Landfill seeking help to stop radiation from household waste

By PETER H. MILLIKEN | milliken@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Operators of a local landfill want Mahoning County officials to help them prevent the landfill’s radiation monitor from being triggered by household-generated radioactive medical waste.

John Campbell, manager of Waste Management’s Mahoning Landfill in Springfield Township, recently told the county’s solid waste policy committee that his landfill has experienced an increase in radiation alarms, mainly due to iodine.

Campbell told the committee the landfill’s costs to have a consultant identify the type of radiation emanating from incoming garbage loads have risen substantially and may have to be passed on to landfill customers.

“They’re very short half-life isotopes, so they’re safe, but they show on our detection” when they enter the landfill, Jerry Ross, Waste Management’s senior district manager, said of the radioactive substances.

Typical half-lives of these substances found in household medical waste are about 36 hours, he said.

The half-life is the time it takes for a radioactive substance to lose half its radioactivity as it undergoes radioactive decay.

NOT A THREAT

Patricia Sweeney, Mahoning County health commissioner, said low-level radiation from these household medical wastes with short half-lives is not a public safety hazard. “It is not a public health threat,” she said.

The Ohio Department of Health also does not consider such waste a public health hazard in landfills, said Melanie Amato, ODH public information officer.

Sweeney, however, said she would be concerned about hazards from higher-level radioactive wastes, or those with long half-lives.

“If it is a high level of radiation that is [from] an isotope that has a long half-life, it is pulled out, and it does not go in that landfill,” she added.

Campbell asked the county board of health to request that physicians and clinics educate their patients who use radioactive substances for medical purposes not to throw contaminated items in landfill-bound household trash.

He said another alternative would be for patients to hold onto potentially contaminated materials for a week to allow their radioactivity to diminish.

Adult diapers, into which the substances are excreted, “tend to retain the radiation” when they arrive in trash loads at the landfill, Ross said.

“As a truck goes into a landfill, the [radiation threshold] levels are set so low that they trigger an alarm,” Sweeney said.

Mahoning Landfill management does not want to raise its radiation detection level above its current threshold of twice the naturally occurring background radiation, Ross said.

“We want to make sure that, at the landfill, we’re detecting those loads and trying to identify those isotopes,” Ross said.

“If you set your threshold too high, then you’re allowing low levels to come through.”

EDUCATION PROPOSED

Trash haulers who dump waste at the landfill could help solve the problem by including with bills they send to their customers a card listing items that should not be placed in landfill-bound trash, said Mary Helen Smith, environmental health director at the Mahoning County Health Department, who left this month to take the same position at the Portage County Health Department.

Patients should also seek advice on home medical waste disposal from their health care providers, Sweeney said.

“Waste Management is trying to be proactive and respond prudently to these incidences that are not a public health threat, but still manage the ones that are,” Smith said.

“We do not believe people that are receiving these treatments, personally, are a public health concern when they throw these adult diapers away,” Smith said.

The Ohio Department of Health no longer sends a representative to the landfill to identify radioactive substances free of charge, Ross said.

“Just the patient sitting on the [trash] container for an extra 36 hours will make the difference of a $600 or $700 bill” from a consultant called in to identify a radioactive substance at the landfill, Ross told the committee.

He speculated that the increase in alarms at his landfill may be due to patients who receive radiation treatments going home from hospitals sooner and continuing to excrete the byproducts of those treatments into diapers at home, or to an increase in diaper use by such patients.

Ross said he did not know the number of radiation alarm activations at the Mahoning landfill, which were caused by home-generated radioactive waste during the past two years.

ODH quit sending representatives to landfills to investigate radiation alarms in January 2009 because it needed to direct its limited resources to matters “presenting greater risk to public health and safety,” Amato said.

WASTE BANNED

State law bars dumping radioactive wastes in Ohio landfills; and the Mahoning County Board of Health, which licenses and inspects landfills here, requires local landfills to use radiation monitors with audible alarms.

But neither the state nor the county has set any specific threshold level of radiation at which the monitors must sound their alarms, Smith said.

Although the Mahoning Landfill sets its trigger level at twice the naturally occurring background radiation level, Republic Services Inc.’s Carbon Limestone Landfill in Poland Township sets its alarm for five times the background level.

Naturally occurring radiation levels vary considerably from one geographic locale to another, Smith observed.

Both landfills have fixed-location radiation detectors at their scales and portable hand-held radiation detectors to determine the exact location of radioactive waste in a load of garbage.

Both landfills require that an arriving garbage truck that triggers the radiation monitor at the scale be driven to another area of the landfill for further examination with the portable radiation detector.

Both have policies prohibiting the dumping of waste in the landfill unless or until its radiation has diminished below their threshold detection levels.

OFFER COMFORT

“The people in Mahoning County should have some comfort that the landfills in Mahoning County have radiation detectors,” said Mike Heher, Carbon-Limestone landfill manager.

All Republic landfills have had radiation detectors for the past 15 years, he said.

Between 1995 and 2005, Carbon-Limestone was rejecting six to eight loads a year due to radioactivity, but the last recorded rejection there for that reason was in October 2012, Heher said.

He credited the reduction in rejected loads to the education efforts directed by the county board of health that have urged the medical community to make sure radioactive waste is kept out of landfill-bound trash.

As for the patients who might generate radioactive medical waste at home, he said: “Usually, what the medical community will tell them is, ‘Bring it back to us for disposal.’”