"The problem with our policy and procedure is that it's not a regulation," Wood said. "It was a stopgap measure."
This meant that, technically, if a recycler failed to follow the policy, the company was not violating any rule. "It's really an underground regulation," Wood said. "That's like a regulation that the department makes up without going through the normal process of rulemaking."
Jamie Soja
Since the '80s, recyclers have disposed of toxic shredder waste at regular dumps like the Altamont Landfill.
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During the decades that followed, industry often made things up as it went along, inventing cheap treatment methods that would pass muster with the state's citric acid test.
"Around the state, I don't feel they're using a consistent method of handling the material," said Glenn Whitmire, who, until he retired recently, operated a specialized toxic-waste landfill in Kern County. The different shredders "are not telling the state the full story behind" how they treat the waste, he added.
Whitmire has written to Governor Schwarzenegger telling essentially the same story as Lymp: Regulators were allowing hundreds of tons of toxic waste to be stored unsafely.
Like Lymp, Whitmire was unsatisfied with California officials' response. "All they do is make excuses," he said. "What they're doing is they're poisoning the water table of California."
Independent scientists not connected to state government or the recycling industry have also expressed doubts about the efficacy of California's policy on treating shredder waste.
Jason Scott, a toxic-materials researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, in 2002 examined U.S. methods for testing toxic waste such as shredder residue that's been treated with cementlike coatings. His work took him to California, where he discussed treatment methods with auto shredder experts. During an interview with SF Weekly, Scott said it's unrealistic to assume that, just because treated waste doesn't leach toxins during a mild acid bath, it won't allow these poisons to dissolve over the years inside a landfill.
This is a point echoed by Muhammed Mutyaba Mukiibi, a doctoral candidate in chemistry at the University of Arizona. Mukiibi worked as part of a team that developed a bioreactor to simulate the inside of a landfill to test whether different materials would potentially leach toxic chemicals into groundwater. This is much more accurate. "That test only uses one organic compound; a landfill has millions," Mukiibi said, in reference to California's citric acid test. "We just need to know what the material is, and we can predict its behavior."
Inside some landfills, Mukiibi told me, treated automobile shredder waste wouldn't stand a chance. The coating would dissolve, and toxic minerals such as lead would become part of the landfill sludge, and the toxins could potentially seep into the groundwater.
Wood, the DTSC scientist, likewise began to wonder over the years whether the informal policy he'd helped develop could withstand real-world conditions. "I started thinking, what if the treatment is only buffering out the acidity of the test, and not [preventing material from] leaching out metals?" he said.
As you might expect, auto recyclers don't want more burdensome requirements for handling shredder waste. In an Oct. 31 letter to toxics regulators, Margaret Rosegay, an attorney representing several California recycling companies, said the state's 1988 policy has been effective, and that the industry has been a good environmental citizen.
The state's shredder waste policy had "served as the cornerstone for environmentally responsible and economically viable operations in this important industry over the last 20 years," Rosegay wrote. "The auto shredder industry has made very substantial investments in these treatment processes in reliance on the Department's policy."
But there are serious questions whether recyclers have simply ignored the state's informal coating rules and just unloaded untreated shredder waste at municipal and county dumps.
In 2005, a pile of shredder waste at Republic's landfill on Vasco Road near Livermore caught fire — an unusual incident for what was supposed to be the functional equivalent of gravel after being treated with the state-approved coating.
"We found out there were high levels of metals coming out of it," said Terry Seward, senior engineer with the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. "We did a limited investigation. And based on those results, we saw that this stuff was potentially leaching metals."
This meant one of two things: Either the shredders weren't treating their waste as the state policy required, or the treatment was useless, and allowed metals to leach into the rest of the garbage at the dump.
Seward showed Lymp reports revealing investigators' conclusions about what had happened at the Vasco Road dump. "It turned out it hadn't been treated," Lymp said.
State toxics officials are accepting public comments on their proposed regulation of shredder-waste handling until Jan. 1; the new rules requiring recyclers to dispose of shredder waste at special landfills designed specially for hazardous waste will go into effect two months later. At least, that's the current timetable.
Lobbyists for automobile shredding plants, however, are trying to keep the rule from going on the books. "We are in discussion with the agency," said Mark Madden of Schnitzer Steel, which has an automobile shredding plant at the Port of Oakland. "At this point in time, I am not able to say more than that."
