
          Hazardous Waste in Georgia
          By Breman, VickiVicki Breman
          Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 7-12
          
          If you are poor, black and live in the South, you are much more
likely to live near a hazardous waste landfill than if you are white
and middle_class. How much more likely? Well, it seems that no one
knows for sure and until recently, no one has tried very hard to find
out.
          If you drive out Georgia Highway 49, near Powersville, you will
find the now-closed Peach County Sanitary Landfill. Rural Peach County
lies near the center of the state. It has a black_population of
fifty-one percent. Over twenty-percent of the families in the county
have incomes below the 1980 poverty level.
          Only thirty feet from the Peach County Landfill stands the Lizzie
Chapel Baptist Church, founded in the 1880s by black tenant
farmers. Because it was contaminated with pesticide residue, the well
which once furnished water for Lizzie Chapel was closed by the Georgia
Environmental Protection Division (EPD) in June of 1983. Today the
twenty-five members of the Lizzie Chapel congregation carry their own
water to choir practice. Contamination of the wells of the five
families who live just down the hill from the chapel seems inevitable
as more of the toxic residue, the leachate, moves
into the water supply.
          Both the Georgia EPD (which manages the state's hazardous waste
program), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA--which
administers the federal Superfund program for clean-up of abandoned
toxic dumps) have put the Peach County Landfill on the current list to
be considered for clean-up using Superfund money. The Peach County
officials who ran the landfill until it was closed in 1978 are not
particularly concerned. Tom Franklin, the county administrator, said
he "didn't even know the church was up there 'til I saw their new
sign."
          The dumping of "empty" pesticide bags and floor sweepings from the
Woolfolk Chemical Works (of Fort Valley, Georgia) contaminated the
Peach County Landfill. Begun in 1925 by a local family, Woolfolk
currently employs 125 people and is one of the biggest chemical
manufacturers in the state. Peach County officials allowed Woolfolk to
use the landfill from the early 1960s until its closing. Woolfolk
dumped such known carcinogens as lindane, dieldrin, benzene
hexachloride and several others listed on EPA's Toxic Substances
Control Inventory. Supposedly, Woolfolk's dumping was restricted to a
special section of the landfill, but monitoring by Georgia's
Environmental Protection Division indicates that dumping actually
occurred over the entire site.
          The Powersville landfill is only one of over 525 sites in Georgia
on a current Environmental Protection Agency inventory list. The EPA
inventory gives the names of all sites for which the state of Georgia
either knows that hazardous wastes are being currently generated,
treated or disposed of (supposedly lawfully and carefully)--or where
there exists the possibility of some contamination on sites used years
ago and now closed or abandoned.
          A 1981 study Hazardous Waste Generation in Georgia,
by Dr. James E. Kundell and S. Wesley Woolf at the University of
Georgia Institute of Government, estimated that industries in
seventy-two counties of Georgia produce over 3.5 million tons of
hazardous waste annually. This amount has surely risen in Georgia
since 1981. It may even have been an underestimate at the time--if
viewed in light of recently released EPA estimates on hazardous waste
generation nationwide. The Wall Street Journal has
reported that the EPA has revised its latest estimate of waste subject
to federal regulation upwards by seventy-six percent to 264 million
metric tons. This is four times EPA's own preliminary 1982
estimates.
          This latest survey found that only about four percent of the total
identified waste was handled by commercial disposal companies, but
that they receive waste from about eighty-four percent of all
hazardous waste sources nationwide. This means that most of the
hazardous waste generated in this country is treated, stored or
disposed of on-site or on adjoining property that the company has
purchased. These industrial sites are often in or near urban centers
and adjacent to low-income residential areas.
          Although the surface area of a landfill site can look harmless
enough, there may be chemicals buried--either covered-over through
passage of time, or on purpose--that are slowly leaking into the earth
and passing into the groundwater system. It may take years to discover
the damage.
          Much of the waste labelled "hazardous" is composed of chemicals
which are either suspected or known to cause. cancer. While exposure
to some hazardous waste materials causes immediate symptoms of
"poisoning" such as nausea, headaches, or nervous system disorders,
exposure to others produces no visible symptoms. Cancer may develop
long 

after exposure. And, because of the contamination of drinking
water, or of soil, or of the air where people live and work,
individuals often may be unaware that they have even been exposed to
hazardous wastes.
          The placing of hazardous waste disposal facilities in low-income,
minority communities follows the logic of an "economic reality" that
argues that it is cheaper and easier to put hazardous waste sites in
sparsely populated areas where land costs are low and residents have
little political power.
          A 1967 engineering study which led to the site selection for the
non-hazardous Seminole Road Landfill in Georgia's DeKalb County
illustrates that public officials do consider the likely response and
the clout of area residents in choosing among alternative sites. Al
Smith, a resident and participant in the DeKalb County controversy,
points out that ninety-eight percent of the residences surrounding the
chosen area were either black-owned or black-occupied. "Minorities and
low-income folks," says Smith, "are seen as less likely to raise a
fuss and mount an organized opposition."
          Organized community opposition can be powerful and effective. In
late 1977, Georgia's Environmental Protection Division issued a permit
for what was its first and so far, only, commercial hazardous waste
landfill, Gordon Services Company. According to Eugene Zwenig,
technical advisor to Residents Against a Polluted Environment (RAPE),
which successfully closed that landfill, Wilkinson County officials
testified at a federal_court hearing in August of 1978 that they had
licensed only a waste oil refinery, a re-cycling industry. The site
was being used to dispose of a variety of hazardous materials from as
far away as Kansas.
          Investigation by Mr. Zwenig's group revealed that the Georgia EPD
had allowed dumping to take place for at least a month before it had
issued a permit and that protection and testing at the disposal site
were inadequate. The state had issued this permit in disregard of
existing federal guidelines under the 1976 Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (RCRA) and the 1977 EPA Guidelines for State
Officials.
          Under public pressure from residents of the town of Gordon, who
maintained an observation post at the entrance to the site around the
clock for two months, the Director of Georgia's EPD, Leonard
Ledbetter, commissioned a- task force of five members, (three from his
own staff, one from the EPA and one from the US Geological Survey), to
conduct an "independent technical evaluation" of the site. The task
force recommended suspension of disposal at the site. The task force
recommended suspension of disposal at the site pending further study
and until the operator submitted for approval the procedures to be
used to insure safe operation of the site, information which should
have been considered before issuing a permit.
          The Wilkinson County site has never re-opened. Eugene Zwenig warns
that "it is now a Superfund site of the future." Monitoring wells at
the site are being sampled every six months according to John Taylor,
chief of the Georgia EPD Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management
Program. This recent change from quarterly monitoring is of
questionable wisdom since contamination is more likely to appear with
each passing month that the waste stays in the ground.
          Donny Weaver lives next to the site. He has his own well checked by
the Georgia EPD each time it checks the Wilkinson County site. And,
although the EPD has promised to send him copies of its monitoring
results, he has yet to receive any.
          Lack of a commercial hazardous waste landfill distresses those
state officials and businessmen who believe that Georgia needs one to
entice migrating industry. Some in the state are willing to sit down
at the welcome table with the gleam of the New South in one eye and
the sting of hazardous waste in the other. "Georgia could make up to
twenty-five to thirty-five million dollars a year on hazardous waste
sites," says former Governor George Busbee. Nor does current Governor
Joe Frank Harris disavow this position.
          Not to be deterred, in 1980 state of Georgia officials again tried
to permit a commercial hazardous landfill waste facility--this time in
sparsely populated (7,000) Heard County. The 1979 Georgia Hazardous
Waste Act, passed in response to the Wilkinson County situation and
also in an effort to prevent federal regulation of hazardous waste in
Georgia under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, had stripped
local governments of any control over solid hazardous waste
disposal. No one told Heard County officials that Earth Management,
Incorporated (EMI), a branch of IU Conversion Systems of Pennsylvania,
had an option to buy 

276 acres of land in the county and had begun
preliminary investigations at the site.
          Word got out about Earth Management's plans in Heard County. When
the public hearing was held by the Georgia EPD on the permit
application in October of 1980, community opposition was galvanized. A
group known as Georgia 2000 filed lawsuits to stop the landfill. The
efforts of the Heard County citizens were aided by Eugene Zwenig and
his friends in Wilkinson County. Zwenig, who holds degrees in civil
engineering from Auburn University and the University of Florida, is a
retired researcher from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
          Once again, the state of Georgia's ability to safely manage a
hazardous waste program was challenged. A study from the Center for
Environmental Safety at Georgia Tech found that Earth Management's
proposed facility provided inadequate staff and laboratory ability to
analyze the wastes it intended to dump and, "based on prior landfill
experience, surface and ground water will be contaminated and
uncontrolled reactions between incompatible waste will occur with the
resultant possibility of toxic fumes, fires and explosion."
          Earth Management withdrew its permit application in the hope that
public reaction would subside. It never did. On June 14, 1984, an
unusual agreement was signed between Heard County and IU Conversions
Systems. The county paid the company $350,000 and in return received
ownership of the 276 acres where the dump was to have been placed,
plus a guarantee that the company would never try to put another dump
in Heard County nor within two miles of its borders.
          Given the state of Georgia's poor record at managing hazardous
waste disposal, how have they continued to act so autonomously?
          It was not until 1970 that the US Congress finally recognized that
hazardous waste storage and disposal was "a problem of grave national
concern. " Having acknowledged the problem, it took six more years for
Congress to enact the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA),
designed to regulate hazardous waste from "cradle-to-grave."
Presently, the Reagan Administration's hostility toward protection of
the environment obstructs RCRA's implementation.
          The RCRA defines hazardous waste as "solid waste,
or a combination of solid wastes, which because of its quantity,
concentration, or physical, chemical, or infectious characteristics
may--cause, or significantly contribute to an increase in mortality of
an increase in serious irreversible, or incapacitating reversible,
illness; or pose a substantial present or potential hazard to human
health or the environment when improperly treated, stored,
transported, or disposed of, or otherwise managed." This law
deals only with waste, not non-waste activities in which toxic
materials are used--such as leaking tanks, spills in loading areas,
leaking underground pipes, or leaking manufacturing equipment.
          The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act required hazardous waste
facility owners to obtain a permit. Because a number of facilities
were already operating when the RCRA became law, a mechanism was
included in the law to allow facilities in operation on November 19,
1980 to continue under "interim status" until a final hazardous waste
permit was issued. All that was required to continue business as usual
was for a facility to report to the EPA that: 1) the facility handles
hazardous waste and, 2) the name, location and identification of what
hazardous materials were to be handled and in what manner.
          If the Peach County Landfill near Powersville had still been
operating in November, 1980, it could have received "interim status"
and operated until its monitoring well showed contamination--which
occurred last spring. The EPA was to have developed permit and
management regulations within eighteen months of the passage of
RCRA. Instead of meeting that deadline, it issued "minimum standards"
for management of facilities under interim status.
          Although final regulations have been in effect since January 1983,
they will need to be strengthened for years to come. The current
regulations have no meaningful applicability since so few final
permits have been issued (only thirty-five in EPA's Region
IV--Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North_Carolina,
South_Carolina, Tennessee--as of the summer of 1984). Any new
facilities are subject to the final regulations. The EPA estimates
that it will be 1989 or 1990 before all facilities either have been
issued final permits or have been closed by denial of a final
permit.
          Georgia manages its own program, as do most states (state
implementation is encouraged by EPA), and claims to be moving quickly
to issue final permits. Up until the end of this April, according to
EPA records, Georgia had issued the fewest final permits of any state
in Region IV. Abruptly, 

in May, the situation changed. Since May of
1984, the Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management Program of the
Georgia EPD has been considering final permits at the rate of
approximately one a week. It has not however, publicized the fact that
it is moving so quickly to grant permits to these sites nor has the
EPD encouraged citizens to participate in the permitting process.
          The present method of advising the public is to print a public
notice in the legal section of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution and in the local paper of the
county in which the hazardous waste operation is taking or will take
place. This notice gives the name and address of the company, the
activities to be permitted and the locations where the draft permits
can be inspected for comments. The notice also provides that persons
may request a public hearing to comment on the permit application and
ask questions about the proposed activities.
          The Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF, the South's
only regional, public interest environmental law firm, see
Southern_Changes March/April, 1984) is currently
seeking financial support for a Southern regional monitoring project
to review these draft permits, make comments, and to notify and
educate citizens near the proposed sites to enable them to participate
in these decisions that bear upon their lives.
          Although it sounds technical, such review is not difficult for
citizens. There are four main areas of concern: does the permit meet
the requirements of the federal regulation in 40 Code of Federal
Regulations Section 264 for groundwater monitoring? Are the closure
and post-closure plans adequate? Are container requirements
sufficiently protective? Are the provisions for financial
responsibility stringent enough so that if the facility has a
contamination problem in the future, the state and its taxpayers are
not left responsible after the company has left with its profits?
          Georgia could have established more stringent rules and regulations
than the bare minimum required to obtain EPA approval for its
program. Although some states in the US have strengthened their own
rules, Georgia and most other Southern_states have not. Instead, the
state has simply incorporated as its own the federal RCRA
regulations--with their many weaknesses and dangers: inadequate
groundwater protection standards, no requirements for closing
facilities until leaks are found and corrected, and no financial
assurance for corrective action on leaking sites.
          Worst of all, the federal law which Georgia adopted exempts those
who produce one ton or less of hazardous waste a month. "This small
generator exemption is very scary," says Georgia Representative Denny
Dobbs, formerly with the Emergency Response Branch of EPA in Region
IV. Dobbs favors closing this loophole which has been estimated as
allowing up to twelve-million metric tons of hazardous waste
nationwide to be sent to ordinary municipal landfills such as the
Peach County site. There are fifty municipal landfills on the
Superfund inventory for Georgia, the majority of which may well
require a clean-up in the future.
          The state of Florida has moved to close this "small generator
loophole" by recently amending its Hazardous Waste Management Program
to apply to all waste generators in excess of one-hundred pounds per
month. Florida has also instituted a program to enable small
businesses, households and other small generators of hazardous wastes
(used electric batteries, containers for business machine chemicals,
paint cans, household poison containers) to safely dispose of them
during "amnesty days" established by the legislature for several
locations around the state.
          The US Congress is considering measures to deal with the problem
nationwide. Hazardous waste from small quantity generators is now
covered by the Solid Waste Disposal Act and amendments to RCRA now
pending before Congress would reduce the small generator exemption in
that law to one-hundred pounds per month.
          As currently written, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
appears unlikely to prevent the sites it regulates from becoming major
clean-up problems in the future. A staff memorandum from the
Congressional Office of Technology Assessment points out that "no
matter what may be done to limit land disposal in the future, the
interim-status facilities have already received billions of tons of
hazardous waste over several decades."
          Lastly, RCRA merely tracks hazardous wastes and assumes that they
will be properly disposed of, but gives no incentive to industry to
recycle or to select alternative methods of disposal. RCRA encourages
landfilling as long as it is cheap. And landfilling is likely to
remain cheap until more stringent and protective regulations are in
place. As Eugene Zwenig notes, "The need exists to remove industry
from the burial habit toward full conservation and recovery
practices." To do this, we must "attack the problem at its root."
Total cost should be borne by the generator of hazardous waste with
rewards for successful reclaiming and recycling projects.
          The magnitude of the abandoned hazardous waste site problem finally
led Congress, in 1980, to enact the Comprehensive Environmental
Response, Compensation and Liability Act, known popularly as
Superfund. Through taxes on manufacturers, producers, exporters and
importers of oil and forty-two chemical substances, a trust fund of
$1.6 billion was created. This fund was combined with the National
Contingency Plan established in 1968 to respond to emergency oil
spills and releases of hazardous substances in navigable
waters--funded through the Clean Water Act.
          Superfund money, which is reimbursable to the govern-

ment by the
party responsible for the pollution, is available for three kinds of
situations:
          Immediate Removals--where prompt action is needed to
protect public health or the environment. These include such things as
protecting drinking water supply, averting fires or explosions and
preventing exposure to highly toxic substances. These actions must be
taken within six months and at a cost of less than one million
dollars.
          Planned Removals--for quick, but not emergency
response actions. They are designed to minimize risks and are subject
to the same time and cost restrictions as emergency removals.
          Remedial Actions--long-term, more expensive actions
directed to permanent clean-up. Only sites that go through a rigorous
investigation and priority ranking process are eligible for remedial
action, since money is limited and cleanup expensive.
          Every attempt is made to find the parties responsible for the
pollution and require that they pay at least part of the clean-up The
Powersville site in Peach County is currently being considered for
designation as a National Priority Site; a decision is expected in
October. If Powersville is selected, a funding formula for clean-up
will have to be devised.
          Superfund operates on the premise that responsible parties are
liable for the situations they have created. If they can be found and
are not bankrupt, they will pay a large share of the cleanup costs. If
no responsible party can be found, Superfund pays one-hundred percent
for immediate or planned removals. For remedial actions, ninety
percent of privately owned sites or fifty percent of municipally owned
sites are paid for by federal money with the state left to pay the
difference. That local governments have to bear such a. large amount
of clean-up costs in their own jurisdictions tends to make them less
than eager to discover hazardous sites.
          At this point in the Peach County case, for example, Woolfolk
Chemical Works denies any responsibility because they "didn't break
any laws" and such liability, Woolfolk claims, would force it out of
business. Because the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was not
in force at the time, technically, Woolfolk did not break any
laws. But, as Leonard Ledbetter, Director of Georgia's Environmental
Protection Division has stated, "In no way does Superfund legislation
have any language that forgives the source for having created an
environmental problem." Even if Superfund money is available, Woolfolk
should pay.
          What will happen if Powersville is not selected for Superfund
and/or Woolfolk is not found liable for the contamination at the site?
Then, as much as the full cost of clean-up will fall to the
municipality (as owners of the landfill) and to the state of
Georgia. Georgia has its own Superfund statute as part of its
Hazardous Waste Management Act, which created a Hazardous Waste Trust
Fund. The Trust Fund's only sources of money are bond forfeitures (of
which there have been none), state assessed fees and surcharges, and
civil penalties. The fund presently contains only $141,000 according
to John Taylor of EDP's Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management
Program. That amount is meaningless given the costs involved. The
Luminous Processes site, the only one in Georgia to be cleaned up
under Superfund, cost $750,000 to remove 1,800 cubic feet of
radiation-contaminated soil from a one-acre area and transport it to a
secured disposal site.
          The actions at Powersville would be different, and would be
directed at protecting the water supply--possibly by curtaining-off
the underlying groundwater from the contaminated site and assuring an
alternative water supply for those with contaminated wells. It would
be very expensive.
          Georgia has over 525 sites on the Superfund inventory, yet only a
total of five have been considered for Superfund. When asked why this
was so, John Taylor responded, "Georgia is not a very industrialized
state, especially compared with areas in the Midwest and Northeast, so
it is unlikely that we have many hazardous waste sites that would be
eligible for Superfund." In all likelihood, Taylor's assumption is
erroneous. It is also dangerous. Even one Times Beach or Love Canal
situation in Georgia would be catastrophic.
          Because of lack of money, EPD only began to assess some of its
potential Superfund sites in January 1984. This action was made
possible by a federal grant which is limited to preliminary
assessments and site inspections; it is neither sufficient, nor
intended for cleanup.
          Georgia needs a state superfund with adequate financing to both
encourage the state to assess abandoned sites for possible clean-up
and to have sufficient funds to do a thorough clean-up if needed. The
Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies in its publication
The Toxics Crisis: What the States Should Do,
recommends the adoption of independent and stable funding mechanisms,
based on fees levied both on the generation and disposal of hazardous
waste. As the report emphasizes, this dual approach discourages
on-site production of hazardous waste by the generator tax and
prevents imported waste from escaping taxation.
          The report also suggests that states designate some of their
superfund money for litigation expenses to investigate and pursue
illegal dumpers. Money recovered could then be returned to the
superfund making it partially self-supporting.
          Most of the Southern_states do have their own
superfunds (Alabama and Arkansas do not) but although some have better
funding mechanisms than others, given their caps of three-million to
six-million dollars and the costs of clean ups, only South_Carolina is
ever likely to have an adequate amount to clean up more than one or
two sites.
          The Georgia office of the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation
(LEAF) is currently preparing a report on the current status of
abandoned waste sites in Georgia, outlining the need for sufficient
funds to take care of the problems that are sure to be found. This
report will be distributed to Georgia legislators and will be
available to the general public.
          The other major problem the citizens of Georgia face is their
government's current insistence upon a hazardous waste landfill in the
state. According to the EPA, ninety-percent of the hazardous waste
generated today can be disposed of safely without landfilling. "Land
burial and deep well injection are absolute last resorts," says Denny
Dobbs. His order of priority is waste reduction, recycling and waste
exchange, treatment (biological and chemical) and incineration.
          Among Southern_states, Florida already has banned hazardous waste
landfills and is beginning a program to promote resource recovery,
recycling, re-use and treatment. 

In order to eliminate its landfills
and encourage alternatives, Georgia needs to assess exactly what
hazardous wastes are being generated, determine the state-of-the-art
disposal method for each and decide the proper kind of disposal
facility and state needs. Even the best alternative methods will need
close monitoring.
          Some alternatives to landfills are more expensive in the short
term. But the costs of living with hazardous waste landfills--measured
by the inevitable clean-up bill and the damage to human health for
generations to come--is considerable and ultimately unacceptable.
          
            Vicki Breman is an attorney with the Georgia office of
the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation.
          
        
