Oil spill waste dumped in landfill

Every piece of oil that washes ashore gets handled separately from all other trash, at least until it reaches the landfill.

Cleanup contractors wear suits and pick up “product” with gloves, placing it in clear plastic bags. Those bags get thrown into a special waste container lined with plastic. Local officials have asked the public not to throw away tar balls in the trash bins at beach access points.

That’s about where the special treatment ends.

Waste Management, which has a contract with BP to dispose of solid oil waste, takes everything washed up on Florida shores to the Springhill Landfill in Campbellton, roughly an hour north of Panama City near the Alabama line.

Okaloosa County has its own contract with Waste Management to take municipal waste to the same landfill.

Though both kinds of trash are carefully kept separate on their way to the dump, oiled trash and non-oiled trash ultimately end up mixed together.

“It’s put in the same cell, it’s handled the same way, it’s covered each day,” said Waste Management spokeswoman Amy Boyson.

When asked where all the tar balls go, both county emergency officials and a spokeswoman for P2S, the contractor that picks up oil debris off the beach, said oil disposal wasn’t a part of their respective operations.

Just before a P2S safety training course in Fort Walton Beach about three weeks ago, the instructor, Keith Benoit, a safety consultant from the Petroleum Education Council, emphasized the need to keep oil waste separate and stop it from “infiltrating the system.”

“It’s hazardous waste, so they can’t just put it in the garbage,” Benoit said.

But according to federal regulations, none of the oil stretching from the site of the Deepwater Horizon gusher is considered hazardous waste. Not the tar balls washed up on the Emerald Coast, or the goopy liquid seen farther west.

“The oil spill materials and the mixture of oil and cleanup debris are not regulated as hazardous waste,” Florida Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Jennifer L. Jones said in an e-mail.

Waste associated with oil and natural gas exploration and production is exempt from federal hazardous waste regulations, according to an October 2002 Environmental Protection Agency document.

“In general, the exempt status of an E&P waste depends on how the material was used or generated as waste, not necessarily whether the material is hazardous or toxic,” the document states.

In October 1976, Congress passed the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act, requiring the EPA to develop hazardous waste regulations. The EPA temporarily exempted oil drilling waste in 1980, pending a complete report on the environmental effects of oil waste, which wasn’t submitted to Congress until 1987.

The temporary exemption became permanent in 1988.

“The petroleum industry, the mining industry, those big industries have considerable influence in drafting regulations,” said Ken Feely, the EPA’s solid waste coordinator. “That’s what we’re stuck with, for better or worse.”

Even if the exemption didn’t exist, no oil spill material would be considered hazardous waste, Feely said. BP runs tests to show that the waste isn’t hazardous — though it’s not required to.

“To my knowledge, it’s passed every time,” he said.

While crude oil may not be considered hazardous waste, it can be toxic, according to the EPA’s website. The agency breaks down crude oil into four classes, which range from highly toxic and volatile liquid oil to “relatively non-toxic” solid oil.

Oil dispersants also aren’t regulated as hazardous waste, according to the DEP.

“Dispersants, some of which may contain potentially toxic constituents, are presumably being used according to label instructions and in accordance with approvals from EPA and the Unified Command,” the DEP e-mail reads.

Only solid oil waste is taken to Springhill Landfill, Waste Management said. Liquid crude sucked up by oil vacuums gets taken to the Theodore Docks in Theodore, Ala., where machines separate the oil from the water.

Some oil even gets reused and sold by BP PLC, which announced in a June news release that it would donate the “net revenue” of recovered oil to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.