Document Rp3rnq7jk5y1BemedJ65ERD68

/ POISON WASTE DISCOVERY SETS DqE A BIG PROBLEM By Tony Mors# ^v>V THE nearest thing to an in* duslriai Watergate was be ginning to hit one of the big names in Britain's waste dis- e>cal business on Tuesday-- orld Environment Day. The row against the Redland Group was boiling up as Eldon GrifTtihs of the En vironment Department was opening Enpocon, the pollu tion control and water treat ment exhibition in London. It was sparked off by a Sunday Timex Insight investi gation into the seeping out of polychlorinated biphenyls dumped in a quarry over looking the mining valley of Taff Vale. The investigation showed that seepage of PCB made by Monsanlp at Newport and damped in the hillside quarry of Maendy in 1966-70 rightly alarmed local farmers--con centrations in land around the site were as high as 14 ppm or seven million times the United States safety figure. Side effects on humans in clude stillborn children, loss of hair, and vomiting. Dangers But in Britain there is no officially recognised danger level although manufacturing companies are well aware of the dangers and confine use i --' ! NEWSCLIP/APCUT i THE ENGINEER Weekly (dte. 1.196) .-7JUNI973 of PCB to areas like closed circuit heat exchanger sys tems. The Environment Pro tection Bill planned for the next session of Parliament must go much further than the basic Deposit of Poison ous Waste Act 1972 in defin ing pollution levels and codi fying disposal methods. The present situation al lows the Department of the Environment to say that toxi cological surveys show the area to be safe while analysis by JCI of farmers' samples indicates the opposite. But the DoE is sufficiently wor ried to make a further sur vey, and admits there are some 40 such tips causing concern. The company operating the Maendy tip-- Purle Waste Disposal (South Wales), part of the Redland Group--is a victim of the rapid reversal in attitudes to dumping in the past three years. In I97Q the use of landfill methods was widely accepted as the most economic way to get rid of dangerous chemicals, and we are now seeing the tragic re suits of shortsighted or indis criminate use of this tech nique. Purle, which inherited the problem when it bought the company previously operat ing the Maendy tip. did not realise until loo late (hat cracks in the underlying rock structure allowed chemicals to seep down into the water table. The trouble is that now use of deep mines with safe geologically sealed structures like Btownhills in Stafford shire--see The Engineer of November 23 1972 -- can be unnecessarily limited by local authorities under pressure from residents. It is now clearly accepted that the only really safe way to dispose of PCB is incinera tion. Developments by Redland and other companies preventing the chemicals from aitacking the inciner ator refractory lining are making this method more economic. MONS 070202