The Environmental Protection Agency has approved a permit that will allow the Army’s chemical weapons incinerators to burn small amounts of PCBs found in the shipping and firing tubes of M55 rockets, an EPA official said.The permit, which was signed Thursday, will apply to the Anniston facility and three other incinerators, in Utah, Oregon and Arkansas. Under federal law, these incinerators are required to destroy 99.9999 percent of PCBs, which are regarded as a probable carcinogen by the EPA.
Agency engineers estimate that less than one ounce of polychlorinated biphenyls, the banned chemicals that were manufactured as industrial insulators, will be released into the environment from the stack of Anniston’s incinerator during its lifetime.
The permit is the result of almost 10 years of work. An EPA official said that the length of time before the approval was a result of Anniston’s legacy of PCB pollution.
“I don’t remember spending so much time on a permit,” said Dave Kling, acting deputy director of the EPA’s office of pollution prevention and toxics. “We were committed to not allowing a loading of PCBs into this community.”
Contamination in west Anniston, where Monsanto operated a plant that manufactured PCBs, is the subject of a high-profile lawsuit and national media attention. However, the incinerator’s PCB output pales in comparison to the amount of the chemical that was dumped in the neighborhood surrounding the plant.
David Baker, president of Community Against Pollution, said there are at least 10 million pounds of PCBs buried in a landfill and that more were released into drainage ditches. But Baker has supported the incinerator because he fears the risks that come from allowing the weapons to continue to sit, potentially as a terrorist target.
“It’s a Catch-22 and I don’t have all the answers,” he said. “But I’m comfortable with (the incinerator) at this point.”
The permit is issued under the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, which was enacted by Congress in 1976 to give the EPA the ability to track 75,000 industrial chemicals produced or used in the United States.
“We needed this prior to destroying the M55 rockets,” said Tim Garrett, the Army project manager at Anniston’s incinerator.
Garrett said that before the beginning of agent trial burns, now scheduled for December, the facility will undergo three extended test runs to demonstrate its ability to destroy PCBs, dioxins and furans pursuant to TSCA and Clean Air Act regulations. Data from the runs will be submitted to the EPA.
Following the destruction of the rockets and their fiberglass tubes, which is expected to take about two and a half years, no PCBs will be emitted, Garrett said.
