Bureau figures, among the poorest suburbs in America.

Commercial development in Robbins consists mostly of rundown liquor stores that open as early as 8 a.m., mom-and-pop convenience stores and the underground bazaar of pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. The big employer here is a nursing home. It has 105 employees.

Between 1970 and 1990, Robbins lost a third of its population. The town collects roughly $270,000 annually in property taxes.

Over the years, Brodie said, she and her predecessors have courted drugstores, grocers, shopping malls, banks and factories. None came. Hoping to entice health care workers, the town built a medical clinic. The building was never occupied. Robbins tore it down.

Developers interested in building homes or opening businesses here have historically been discouraged from doing so by area bankers, according to economists, historians and elected officials. Area banks typically either refused to lend money for commercial projects in Robbins or redirected development to neighboring white communities such as Blue Island, Midlothian or Alsip, said Larry McClellan, a sociology professor and director of the South Metropolitan Leadership Center at Governors State University in Illinois.

Chicago had the only incinerator in Illinois until 1987, when state lawmakers sparked a proliferation of garbage burners. Fearing -- unnecessarily as it turned out -- that the state was exhausting its landfill capacity, the legislature approved a tax incentive to encourage the construction of facilities that converted solid waste to electricity.

That was the catalyst for a proliferation of incinerators in Chicago's south suburbs: a wood burner in Chicago Heights, a tire burner in Ford Heights, a medical waste incinerator in Harvey. Of the newly built plants, only a trash incinerator in nearby Summit is in a community that is neither impoverished or populated mostly by people of color. Robbins, however, was the only community in the state to actively shop for an incinerator to move to town.

Executives from Foster Wheeler left their 1988 meeting with Robbins's elected officials slightly stunned, but clearly intrigued by the possibilities. "They did more selling to us than we did to them," said Neal, the corporate executive who has since left the company. "It was obviously a poor town. I think the leaders just saw that their town was dying and they wanted to do something about it."

Foster Wheeler officials did the math and calculated that a taxpayer subsidy could boost annual profits from a plant in Robbins to $23 million. A deal was struck. From its profits, Foster Wheeler would pay its host nearly $2 million annually in rent, doubling the town's yearly revenue.

But the proposal quickly hatched a forceful, organized campaign to keep the incinerator from ever opening in Robbins. Greenpeace and other environmental activists said that an incinerator burning 1,600 tons of refuse a day would release dangerous levels of mercury and other pollutants. Robbins's neighbors joined the protests, arguing that their homes and families were in harm's way.

Foster Wheeler used its deep pockets to buy billboard and newspaper ads, and the painters' caps worn by Robbins residents in support of the proposed facilities. Company executives assured residents that they planned to install the safest, state-of-the art equipment available at the Robbins plant.

But rallies and public hearings were contentious, and attended at times by hundreds of supporters and opponents. Not everyone from Robbins endorsed the incinerator. Clergymen and others decried what they characterized as the exploitation of a destitute town, desperate for development of any kind. But environmentalists admittedly had a difficult time recruiting blacks from Robbins to join their effort. And while some blacks were not supportive, virtually all whites who attended rallies, protests or public meetings were opposed to the plant and lived outside of Robbins, a fact that did not escape Brodie and others who supported the site.

Environmental activists failed to keep the incinerator from opening, but their campaign was two-pronged. With the help of fiscally conservative Democrats and Republicans in the Illinois legislature, they successfully lobbied for a repeal of the substantive taxpayer subsidy -- nearly $360 million over 20 years -- that made the conversion of trash to energy so appealing in the first place.

"It was a license to print money at taxpayer expense," said Jeff Tangel, an organizer of the anti-burner campaign. "Taxpayers were paying for their own poisoning.'

The repeal, and the refusal of more than a dozen of Robbins's neighbors to send their refuse to the incinerator, is causing Foster Wheeler to lose roughly $1 million a month at its Robbins operation, according to the company.

Because Robbins's rent payments from the incinerator are based on the incinerator's profitability, the town is scheduled to collect only about $400,000 of the nearly $2 million windfall it had expected.

Foster Wheeler has sued the state, arguing that because its plant was under construction when lawmakers rescinded the tax incentive, the Robbins plant should have been "grandfathered" in. But company executives acknowledge that they cannot operate indefinitely a plant that is losing money.

The state's environmental protection agency said that the Robbins plant has, in recent months, violated the conditions of its operating permit. But the excess emissions are not egregious, they say, and not particularly worrisome.

Brodie, for her part, remains optimistic. Despite its financial woes, Foster Wheeler has fulfilled one part of its agreement with the town, providing full college scholarships for 12 students from Robbins.

"That's 12 kids who might not have gone to school otherwise," she said proudly. "The school board [that Robbins shares with several surrounding suburbs] sure wasn't going to give those kids full scholarships to college.

There's always been environmental racism. We're just making it work for us for once."

4. NEWS: RECENT AGREEMENT BY NEW ENGLAND GOVERNORS AND EASTERN CANADIAN PREMIERS TO TACKLE MERCURY POLLUTION:

About mercury: Mercury is a metal that causes brain damage and reproductive problems. It's released into the atmosphere through the burning of coal and at incinerators handling medical waste and such products as batteries, which contain mercury.

What they did:. The premiers and governors agreed to the elimination of mercury pollution within their own regions, beginning with at least a 50 per cent reduction by 2003.

Why they acted: Studies show elevated levels of mercury in freshwater fish across northeast. Children most at risk because immature nervous systems sensitive to toxic effects of the metal. Birds, fish and fish-eating animals also threatened.

How mercury will be reduced: Specific reduction targets are municipal and medical waste incinerators, sludge incinerators, boilers, industrial and area sources.

Quotes:

"Regional sources are important . . .It's important that we take action locally and regionally so we'll have the moral authority to urge that kind of action nationally, internationally and globally. We can't just point to our up-wind neighbors." - Ned Sullivan, Maine's environment commissioner,

"In some cases it'll mean fuel-switching from coal to natural gas. In some cases it will mean pollution control technology and in some cases, down the line, it will probably mean closing down some garbage incinerators." - said David Coon of the New Brunswick Conservation Council.

''For the first time ever, it says that our goal should be the virtual elimination of manmade mercury.'' - David Struhs, Massachusetts environmental commissioner, Boston Globe, 9/6/98

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