POLLUTION CONTROL Center refuses leachate

Two months of nonpayment is the standard cutoff.
By DENISE DICK
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- The city's water pollution control center stopped accepting leachate from the Warren Recycling Inc. landfill last month because the company hadn't paid for the treatment.
Tom Angelo, director of the center, said the company was shut off earlier last month after failing to pay the bill for two months.
"There's a standard two-month cutoff for anybody," business or residential, Angelo said.
The company paid 3 cents a gallon and brought in about 24,000 gallons per day, he said. The material was taken by truck from the landfill to the plant.
The outstanding bill is about $46,000.
"That sounds like a lot, but when you bring in that amount of leachate, it's proportional," Angelo said.
The city is working to develop a payment plan with the company after which the company can resume trucking the leachate to the plant, he said. Leachate is the liquid runoff from the landfill.
Debbie Roth, leader of Our Lives Count, a citizens group formed because of health concerns surrounding the landfill, says the leachate is accumulating.
Company officials couldn't be reached, but Roth said residents haven't seen trucks hauling leachate from the landfill in about six weeks.
"The city of Warren is putting us at greater risk because the leachate is becoming septic when it only costs pennies to truck it," she said.
Angelo said the company could be taking the leachate to another site for treatment.
Ohio EPA's view
Kurt Princic of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency's Division of Solid and Infectious Waste said whatever the landfill is doing regarding the leachate isn't sufficient.
"It's been clearly explained to them what their obligations are regarding the management of leachate," Princic said.
Failure to do it is part of what led to the agency's enforcement action against the company, he said.
The Ohio attorney general's office and the company entered a consent agreement in July 2003 detailing steps the company must take to bring the facility into compliance with state law and the deadlines by which those steps must be done.
One of those requirements was leachate management.
Earlier this year, the AG's office filed a motion for contempt of court against the company, saying it failed to meet those requirements. One of those items was keeping more leachate at the site than was agreed to in the order.
Leachate accumulation is one of the contributors to the hydrogen sulfide, rotten-egg stench coming from the landfill, Princic said.
"We know there's more leachate in the bottom of that landfill than there's supposed to be," Princic said.
"And there has been for a long time," said Mike Settles, OEPA spokesman.
denise_dick@vindy.com