Don’t expand the landfill
CWM site in Porter is close to lakes, and DEC says no new capacity is needed
Additional hazardous waste landfill capacity in New York State is unnecessary. Demand is down and there’s no need to encourage it, the state concluded a long time ago.
So, why does the proposed expansion of a hazardous waste site in Niagara County remain an issue? Probably because the Department of Environmental Conservation’s draft of a hazardous waste facility siting plan, a revision to a 2003 version, sets guidelines for approving new or expanded hazardous waste landfills and there’s a company that wants to use them.
That’s a problem for those who oppose efforts to expand Chemical Waste Management’s 710-acre chemical and industrial waste disposal site in Porter. And it’s a problem for anyone concerned about the future health of an area that has a history of environmental problems that includes the Love Canal debacle in Niagara Falls and waste that dates back to the Manhattan Project virtually next door to the CWM site.
Ironically, the state had concluded that additional landfill capacity of this type is not needed, with more than 42 years’ capacity remaining at CWM’s Model City Landfill in Porter. Yet a hearing is set for Jan. 21 for a small expansion of the facility.
The Department of Environmental Conservation is taking the position that a one-year expansion has no environmental impact, a determination given because there would be fewer trucks carrying clay to the facility.
CWM has asked the department to allow it to cap the landfill with six inches of clay, instead of 24 inches, and use the difference to bring in hazardous waste. The DEC essentially is saying that substituting hazardous waste for clay has no significant impact on the environment and, by doing so, is using a small exemption to circumvent the siting law.
Hazardous waste is trucked in from all parts of the country to the CWM facility, one of only eight such sites in the country certified to handle PCBs. And now there’s an agency trying to promote expansion by indicating that another 160,000 tons of hazardous waste has no significant impact on the environment — despite the site’s close proximity to the Great Lakes, a national priority for protection.
The shame of it is that there could have been something done to destroy hazardous waste at the place it was generated, with safe technology. But the DEC was prohibited by law from accepting the one bid it received for full on-site remediation because that bid exceeded the DEC engineer’s estimate.
There are those who feel it is perhaps unfair to criticize Commissioner Peter Grannis for being unwilling to break the law. Niagara County’s State Sen. George Maziarz is not one of them. He takes the position that there’s one licensed commercial hazardous waste facility in the Northeast and that’s where everything is being sent — including, without notice, PCBs from a Queensbury salvage site north of Albany where the contaminants could have been destroyed. Maziarz said that project could have been rebid, or another cheaper method of destroying the waste explored.
Maziarz himself has taken a barrage of criticism over his treatment of CWM by environmentalists who cite a laundry list of complaints that he vigorously denies, adding that he has sponsored legislation that prevents CWM from operating. The senator said if the waste were headed downstate, the commissioner and governor would have figured out a way for it not to go there and it would have been treated.
Expansion is not needed. Environmental groups, municipalities, Erie and Niagara County Legislatures, realtors and the Farm Bureau are right on that.
With an earlier draft siting plan already acknowledging excess capacity for 42 years, the state should be discouraging these applications — not trying to put through a temporary expansion of one year to the current landfill, a step many see as helping a company get closer to a 40-year expansion.
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