Wayne Disposal Inc. has suddenly become a hot topic after years without controversy, a development that company officials don’t completely understand, Jim Lynch reports in The Detroit News.
The private landfill operation that sits just off Interstate 94 in Belleville is caught in the tug of war over energy policy in Michigan as well as other states. It has been here for several decades handling wastes that can’t be stored in a normal solid waste landfill — such as incinerator ash, dust from steel mill air filtering systems or PCB-contaminated soils and sediments from industrial sites.
But it wasn’t until last month — when the public became aware the facility planned to take a shipment of hydraulic fracturing sludge from Pennsylvania — that anyone seemed to care. State Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, said he was “shocked to learn that a landfill in Michigan was scheduled to accept nearly 40 tons of low-level radioactive sludge” and announced he would introduce a bill banning companies from shipping such wastes to Michigan.
Wayne Disposal is operated by EQ, a Wayne-based subsidiary of Boise, Idaho-based US Ecology, and company officials announced they would not accept the Pennsylvania fracking material until a panel created by Gov. Rick Snyder reviewed how the state handles wastes with low levels of radioactivity that are a little above naturally occurring levels.
Nic Clark, Michigan director of Clean Water Action, criticizes Gov. Rick Snyder’s call for a panel to review waste policies.
“Michigan is home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water, so why would we import any radioactive waste to begin with?” Clark says in a statement.
