Overview:
- Two bills aimed at limiting hazardous and radioactive waste facilities in Michigan are advancing in the state Senate Committee. Sponsored by State Sen. Darrin Camilleri, the bills propose higher tipping fees for liquid hazardous waste and a five-year moratorium on new hazardous waste treatment and storage facilities and site expansions.
=The goal is to protect vulnerable communities and prevent Michigan from becoming a primary dumping ground for North America.
-The Senate Committee on Energy and Environment passed the bills with a 10-4 vote, mostly along party lines, and they will now proceed to the Senate floor.
A pair of bills that would rein in Michigan hazardous and radioactive waste facilities is making progress in lame duck. The bills passed out of the Michigan Senate Committee on Energy and Environment last week with a 10-4, mostly party-line, vote and will now head to the Senate floor.
Public officials from western Wayne County voiced their support for the bills at a committee hearing, saying their municipalities were unprepared to deal with the impacts of massive quantities of waste being dumped in their communities.
“We’re undertrained, under-resourced and underprepared to address events at the (Detroit Industrial Well),” Kevin Krause, director of community safety and development for the city of Romulus, told the committee.
He said the city and region lack emergency response capabilities to respond to fires and other incidents. He noted that the city hadn’t wanted the facility but was forced to accommodate it when state and federal authorities issued permits for it.
Kevin McNamara, supervisor of Van Buren Township, made similar comments about his township’s ability to respond to fires at the Wayne Disposal Inc. facility, which has received Manhattan Project era radioactive waste and contaminated soil from the East Palestine rail disaster.
The legislation, sponsored by State Sen. Darrin Camilleri (D-Trenton), would raise tipping fees for liquid hazardous waste and place a five-year moratorium on new hazardous waste treatment and storage facilities and site expansions.
Shipments of very low level radioactive waste and odor problems and other issues at Republic Services’ facility in Detroit’s Poletown East neighborhood have made headlines in recent years, sparking public outcry.
“This is a major problem,” Camilleri said. “People are sending their material from everywhere else into our backyard.”
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He said more protections were needed to curtail an ever-growing stream of waste that threatened to turn Michigan into the “premiere dumping ground for North America.”
SB 1052 would ban new hazardous waste facilities in densely populated areas, environmentally overburdened communities, or within 100 miles of an existing facility. The legislation would also:
- Enact a five-year moratorium during which hazardous waste treatment and storage facilities could not be built or expanded.
- Ban the creation of new hazardous and radioactive waste injection wells.
- Require the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy to develop a comprehensive new plan for managing hazardous and radioactive waste during the five-year moratorium.
- Set a maximum statewide capacity limit for hazardous and radioactive waste.
- Strengthen financial assurance requirements to protect taxpayers from footing the bill for cleanups.
Meanwhile, SB 938 would require owners or operators of hazardous waste injection wells to pay a $100 per-ton fee to EGLE to create a fund for host communities to improve emergency preparedness.
Camilleri said the Romulus injection well was the only such facility in the state. There is currently no per-unit surcharge for liquid hazardous waste in Michigan.
Why Michigan is a magnet for hazardous waste
Environmental advocates and public officials said Camilleri’s legislation was needed to modernize the state’s hazardous waste system and protect vulnerable communities.
Six of the state’s eight hazardous waste facilities that take off-site material are in Wayne County. And 65% of those living within a three-mile radius of Michigan’s commercial hazardous waste facilities are people of color, according to the Sierra Club. However, they only make up 25% of the state’s population.
Andrew Bashi, staff attorney at the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, who helped draft HB 1052, told the Senate committee that Michigan had the worst record in the nation for discriminatory siting. He added that these facilities mostly took in out-of-state waste and not materials from the counties where they are located.
Unlike some other states, Bashi said Michigan had failed to ban the disposal of technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material (TENORM), a category that includes the waste being brought in from the Manhattan Project sites.
Lawmakers have also previously cited low tipping-fees for landfill and hazardous waste as factors that make Michigan more attractive for out-of-state waste.
“I would love to shut it down,” Camilleri said of the Romulus injection well, although he added that this wasn’t likely to be legally possible.
“What we can do is try to drive them out of business,” he said. “It has to be expensive to send your waste to our state.”
Camilleri said the $100 per ton fee included in SB 938 would shift the state from being the cheapest in the nation for liquid waste to the most expensive.
Hearing sets up a vote on hazardous waste protections
All of those who testified on Thursday supported the bills, although representatives for groups like the Michigan Manufacturers Association, Detroit Regional Chamber and Michigan Chamber of Commerce submitted cards opposing the legislation.
State Sen. John Damoose (R-Charlevoix) was the lone Republican to back the legislation.
“Being a dumping ground for other states and for Canada, not just related to radioactive material but for trash in general, has bothered me for a long, long time,” Damoose said.
If passed by the legislature, the bills could be one of the few pieces of environmentally protective legislation acted on during the lame duck period when Democrats still maintain control of both the Michigan House and Senate. Environmental advocates have recently drawn attention to the legislature approving potentially $10 billion in incentives for big business while failing to act on priorities like polluter pay and community solar.
Camilleri said it was important to pass environmentally protective legislation now, because “a round of deregulation is coming” with the Trump administration.