Car Alarm

After saying for decades that treated "shredder waste" from junked cars and old appliances was safe, state regulators now admit it isn't.

By Matt Smith

published: December 03, 2008

Standing across the highway from the Altamont Landfill, which receives more than 80 percent of the garbage produced by San Francisco, Rick Lymp waits for a dump truck to roll by. He's not looking for any old dump truck. Lymp brought me here last spring hoping to spot one carrying the toxic leftovers of dismantled cars and old home appliances.

In the metal recycling business, these leftovers are known as shredder waste. California disposes of 700,000 tons of it every year, making it the biggest toxic waste stream in the state.

Few people outside the recycling industry know anything about shredder waste. But Rick Lymp knows a lot about it. This extraordinarily persistent retired 58-year-old salesman has dedicated the last decade of his life to getting state officials to better regulate this material, sometimes called auto fluff.

Automobile shredder waste is made up of the carpet, foam, wiring, tires, bumper plastic, dashboards, hoses, road filth, and other debris that's left over after recycling plants extract metal from junked cars. Refrigerators, washing machines, and other appliances are ground up and sorted at the same recycling facilities, and the shredder waste from these appliances goes into the same trucks and landfills.

For years Lymp worked as a broker selling lime, the alkaline mineral used in concrete, mortar, and other industrial materials. Some of his biggest customers were automobile recyclers, who used lime as part of a coating for shredder waste that purportedly prevented lead and other hazardous minerals from leaching through landfills.

Under a 1988 California exemption, recyclers using this coating could avoid having to transport this toxic refuse to special separated and double-sealed — and very expensive — hazardous waste dumps.

"It's like creating an M&M candy," Lymp says of the flawed theory behind the exemption. "You coat it, and it's safe." As a minerals broker, Lymp knew shredder waste included harmful toxins such as mercury, cadmium, and arsenic.

And the more he thought about how his auto shredder clients used his product, the less comfortable he became. The sludge inside a landfill is a caustic brew that would likely overpower the coating treatment.

Lymp came to believe the science behind the coating policy was bogus. "This could be another Love Canal," he says, referring to the 1978 disaster that resulted after a housing subdivision was built over a chemical waste dump in upstate New York. "I've spent 10 years just trying to pay back society after having been in business. I just felt it was wrong what was being done."

Lymp left the business in 1996, and a few years later made it his mission to persuade regulators to classify auto fluff as toxic waste. Since then, he has spent thousands of hours and $50,000 of what was supposed to be his retirement money trying to force regulators to accept his belief that, as sure as an M&M melts in your mouth, the chemical durability of the cementlike coating is temporary. Lymp has hired attorneys and filed multiple legal challenges against California toxic regulators, asserting that they're breaching their duty to protect the public. He has telephoned, written to, and visited bureaucrats, scientists, and politicians. It's a crusade he has waged alone. Even environmental groups around the state haven't paid attention to shredder waste.

As his reward, he's been rebuffed and ignored and legally defanged. He's now broke, and can't find a job. Though his crusade has left him destitute, humiliated, and disillusioned, it's nonetheless still what he lives for.

During his truck-watching visit to the Altamont Landfill near Livermore this past spring, he seemed downright giddy as he waited in the drizzle to show me that San Francisco's garbage is mixed with toxic waste at the dump.

"Are you catching that blue cab?" Lymp asked, as a road tractor towed a sturdy steel-box trailer up the hillside that conceals the three-square-mile landfill. "That's the kind of trailer that will carry auto shredder waste."

Though he didn't realize it back then, Lymp had just seen what was about to become an endangered species. Regulators have since quietly proposed new policies essentially complying with Lymp's demands, banning those truckloads from dumps such as this one.

The change may have come about in part because of Lymp. After fighting his lawsuits and ignoring his pleas, state regulators have quietly acknowledged that his warnings were correct, and that the truckload winding its way up to San Francisco's garbage dump was filled with leachable poisons.

---

In September, state regulators wrote to auto recyclers saying that the state's 1988 policy on shredder-waste handling would be rescinded. After March 1, 2009, recyclers would have to handle their toxic garbage like everybody else does, and put it in special hazardous-waste landfills.

This policy shift largely went unnoticed by the public, but it was momentous.

After publicly claiming for 20 years that it was safe to spread millions of tons of treated waste at county dumps, state officials were now acknowledging that the science behind this policy was flawed and that the waste was unsafe. That meant that millions of tons of toxic waste are sitting in municipal dumps all over California, possibly leaching hazardous materials into the groundwater.

It also meant workers at recycling plants at dumps have for a generation been breathing dust and handling material that state regulators told them was safe, but now say may be hazardous.

And it meant that automobile recycling — which charities such as Habitat for Humanity tout as "green steel" — isn't terribly environmentally friendly after all (see "Junk in the Trunk").

As it turns out, Rick Lymp wasn't the only one expressing concern about the hazards of shredder waste. In fact, state toxics investigators had likewise raised red flags for years — fruitlessly — saying California's system for regulating of this type of hazardous waste was inadequate and ineffective. Those warnings, however, were ignored.

In 2000, Peter Wood, a hazardous substances scientist with the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), assessed the state's shredder waste policy by visiting seven recycling plants around California. Wood performed tests designed to determine whether treated waste could leach lead, zinc, and other hazardous minerals into the ground. This was important because an underlying assumption of the state's dumping policy was that the shredder fluff wouldn't leach poison into the water.

But Wood found that waste at some of the plants leached enough lead and zinc to classify the material as hazardous. In a 2002 draft report, he recommended that state regulators re-evaluate the policy of allowing treated waste to be stored in landfills. Instead, he proposed that regulators should regard recycling residue as toxic, and require that it be disposed of like other hazardous waste, in special double-sealed and segmented landfills.

The report sat ignored on a shelf for years without being officially finalized. "I have been recommending this for six years now," Wood said during an October conference call that included two DTSC public relations specialists and a lawyer for the department.

So why didn't he ever produce a final version of his 2002 report? "All I can say is, I don't know," Wood said. "I think it raised a number of questions that caused people not to want it finalized."

By never approving a finalized version of Wood's report, state toxics officials didn't have to act on his findings.

The decision to revisit the policy coincided with the development of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Green Chemistry Initiative, a package of legislation and programs designed to more tightly regulate dangerous chemicals found in consumer products. In 2005, Schwarzenegger appointed Maureen Gorsen, a respected former Environmental Protection Agency enforcement attorney, to head the Department of Toxic Substances Control. In 2007, she instructed staff to examine the way California regulated waste from automobile recycling.

"Our mission is to protect the public from harm," Wood said. "We are not meeting our mission by continuing to allow this waste to be disposed of in municipal landfills. That is why Maureen Gorsen has decided to change the way [the industry] operates in California."

---

The state's ineffective shredder waste policy was born of a bureaucratic compromise that, like so much the California state government does, satisfied the needs of a group of inside players, while not serving the public interest.

In 1980, after President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency at Love Canal, and Congress passed the Superfund law calling for federally funded cleanup of toxic waste sites, California regulators realized they had a problem of their own. Automobile and appliance recyclers produced a massive stream of toxic waste, and there wasn't enough space to store it safely.

When state officials began talking about requiring the metal recyclers to transport the shredder piles to hazardous waste facilities, industry representatives resisted. They didn't want to pay the extra money it would take to truck the shredder waste to distant and expensive toxic-waste dumps.

State officials were left with a difficult choice. They could stare down recycling companies, who could answer by threatening to cease operations and thus allow dead cars to pile up around the state, leaking gasoline, coolant, dirty oil, and other hazardous material into the ground. Or they could continue allowing municipal landfills to be dumping grounds for concentrated toxic automobile waste, potentially threatening Californians' water supply.

So regulators, along with lobbyists for shredders, conceived of a third way, by which a coating would be developed that could withstand the chemical cauldron of a landfill. The idea was to coat the waste with silicate-based compounds, known to bind to metal molecules such as lead in a process known as fixation, so toxic minerals wouldn't dissolve. The proposed coating included lime; using an alkaline coating, the theory went, could neutralize acidic landfill chemicals that otherwise might eat away at the coating.

To prove that the treatment worked, recycling plants needed to show that chunks of treated shredder waste could survive 48 hours in mild citric acid without leaching toxic chemicals into the liquid. This compromise with the auto-shredder industry was initially considered as a temporary solution. But the policy was never vetted to become a formal regulation, and therefore never underwent scrutiny from scientists, environmentalists, legislators, or senior government officials about whether it actually worked. The fact that the informal, in-house DTSC guideline never became a regulation also meant there weren't clear rules on how it should be implemented.

"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."

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."

Industry representatives say if the new regulation goes into effect, some recycling plants would have to shut down because of the increased costs. Rosegay also wrote that there's no evidence that toxins from shredder waste have actually seeped into groundwater, let alone made anyone sick. And she noted that other states don't even require recycling plants to treat the waste before sending it to ordinary municipal or county dumps.

State officials, meanwhile, are left making the difficult argument that although there may be no obvious harm so far, that doesn't mean there couldn't be in the future. Wood, the DTSC scientist, says the stakes are higher now because modern cars contain more of some types of toxins than old ones did. Recently built cars contain electronic equipment such as rear video screens, switches, and engine monitors containing mercury and other contaminants. Modern appliances, meanwhile, contain more galvanized steel, which is treated with zinc, which, when consumed in excess, can prevent the body from absorbing essential minerals.

"We thought when leaded gas was outlawed in California that, over time, the amount of lead we would see [in automobile shredder waste] would start to decrease," Wood said. "But if anything, we've seen it go up. Total copper, it's gone up. Cadmium has gone up. The biggest [increase] I've seen is in the amount of zinc."

While Wood played a key role in getting his bosses to reconsider the state's policy on shredder waste, Rick Lymp played one, too, according to Seward of the Regional Water Quality Control Board. "There was a lot of activity," Seward said. Lymp "was lobbying the DTSC, the state water board, and regulators in other regions. ... I think he perhaps had some effect."

So does Lymp feel vindicated? "Not entirely," he said. "I'm glad the policy's changing. But I don't think that's finishing the job. You've got hazardous waste, treated and untreated, in municipal landfills everywhere, percolating. And landfills leak."

Perhaps as important, Lymp says he doesn't believe that this policy change reflects a new era of "green" thinking by state policymakers. He believes it's more than a coincidence that DTSC announced the change a few months after SF Weekly began asking questions about claims in Peter Wood's 2002 report, and Lymp's 2005 lawsuit.

"I believe the decisionmakers are only making this change because of you," he said. "I believe the decision is being implemented because a reporter is asking them very specific questions, and they couldn't change the subject and avoid the questions."

Department of Toxic Substances Control officials have said during various interviews that the policy change is because of findings by staffers such as Wood.

Lymp doesn't buy it. "They could have made this decision years ago," he said. "They have acquired no additional information over the last eight or nine years that they didn't have 10 years ago. Because of their denial of the problem, I have spent a good portion of my life dedicated to this project. And I'm paying the price for it."