Published in the Asbury Park Press
By JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
TOMS RIVER -- It was described by the federal Environmental Protection Agency as a forum to discuss thermal desorption, a heat treatment that is one of the possible methods the agency is considering to clean up the former Ciba-Geigy Corp. site.
But Thursday's meeting quickly turned into an audience referendum on incineration, a type of treatment an EPA administrator said is not even being considered for the Superfund site off Route 37 west.
The contentious nature of the forum shows how difficult it may be to reach community consensus on how to treat 35,000 drums of chemical waste, along with more than a dozen contaminated sites on the Ciba property, which was placed on the federal Superfund list in 1982.
EPA officials have said repeatedly that no final decision on how to treat the waste will be made until the treatment methods receive support from residents. Additional treatment methods, including biological treatment, landfilling and stabilization, will be introduced to the public at a meeting next month.
Ciba is scheduled to submit a draft feasibility study for the cleanup operation by late May or early June.
"Incineration is not one of the technologies we are considering for this site," said William J. Muszynski, deputy regional administrator for EPA's Region II, which includes New Jersey. "There is confusion between thermal desorption and incineration."
But to many of the people who crowded into a meeting room at the Holiday Inn, the two technologies seemed the same.
Sharon Finlayson, chairwoman of the New Jersey Environmental Federation, compared the thermal desorption unit with a garbage incinerator now operating in Camden. Finlayson said using an incinerator to clean up contaminants at the Ciba site would be "unconscionable."
"You're moving the poison from the soil to the air, where it moves more readily through the population," Finlayson said.
Romona Pezzella, EPA's remedial project manager for the Ciba site, said it was not accurate to compare the Camden garbage incinerator to the thermal desorption units that could be used to remove some of the pollutants at Ciba.
Incinerators typically operate at much higher temperatures -- between 800 and 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit -- than the thermal desorption units, which heat soil at temperatures between 500 and 1,200 degrees, she said.
The thermal desorption units can be used to treat soils contaminated with organic pollutants, Pezzella explained. In a two-step process, the soil is heated to vaporize the pollutants and turn them into gases, which are then treated to destroy or collect the contaminants before the cleansed gas is released to the atmosphere.
Thermal desorption was used to clean up about 15,000 cubic yards of polluted soil at the Reich Farm Superfund site, off Route 9, from November 1994 until February 1995.
An incinerator, on the other hand, "is a unit in which you try to destroy the contaminants," during the first step of the process, Pezzella said.
Although EPA officials are considering incineration for some of the pollutants found at Ciba, the materials would be taken to an off-site incinerator, she said.
The thermal desorption units would be placed on-site. But while heat treatment could be used to remove some of the pollutants at Ciba, including the contents of some of the 35,000 drums of waste at the site, it is not appropriate for all the contaminants found there.
Thermal desorption cannot remove metals from the soil, and is not effective at removing highly concentrated waste.
William L. Troxler of Focus Environmental Inc., a Knoxville, Tenn., company specializing in thermal treatment and air-pollution control, told the audience that his company has been involved in more than 60 remediation projects throughout the country in which thermal desorption has been used.
He said tests of emissions from the thermal desorption units have shown hazardous waste levels -- including dioxins -- far below federal and state standards.
But Dover Township resident Scott Minnich said it makes no sense to attempt to clean up a hazardous waste site by spewing any amount of dioxin into the air.
"It is the most dangerous chemical I am aware of," Minnich said.
Many of the people attending Thursday's meeting strongly opposed any type of heat treatment for the drummed Ciba waste.
But some residents urged the audience to hear about all the forms of treatment the EPA is considering before rejecting any of them.
"I want it underlined that EPA has not made a decision yet," said Benjamin Epstein, president of Ocean County Citizens for Clean Water. "We sometimes get too excited about what the story isn't, before we've even heard the whole story."
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: March 29, 1999
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