Riding the Rails

Ohio’s C&D landfills have become the final resting place of choice for
thousands of tons of C&D debris shipped by rail, most of it from the northeast United States. The reason for this is simple, as Ohio’s tipping fees can be one-tenth of those along the Atlantic coast. Coupled with the relative affordability of hauling by rail, one can see why in 2003 Ohio had net imports of more than 1.4 million tons of all types of solid waste, a 13.4 percent increase in net imports since 2002.

Included in that total is an average of thousands of tons per day of C&D that has been coming into the state, with much of it arriving in a pulverized, almost powderish form so that more can be fit into each rail car. Indeed, some C&D recyclers in the Northeast have whole business models planned around picking out some of the more recyclable materials from the waste stream and shipping the rest to the Buckeye State.

But such wise business decisions have become controversial in the wake of citizen complaints of hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) odors from some of the landfills in Ohio that accept the rail-hauled waste. This has led to increased enforcement of the state’s C&D regulations, and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) is now taking a closer look at its own interpretation of those rules.

"This includes shredding, pulverizing, anything that would render the material unidentifiable. We have a few facilities that have been bringing in material that we determined to be unidentifiable and in violation of that rule," he notes.

Harris explains that the reason for the rule is to ensure that Ohio C&D facilities are receiving the kind of waste deemed appropriate for the facility. If the material is pulverized and that ability to recognize it as C&D is gone, "our site inspectors really don’t have any way of verifying that the material is appropriate."

The concern is to make sure there are no contaminants in the material. This is key, he adds, because historically C&D was very identifiable: "What we are used to seeing is stuff where you can see the brick, wood, drywall, stone, and different sized materials. If you can’t recognize the material as C&D, then you have absolutely no basis to know what else is in there."

This is not always the fault of the Ohio C&D landfill operators. Paul Ruesch, an environmental engineer with U.S. EPA’s Region 5, based in Chicago but covering the state of Ohio, has toured many of the Ohio facilities. "The regulators in Ohio can’t tell whether the material has municipal solid waste or banned items such as propane cylinders, asbestos, lead-based paint, contaminated soils—you name it, it has been found," he remarks. "They have to hire crews of workers to walk along the face of the landfill and pick out the tires, solid waste, propane canisters, etc. The material is not getting sorted out on the East Coast."

Ruesch’s take on the situation is that Ohio has weak regulations for C&D landfills. "The regs were designed for small facilities that accept a couple of hundred tons of material a week. They were not designed to handle facilities taking in thousands of tons per day of pulverized debris shipped in from out of state," he says.

Michael Cyphert, the legal representative for the C&D Association of Ohio, says there are a few landfills, mostly in the eastern portion of the state, that accept rail-hauled C&D. "The majority of C&D landfills in Ohio do not accept waste via rail," he says. "Most of these businesses do not have problems with waste not identifiable as C&D."

The problem stems from how EPA is interpreting and using the C&D definition of the word "recognizable," he says. "My opinion is that Ohio EPA has gone too far, that they have missed what the real reason behind the (1996) rule amendment was, and are now using it as a sword to deal with what they consider to be problem landfills."

One example of the interpretation problem is the C&D fines. "There probably is no difference in the fines of a rail car [full of C&D debris] than fines in the bed of a long-haul truck hauling MSW three miles down the road to the local landfill," Cyphert says.

Gordon Reger is a principal at Regus Industries, which until recently operated the Warren Hills landfill near Warren, Ohio. The site received hundreds of railcars filled with pulverized C&D. With nine Notice of Violations warnings in eight months, according to Ruesch, the facility was often spotlighted for facing the many problems with Ohio C&D regulations.

Reger says he understands that OEPA was very strictly enforcing the definition of C&D in the regulations, "which they have the right to do." But he adds, "That includes a coffee cup or water bottle from a construction job. Every once in a while it does happen," he says, referring to a beverage container being lobbed into a C&D debris bin at a work site. :When you bring in waste in large volumes, there is no way to sort out 100 percent of the non-conforming waste."

But Warren had other problems as well, according to its critics, including the generation of H2S gas, which brought in complaints from the landfill’s neighbors. H2S, which smells like rotten eggs, can, in very high doses, be harmful to human health. Harris of OEPA says that the complaints are what originally brought his agency in to investigate the site. "But the hydrogen sulfide issue is not the reason why we are focusing on pulverized waste. Really it is the existing rule, and the issue of how do we assure the citizens of Ohio that [this] is C&D going to these Ohio facilities."

Yet Harris admits that "with the advent of seeing these carloads of pulverized material coming in, that is where we first saw the problem with the hydrogen sulfide gas."

He adds, "We have learned that you have to have very careful control of your leachate management system. We also have understood from various sources that leachate re-circulation can aggravate the hydrogen sulfide situation."

Ruesch goes further, saying that the open ponds of leachate at Warren Hills exacerbated the problems. In Ohio, though, open ponds of leachate are not against the law. "When the leachate gets agitated, it releases hydrogen sulfide," Ruesch says.

Some of the odor problems can possibly be traced back to the OEPA’s own regulations, says Cyphert. "It is a challenge to take in large amounts of material in a confined area," such as what the regulations require, he says. "In some respects the regulations themselves may, frankly, be to blame by limiting the working space."

He says he has been in environmental law for 31 years and the Warren Hills experience was the first he had heard of H2S problems in landfills. Nobody knew about the problem before it happened, he says. "It is shortsighted for OEPA to say it is all that operator’s fault; that he should have known it would develop. Nobody knew; EPA didn’t know. They have 20/20 hindsight," says Cyphert.

So does the rail hauling of C&D to Ohio have a future?

Cyphert thinks rail hauling will continue to go on in Ohio, although only to a small number of facilities. On the shipping end, it will require the participation of good haulers and transfer stations in Eastern states who are very careful about how they deal with C&D, he says, and who understand Ohio’s stance on "recognizable" C&D debris.

"The solution is that if the rail haul operations are going to continue, that this pulverized waste should not be allowed in C&D landfills, it should go to Subtitle D landfills," says the U.S. EPA’s Ruesch. "The pulverized material must be disposed of in a manner that is protective of human health and the environment."

Interestingly, landfill owner Reger agrees. "Ohio is one of the last states that has C&D landfills that don’t require synthetic liners and post-closure treatment. My guess is that it won’t continue like that for very long. That is why we have decided that all the materials should go into an MSW landfill and be done with it," Currently all material that Regus Industries is accepting is going to the Sunny Farms Landfill, an MSW facility the company operates in the state.

But he thinks that even under this scenario, the practice of shipping material that is generated hundreds of miles away by rail will remain economically feasible. Contractors, haulers, landfill operators and recyclers in both parts of the country will maintain a keen interest to see what develops.

The author is associate publisher of C&DR and executive director of the CMRA. He can be contacted at turley@cdrecycling.org.