Toxic trash: California’s aging hazardous waste sites have troubling safety records

Aug 29, 2023

California produces millions of tons of hazardous waste every year – toxic detritus that can leach into groundwater or blow into the air. It’s waste that can explode, spark fires, eat through metal containers, destroy ecosystems and sicken people. It’s dangerous material that we have come to rely on and ignore – the flammable liquids used to cleanse metal parts before painting, the lead and acid in old car batteries, even the shampoos that can kill fish.

It all needs to go somewhere.

But over the past four decades, California’s facilities to manage hazardous waste have dwindled. What’s left is a tattered system of older sites with a troubling history of safety violations and polluted soil and groundwater, a CalMatters investigation has found. Many are operating on expired permits. And most are located in communities of color, often ones with high rates of poverty, despite environmental justice laws meant to ensure that the most disadvantaged don’t also face the greatest pollution exposure.

“It’s difficult to permit a new toxic facility. There’s going to be a lot of resistance to building a new one,” said Bill Magavern, the Coalition for Clean Air’s policy director, who advised on a state report in 2013 that examined California’s hazardous waste permitting process. “So the path of least resistance is keeping some of the old ones going.”

This conflict is playing out in Santa Fe Springs, a city of about 19,000 people in Los Angeles County that houses one of the state’s biggest hazardous waste treatment and recycling facilities, called Phibro-Tech. Last year, state regulators issued a draft of a new five-year permit for the company, which has been running on an expired one since 1996. Community activists and environmental groups are opposed.

Phibro-Tech is one of only 72 permitted destinations for hazardous waste in a state that had more than 400 in the early 1980s. Shipping records show it handles as much as 23,000 tons of hazardous waste a year from some of the biggest West Coast companies, including tech giants Intel and TTM Technologies.

But Phibro-Tech is also a company with a lengthy record of violating laws meant to protect workers, the environment and its neighbors in a low-income Latino community, according to hundreds of pages of inspection reports CalMatters obtained through government databases and public records requests.

In recent years, California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control inspectors cited Phibro-Tech for leaking containers and cracked containment barriers. They identified poorly maintained wells that might allow toxic waste to seep into the environment and they dinged the company for failing to address one area of contamination on the site in a timely manner. Among the pollutants state regulators have documented in soil and groundwater under and near the plant are trichloroethylene and hexavalent chromium – the cancer-causing chemical made famous in the movie “Erin Brockovich.”

Other regulators also found problems in the past decade. The Los Angeles basin’s air pollution agency cited the company after its equipment released ammonia gas, which can burn lungs if inhaled. Sanitation system regulators cited the company for discharging wastewater with excess contaminants into sewers, including copper, a hazardous element that can be toxic to aquatic life.

And occupational safety regulators cited the company for unsafe working conditions. Among the more serious incidents: In 2015, a worker making $15.70 an hour slipped in a puddle of spilled acid and got second- and third-degree burns on his legs, feet and genitals, workers’ compensation case file records and inspection reports show. Last year a cracked valve sprayed hydrochloric acid in another worker’s face, leaving him with breathing problems, those documents reveal.

The company’s representatives, in meetings with CalMatters, defended Phibro-Tech’s record. They want the state to approve a new operating document and blamed many of their regulatory violations on what they deem to be an ambiguous and outdated permit. The company has entered into agreements to fix problems found during inspections, and has addressed issues on site. They said residents are in no danger from operations and that contamination on site was from other companies – the legacy of a century of industrial operations there and nearby. And they touted Phibro-Tech’s role in recycling waste that would otherwise be dumped and lead to environmental damage from mining. (Every 55 pounds of copper the company is able to recover from the waste that electronics manufacturers send them is 10,000 pounds of earth that doesn’t need to be excavated in the hunt for precious metals, they said.)

But that’s little comfort to some residents of Los Nietos, in unincorporated Los Angeles County, where the nearest home is roughly 550 feet from Phibro-Tech’s warren of aging tanks and labyrinthine pipes. It’s one of the most environmentally vulnerable areas in California, according to a complicated scoring system the state devised to account for exposure to pollution and health risk because of factors such as poverty.

More than 20 sites generating hazardous waste sit within a mile of this neighborhood, including companies that do chrome plating, manufacture radiators and make batteries.

“We are not a rich people,” said Esther Rojo, whose house is a thousand feet – as the wind blows – from Phibro-Tech. “So they put all of them over here in this area.”

A 2015 state law was supposed to do something about that — by requiring regulators to consider the “cumulative impact” on communities when making permitting decisions. Yet officials never actually adopted the regulations that the law required. The Department of Toxic Substances Control – which refused to be interviewed for this story – is poised to finalize the draft permit for Phibro-Tech later this year.

“We don’t know what to do,” Rojo said. “(Phibro-Tech) got the money. They got the power to stay here.”

The rules for handling dangerous waste date back to the 1970s, when state and federal officials began trying to define “hazardous.” That’s when they passed laws and started crafting regulations branding certain material with the label based on characteristics including ignitability (would it burst into flames?), corrosivity (could it eat through a metal container?), toxicity (are you more likely to get cancer if you’re exposed to it?) and reactivity (is it unstable and likely to explode?).

Those regulations generally require that hazardous waste go to a specially permitted facility that can treat, store or dispose of the material. But while just about everyone wants consumer products that lead to the creation of hazardous waste, no one wants that waste dumped in their backyard.

In the past 40 years, the number of California facilities that have permits to treat, store or dispose of hazardous waste has dropped by more than 80% — while the number of places that generate this waste grew by more than 70% since 2010, according to a state report released last month. Only 72 permitted facilities remain statewide to handle the waste of about 94,500 generators. As some companies turn to more sustainable practices, California’s volumes of hazardous waste have dropped a modest amount since the 1990’s, state analyses of shipping records show. For example, California shipped about 11% less hazardous waste in 2015 than it did in 1995.

Officials and experts have long recognized that there’s little political will to open new sites to take toxic material. A 2017 state report discussed California’s longstanding efforts to reduce the generation of hazardous waste because of the “difficulty in gaining consensus in the siting of new facilities.”

It’s also expensive to try to open a new site. Permitting can take years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for companies who also “must pay taxes and any other expenses to maintain the property throughout time the permit is being processed, despite receiving no revenue from the facility,” according to the July report.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, roughly half the hazardous waste generated in California winds up in other states – often ones with weaker environmental regulations, according to a Department of Toxic Substances Control analysis of shipping records. (California’s standards are tougher than the federal ones. So waste considered hazardous in California can sometimes be disposed of at regular landfills in states like Arizona and Utah.) The average distance from a California hazardous waste generator to a destination facility is 500 miles, according to the July report.

CalMatters asked the Department of Toxic Substances Control when it last received a permit application from a company trying to open a business in California to store, treat or dispose of federally defined hazardous waste. “Based on a review of available information,” there doesn’t appear to have been any permit applications for a new commercial facility since the early 1980s, according to the agency.

The toxic material that stays in California goes to a relatively small collection of aging facilities, many of which have a history of regulatory violations and safety lapses, a CalMatters review of permitting and enforcement records found.

Using a list of permitted hazardous waste businesses in California and a database of shipping records, CalMatters identified 41 commercial facilities in California that received at least one shipment of hazardous waste last year. (The rest are largely a mix of military installations and operations that treat their own toxic waste before sending it to another facility, records show.) Among those 41 sites, 24 have been the subject of “corrective action” to clean contamination on their site (some tracing back to earlier owners), 29 were the subject of enforcement action by toxics regulators since 2010, and 11 are operating on expired permits.

“It can’t be that a system that’s held together at best by bubble gum and baling wire is the thing that we’re doing in a developed nation to manage hazardous waste,” said Angela Johnson Meszaros, a managing attorney with the environmental law organization Earthjustice.

This article was originally published by CalMatters. Read more of their coverage of California state government on CalMatters.org.