A week after residents and officials learned radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project was being sent to a Wayne County disposal facility, the Wayne County Commission met to discuss ways to reduce the amount of waste coming to Michigan and provide greater transparency over what’s being dumped in the state.

Public officials at the Tuesday meeting said they hadn’t been notified that the waste was coming to Republic Service’s Wayne Disposal Inc. facility in Van Buren Township. They said the issue highlighted the state’s failure to increase fees for waste arriving at Michigan facilities, which could discourage waste from entering the state. Some also called for state legislators to pass ”polluter pay” legislation that could protect residents from cleanup costs.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) brought up Republic Services’ history of violations at various facilities in Wayne County. The Wayne Disposal facility previously had issues with leachate spills into surface water and improper venting and monitoring of hazardous waste in underground storage and disposal of hazardous waste in nonhazardous waste areas.

Republic’s US Ecology facility in Detroit’s Poletown East neighborhood has received violations for odor issues and a leak that posed a hazard to groundwater.

“Look at the history of the company…this is a company that’s been fined a million dollars this year,” Tlaib said.

Melissa Quillard, a spokesperson for Republic, told Planet Detroit that the company recently completed upgrades at the Poletown East facility that include “the installation of a state-of-the-art tank system, groundwater monitoring wells and enhanced pre-acceptance procedures.”

The issue of importing hazardous waste to Wayne County made headlines in 2023, when contaminated soil and liquid from the rail disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, were brought to Wayne Disposal. Lawmakers, including Wayne County Executive Warren Evans and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Ann Arbor), expressed outrage that they hadn’t been notified before the shipments arrived.     

“There is no notification requirement or process to inform local officials of individual shipments,” said Hugh McDiarmid, spokesperson for Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, referring to the radioactive material. McDiarmid said EGLE was informed of the shipments and confirmed they were appropriate for the facility. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notified Van Buren Township that the materials were coming.

These waste shipments have also highlighted the disproportionate burden residents in southeast Michigan face from hazardous waste. Six of the state’s eight hazardous waste facilities that accept off-site materials are in Wayne County.

Nick Schroeck, associate dean of experiential education at the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, said during a 2023 hearing that in Michigan, 65% of those living within a three-mile radius of a hazardous waste facility were people of color. However, they made up only 25% of the total population.

Location and low tipping fees make Michigan a waste magnet?

Wayne County has one of only five facilities that accept the kind of materials being hauled from the Niagara Falls Storage Site near Lewiston, New York, where the radioactive material is currently stored. It’s the only such facility east of the Mississippi River, Patrick Cullen, divisional director of Wayne County’s environmental services for solid waste technical, said at the commission meeting. 

A 1992 Supreme Court ruling declared that garbage from out of state was a commodity that couldn’t be restricted under the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

However, lawmakers and environmental advocates have often said that Michigan’s low tipping fees for hazardous materials and landfill waste compared to neighboring states make it attractive for out-of-state garbage. Michigan charges 36 cents per ton for landfill waste, compared to Ohio’s $4.75 and Wisconsin’s $13. 

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Brent LaSpada, USACE’s project manager for the Niagara Falls Storage Site, told Planet Detroit that Wayne Disposal would receive 6,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil and concrete but no groundwater, as was previously reported. He said lined and covered trucks will transport the materials using federal highways. Shipments will begin in late September and continue for six to seven months, with approximately 25 trucks coming weekly.

“It’s on the lower end of the type of material we ship for the (Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action) program,” he said, referring to the program that cleans up sites with contamination from the nation’s early atomic energy program. However, he said it still needs to go to a licensed facility that meets certain requirements for receiving radioactive waste.

Residents and lawmakers concerned about water and accidents

At Tuesday’s meeting, residents and officials voiced serious concerns about the risks of transporting radioactive materials and potential impacts on waterways.

“The possibility of accidents (and) leaks during transportation presents a significant threat to health, safety and the environment, even with the most stringent safety message measures,” said Jason Smith, city manager for Belleville.

Belleville Lake lies within a few thousand feet of the Republic facility, part of the Huron River system that flows into Lake Erie. Smith said any impact on the 1270-acre lake would be ecologically and economically devastating for the area.

Denise Trabbic-Pointer, a toxics and remediation specialist with Sierra Club Michigan Chapter, said that in addition to transporting the materials, the treatment and landfilling processes present a concern, as does the leachate, which is the slurry created when rainwater mixes with contaminated soil. Trabbic-Pointer said all landfills will leach hazardous chemicals and radioactive material at some point, noting that low-level radioactive materials are prevalent in the environment.

“Exposure points can occur in transit if the loads are not properly covered and at the landfill with employees being most at risk in the case of (Wayne Disposal),” she said. 

Quillard, with Republic, said that Wayne Disposal is designed and equipped to handle materials like those from the Niagara Fall Storage site and that the facility has “a robust liner system and an environmental monitoring program with more than 100 monitoring points that analyze groundwater, surface water, ambient air and soil.”

Can lawmakers rein in Michigan’s hazardous waste imports?

Wayne County Commissioner Sam Baydoun said the state needs stronger state and federal rules to address the amount of waste Michigan receives and hold companies accountable.

“We should work very hard to make it… expensive for this company to dump in our backyard,” he said.

State Rep. Reggie Miller (D-Van Buren Township) introduced legislation in 2023 to raise hazardous waste disposal fees and require a percentage to be distributed to the host community. This bill has not advanced. She also sponsored a resolution that was adopted to encourage better notification from the federal government when toxic waste is crossing state lines. But she noted that such notification had not occurred.

Tlaib suggested that EGLE could do more to discourage companies from handling toxic materials, saying the agency recently renewed permits for Republic even though their facilities have had multiple violations in recent years.

“When’s the last time they denied a permit?” she said. “Because every permit I’ve ever seen come forward to the state seems to get approved or delayed because they need more information.”

Norrel Hemphill, equal justice works fellow with the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center who is working in coalition with the water rights nonprofit We The People of Detroit, said that addressing the dumping of hazardous materials in Michigan was an issue of global importance.

Noting the large percentage of the world’s freshwater contained in the Great Lakes and the phosphorus pollution already affecting western Lake Erie, Hemphill said Michigan couldn’t afford to make mistakes with its water resources

“The water that we have is the water that we have,” she said.

Rep. Dingell and Executive Evans will hold a town hall meeting on Wednesday, September 4, at 6 p.m. at the Ted Scott Campus of Wayne County Community College in Belleville. Representatives from the USACE, EGLE and EPA will attend.