Emelle Hazardous Waste

Sometime you learn new things about your home state. Sometimes those things break your heart.

Emelle.

I’ve never been there. Evidently, the 2000 census says only 31 people live there.

Emelle: site of great sadness, threat to us all.

1978. Enter Waste Management. There is a lot to say about this company. What exists on the Interwebs is not attractive, but is potent. It earns over $16 billion a year. And because of it, Emelle is home to the largest hazardous waste dump in the nation (and maybe the world).

From a 1992 case decided by the United States Supreme Court (504 U.S. 334):

The parties do not dispute that the wastes and substances being landfilled at the Emelle facility “include substances that are inherently dangerous to human health and safety and to the environment. Such waste consists of ignitable, corrosive, toxic and reactive wastes which contain poisonous and cancer-causing chemicals and which can cause birth defects, genetic damage, blindness, crippling and death.” Increasing amounts of out-of-state hazardous wastes are shipped to the Emelle facility for permanent storage each year. From 1985 through 1989, the tonnage of hazardous waste received per year has more than doubled, increasing from 341,000 tons in 1985 to 788,000 tons by 1989. Of this, up to 90% of the tonnage permanently buried each year is shipped in from other States.

A pretty comprehensive discussion of the dump at Emelle lives on the University of Michigan servers here. I wish that the person who did the coding for the page knew how to make all of the punctuation marks show up as actual punctuation marks and not as little question marks. Other than that, it’s a good start.

Here’s where the science kicks in. The Emelle dump is over the Cretaceous Eutaw aquifer. According to some academics from Auburn,

Over 50 million gallons of water per day is pumped from the Eutaw aquifer reaching more than 650,000 people in 20 counties. The quality of drinking water supplied to this increasingly large population has been the concern of many in recent years. Although many have studied the geology of the coastal plain, elevated metal (iron, manganese, and strontium) content, water-sediment interaction, and influence of subsurface microorganisms on groundwater chemistry remain insufficiently understood. Preliminary data indicate that high alkalinity levels correlate with high metal concentrations in groundwater.

This does not make me happy. Further, hydrologists writing articles about the aquifer point out that it has an important filtering role. And this is where our drinking water comes from.

So then there’s this red-text-on-powder-blue-background webpage, which links up to this 1991 Greenpeace report.

It’s frustrating because all of the information on this dump appears to be dated. Obviously it was a hot issue to battle with Waste Management Inc. back in the 1990s. Maybe everyone has simply gotten burned out on the issue. Or maybe they were right to pick out a super poor part of Alabama with low population density for their dump. Hard to get people organized out there, especially when the corporation is pumping the “jobs” angle.

That’s what we’ve seen in other environmental justice fiascos here in Alabama. For example, over in Perry County (Be sure to click on the video). Local leaders have been bought off. People take poison because they think it’ll help their pocketbooks. Slightly different deal over in Anniston with the military and the chemical weapons incinerator. People will take risks with their health (and the health of their children) if they think there’s a buck to be made. And as long as Alabama remains poor (and those poor people remain disorganized and short-sighted), we’ll remain the dumping ground for the trash of the nation.

Alabama: America’s Toilet. Just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as our actual slogan.