Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- If last night's meeting is any indication, it is going to take the Environmental Protection Agency a long time to create a community consensus on how to treat contaminants found at the former Ciba-Geigy site.
Last night's session focused on thermal desorption, a treatment that uses heat to vaporize organic pollutants found in soil and sludge. But officials had barely completed describing how the technology would work when the audience's objections began.
William L. Troxler of Focus Environmental, Inc., a Knoxville, Tenn., company specializing in thermal treatment and air-pollution control, explained that thermal desorption involves heating soil and sludge to temperatures between 500 and 1,200 degrees to turn the pollutants into gases and remove them.
The gases are then treated to destroy or collect the contaminants, with the cleansed gases released into the atmosphere. From November 1994 to February 1995, a thermal desorption system was used to treat 14,836 cubic yards of polluted soil at the Reich Farm Superfund site off Route 9.
Almost as soon as Troxler was finished, Dover Township resident Scott Minnich said the heat treatment would release deadly dioxins into the air and challenged EPA officials to discuss the dangers of dioxin. But Troxler's figures on dioxin emissions at previous thermal desorption sites showed emissions far below a proposed EPA standard.
And Marianne Borthwick of nearby Pine Lake Park in Manchester said she did not want to see her community's long history of water contamination followed by a new threat of polluted air.
"I can't see how you can even consider putting a system in when you do not know how it will affect the people around it," Borthwick said, noting EPA officials have done no follow-up studies on the health of people living near previous thermal desorption sites.
The EPA was not the only public entity to be criticized last night.
Dover resident Dr. Jack Moriarty drew a round of applause when he asked why no elected officials from the township attended last night's meeting.
"We're here discussing toxic waste in the middle of billions of dollars of residential real estate, and they're not here?" Moriarty said.
Romona Pezzella, EPA's remedial project manager for the Ciba site, said thermal desorption is a treatment option for several source areas at Ciba, including the drum disposal area, a backfilled lagoon area and a site where filtercake from the company's dye production process was dumped.
Biological treatment, landfilling and stabilization are also being considered.
Pezzella said that while thermal desorption is very effective at removing organic compounds from the ground, it is not an effective treatment for removing metals or highly concentrated waste.
There are about 35,000-waste-filled drums at the Ciba site, and EPA officials announced last month that they will have to be removed. The agency has just begun the process of trying to decide how to treat the drummed material.
Pezzella said much of the material in the drums could be treated with thermal desorption, because many of the drums contain soil mixed with other industrial waste.
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: March 26, 1999
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