Capping waste pile at Edge Moor costs $5 million; moving it would cost $380 million
Wilmington News Journal, Jeff Montgomery
Published July 16, 2005
WILMINGTON -- Just northeast of Wilmington, along the Delaware River, stands a mostly barren pile of industrial waste. Some DuPont Co. officials describe the material in the 500,000-ton, 16-acre pile at the company's Edge Moor Plant as little worse than dirt.
But to Cragmere resident Steve Tindall, the dump is a ticking, toxic time bomb. He and other neighborhood residents want it hauled away.
The pile near the mouth of Shellpot Creek is ground zero in a tangled, high-stakes battle worth hundreds of millions of dollars to DuPont.
For months, community and environmental groups have warred with company scientists and consultants over the fate of the mound. Some DuPont opponents have labeled it a monument to dirty tricks, dioxins and other toxic wastes.
Dioxin is a catch-all term for hundreds of related compounds that in some combinations can be "highly potent, likely carcinogens," according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Area residents worry about the fine particles of dioxin and other pollutants blowing into their neighborhood across I-495 from the plant. And they're upset about a quietly negotiated deal between DuPont and the state that could result in the pile staying there forever.
Covering the stockpile in place -- more than a mile from any home or residential area -- "poses substantially lower potential human health risks" than moving the material, DuPont concluded. It also would cost less than removal and incineration.
The proposal to cap the waste with a thick plastic cover and leave it where it is would cost about $5 million, DuPont estimates. Removing the material could cost up to $380 million, the company says.
But the discovery of dioxins in the material has fed opposition to the clean-up-and-bury settlement company and state officials once considered a sure thing.
"They say they don't want to stir it up, that it's better to leave it there," Tindall said. "If it's that much of a concern, it doesn't belong there."
The controversy has opened a new and potentially costly chapter in DuPont's nationwide struggle to manage and cut costs for dealing with waste from its flagship titanium dioxide, or TiO2, pigment business. The company heats and combines titanium ore with chlorine and other ingredients to make a valuable whitening agent used in everything from paper coatings to toothpaste, paint and food products, including the cream in Oreo cookies.
The product line, worth $2 billion in sales last year, already has been bruised by costly government investigations in California, thousands of potential toxic-injury lawsuits in Mississippi and probes of shellfish contamination near the Gulf of Mexico.
One Delaware community group opposing the plan already has enlisted the help of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center at Widener University. Other residents say they are in touch with lawyers suing a similar DuPont operation in Mississippi.
"In reality, DuPont does not want people to discover that they're the world's largest dioxin producer. No one else comes close," said Allen M. Stewart, a Dallas attorney who represents more than 2,000 people now waiting to sue the company over illnesses they blame on a TiO2 pigment plant in Delisle, Miss. "There's no doubt that the stuff gets out into the environment."
In the Edgemoor area north of Wilmington, DuPont's landfill effort triggered protests, claims of conspiracy and demands for new studies and investigations.
"There are a few types of chemicals that get singled out and kind of hyper-regulated," said Aaron A. Jennings, a civil engineering professor who specializes in toxic metal contamination research at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "PCBs are one, and dioxin is another. You can identify hundreds of things that don't raise any flags, but you identify dioxin and klaxons go off."
Stewart said attorneys involved in the Mississippi case are in touch with several Delaware residents.
"No one has really contacted us" from Delaware for legal representation, Stewart said. "We're trying to keep our ear to the ground. If what's going on in Edge Moor is the same thing that's going on in Delisle, I would expect problems" for the health of residents.
Although DNREC officials say they have not yet approved DuPont's plan, a court-approved consent decree issued in October 2001 orders DuPont to close the pile "in place."
DuPont officials stand by their plan, saying the cover and seal designs far exceed state or federal safety requirements.
"There are no holes in our plan," said Gregory W. Smith, head of DuPont's Corporate Remediation Group, a company division that handles hazardous waste cleanup. "The remedy is clearly the right remedy."
Toxic residues
DuPont has acknowledged for years that its waste -- once called Iron Rich and marketed as construction-type fill for roads and landfills -- contains some toxic residues, including arsenic, manganese and potentially cancer-causing chemicals.
But company officials said studies had found "minimal risk" from the pile and disputed efforts by environmental groups such as Green Delaware and Environmentalists for Truth to brand the project "DuPont's Dioxin Dump."
Tests found that levels of dioxins in the Edge Moor pile fall below guidelines used to trigger federal or state cleanup orders, company officials said. Although a thick blanket of soil would have met state requirements to reduce risks and environmental releases, DuPont said, the current proposal calls for capping the top and sides with a thick plastic-like blanket.
Edward Kavazanjian Jr., an associate professor at Arizona State University deeply involved in hazardous waste disposal, said that landfill caps are a "widely accepted" solution for hazardous waste landfills in some -- but not all -- cases.
"It's not like capping ignores the fact that dioxin is there," Kavazanjian said. "It's one remedy. Digging the stuff out, moving it, creates a whole potential range of exposures both to workers and the community."
Some neighbors remain unconvinced. They claim state regulators timed a cleanup order to create a loophole big enough to hide DuPont's pile from tougher and costlier waste designations.
"It doesn't belong there," said Edgemoor resident Curtis C. Hatton Jr. as he spread mulch around a carefully manicured lawn on his tree-shaded street. "If it was us, we'd never be allowed to do what DuPont wants to do. They've got it in our back yard, practically. They should have to take it away and dispose of it."
In dispute are issues ranging from the importance of naturally occurring radioactivity in the pile to the degree of risk from different varieties of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds.
Tests of the waste found dioxin pollutants, among the most toxic substances known, but at concentrations DuPont said are too low to justify any restrictions for now, based on both state and federal standards.
Federal records show the EPA rated other pollutants in the pile, including manganese, arsenic and cancer-causing organic compounds, as more of a concern than dioxin. But federal officials did describe dioxins as a "supporting basis" for declaring the waste hazardous in 2001.
The EPA qualified its decision to omit dioxin from the official list of "contaminants of concern" for Iron Rich by declaring in its final Federal Register notice that, "We are acting to protect human health and the environment from the release of the significant levels [of dioxins] found in the untreated waste form."
Despite claims that removing the pile would create health hazards from truck traffic and hazardous dust worse than those expected from covering and keeping the waste in place, objection to DuPont's landfill plan have continued in Northeast Wilmington, suburban neighborhoods to the north and New Castle Avenue residential areas to the south.
On Wilmington's East 28th Street, retired autoworker William O. Griffin agreed with Hatton's view from the suburbs.
"It's a toxic dump. How could it belong there?" Griffin asked. "We have enough problems here already. We have some of the worst areas in the city -- we don't need 500,000 tons of toxic waste."
DuPont has shrugged off some of the most vocal opponents, saying the debate has been clouded by "professional environmental groups and individuals who make their living by causing conflict."
Agitation by Green Delaware and other groups, DuPont officials said, has helped to convince New Castle County Council and the city of New Castle to adopt what the company claims are misguided resolutions opposing the landfill capping plan.
"What's disappointing is the fact that well-intentioned people have been swayed," Smith said. "We're disappointed in the information, the misinformation, that they've used to influence otherwise reasonable people."
Process gone awry
In the mid-1990s, DuPont made production changes at its Edge Moor plant that officials hoped would turn processing leftovers into new products, including the dirt-like "soil substitute" dubbed Iron Rich because of heavy iron residues.
Company managers hoped to sell Iron Rich for use in landfills, roadbeds or other construction because of its soil-like qualities.
EPA regulators had different ideas.
The agency tentatively labeled some of the plant's waste hazardous in 2001, as part of a nationwide review of chemical industry landfill pollution risks.
Later studies found dioxins and unacceptably high levels of manganese, arsenic and iron in the Delaware pile, as well as two toxic chemicals: hexachlorobenzene and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Both are potential cancer-causing agents after prolonged exposure that can cause a variety of other ailments, including memory loss and disorders in motor skills.
After the new rules took effect, DuPont started splitting up its waste, sending the most toxic residues to hazardous disposal incinerators. The change qualified remaining leftovers for disposal without hazardous waste restrictions in a landfill in South Carolina, but stranded the mixed wastes piled at Edge Moor between 1997 and 2001.
Officials also said they would make process changes that would, by 2007, eliminate 90 percent of dioxins, PCBs and other compounds.
"We estimate that it's going to cost between $15 million and $25 million" to reach the voluntary 90 percent reduction, said Edge Moor Operations Manager Harold J. Kirby.
Meanwhile, before the new federal regulations took effect that labeled DuPont's waste hazardous, state regulators and the company signed a privately negotiated cleanup agreement backed up by a Superior Court consent decree. The decree authorized the company to apply for the state's Voluntary Cleanup Plan program with a proposal that would include keeping the pile under cover and in place at Edge Moor.
The agreement and timing potentially made the waste mound eligible for entombment in its original spot near the river, heading off the possibility of a cleanup order under the new hazardous waste ruling.
The EPA published a federal notice outlining its concerns about DuPont's waste in September 2000, but state records show that DNREC and DuPont were in private talks for months before DuPont announced the dioxin concerns in Delaware.
While those talks were under way, DNREC also quietly tightened controls on older, already closed piles at Edge Moor containing the same TiO2 Iron Rich. The older piles were unaffected by the new federal rule, although DNREC ordered periodic testing of runoff for dioxin, PCBs and other pollutants.
"They argue that the pile is not a dump, they argue that it wasn't illegal when they put it there, they argue that the dioxin is good dioxin and that the concentrations are low," said Alan Muller, who directs the environmental group Green Delaware. "If that material was being produced now, DuPont would not be allowed to leave it there."
DuPont officials point out that the site, long zoned for industry, already has pollution problems nearby. Adjacent to DuPont's pile are Wilmington's wastewater plant, a sewage sludge processing operation, northern Delaware's busiest municipal waste landfill, a power plant and other industries.
Nevertheless, the 500,000-ton deal has threatened to unravel as skeptics ask why the company should receive a permit to cap and preserve a mildly radioactive waste pile laced with toxic metals, chemicals and dioxins.
"I think they ought to remove it. I don't know how they would go about it, but I feel that it's too close to the water for it to be left there," Wilmington resident Angela Jones said as she supervised a youth group during a trip to Fox Point State Park, north of the plant.
Joe Frarer, a retired DuPont employee, is satisfied with the company's plan.
"It's right in an industrial area already, and you have the same kinds of things in that pile that you do in other places all around the city," Frarer said while on volunteer duty at Fox Point State Park.
Discovery of high arsenic levels and other contaminants in soils at Fox Point forced the park's shutdown from 1991 to 1995. DNREC has been working since to reclaim more of the popular riverside spot by covering contaminated soils with thick layers of clean earth.
"This park right here is built on top of industrial wastes, and people don't have any problem with it," Frarer said.
Decision delayed
Delaware's General Assembly voted last month to postpone a final decision on DuPont's cleanup plan, approving instead a resolution that called for DuPont to finance a study of the waste pile by a consultant chosen and supervised by DNREC.
State officials have acknowledged that some questions raised during public hearings in March deserve answers.
Issues up for additional review include a concession by DuPont during the March hearings that some of the the Iron Rich contains low levels of uranium and thorium. Company officials at the time said the radioactive materials came to the plant with ores used to make TiO2, and are at levels low enough to be exempt from state or federal restrictions.
"If you look at the short-term risk of carting this away, moving this material is so much more risky because of the potential for having a traffic accident than it is leaving it in place, where it's covered and no one can come in contact with it," said Annette Guiseppi-Elie, a senior consultant for DuPont's Corporate Remediation Group.
Guiseppi-Elie said the dirt-like waste was similar to regular soil but did contain unacceptably high levels of manganese and other compounds. Even with the contamination, she said, residents would face more risk from truck traffic during relocation than they would with it left in place.
A study ordered by DNREC and completed by a DuPont consultant found that even without a cover the pile's risks to nearby residents fall far below the one extra cancer death per million residents that often triggers federal cleanup studies. Risks from moving the material, DuPont's consultant found, were 50 times higher than leaving the material under a cover, but still were below one in 1 million.
"This is the largest dioxin source in the country, and probably has been for many years," Green Delaware's Muller said. "Large amounts of this waste were handled very casually. We ought to be looking for the consequences. Instead, we're doing the opposite. We're seeing something cooked up that's intended to help justify a decision to leave the pile there."
Under Delaware cleanup rules, the state requires screening for only two of the most hazardous dioxin compounds. Company researchers reported detecting only one type of dioxin in only one of 11 samples screened for the two most hazardous compounds.
Uncounted are most of the more than 41,000 grams of dioxins and dioxin-like compounds, called "furans," that Edge Moor produced in 2003.
Even counting all types of dioxins, concentrations in the Iron Rich pile amount to about 1 part per billion -- just at the limit used as an EPA cleanup goal for residential property, and only one-fifth to one-twentieth of the level that triggers cleanup studies on industrial sites.
By comparison, the EPA said last year that it would not require a dioxin cleanup for soils at the abandoned Metachem Products factory near Delaware City unless tests found concentrations at 4 ppb or higher.
"I think dioxins are an issue in this pile despite what they say," said John Kearney, who directs the nonprofit Environmentalists for Truth. "Thousands of pounds of that pile were blowing away a year, and they dismissed it by saying it all blew into the Delaware River."
