Medical waste could mean cash for Marion County

The Brooks garbage incinerator, just north of Salem, may soon take more out-of-state medical waste – as much as 50 million pounds more per year.

Marion County Commissioners will vote on the proposal at their June 29 meeting.

The county’s revenue from the 30-year-old incinerator has been dropping, and medical waste is lucrative.

The proposal could net the county as much as $3.4 million per year, county spokeswoman Jolene Kelley said.

The incinerator, operated by Covanta Marion, currently burns about 400 million pounds of municipal garbage each year.

That includes about 2.6 million pounds of medical waste, Kelley said. About 1.4 million pounds come from Marion County health facilities and the rest is from out of state.

If commissioners approve, Covanta would contract with Illinois-based Stericycle, the country’s largest medical waste disposer, to take medical waste it collects from hospitals and medical offices in Washington and California.

Stericyle will be charged $450 per ton, compared with the $87.50 per ton municipal garbage haulers pay.

Under the proposal, Covanta Marion would accept two kinds of medical waste from Stericycle:

• Up to 30 million pounds per year of “gray bin” waste, also known as biohazardous or infectious waste, which is regulated medical waste that poses a significant risk of transmitting infection. It could include liquid or dried blood; surgery or autopsy tissue, organs or body parts; cultures or stocks of a virus, bacterium or other organism; teeth in dentistry; and discarded laboratory wastes, medical equipment and materials that have been in contact with infectious materials.
• Up to 20 million pounds per year of “blue bin” waste, which is non-hazardous pharmaceutical waste and pharmaceutical sharps, including IV tubing, bags, used needles and syringes.

The waste will not contain fetal tissue or large body parts, Covanta said in a presentation to a county advisory committee last month.

Marion County officials banned the disposal of human fetuses at the incinerator in 2014 after an uproar over allegations that they were included in shipments of medical waste Stericycle sent from Canada.

Out-of-county medical waste currently is capped at 3 million pounds per year. County commissioners have discussed the plan to raise the cap at two work sessions, and it was presented to the county’s Solid Waste Advisory Council in May. No one voiced concerns or opposition to the plan at any of those public meetings, Kelley said.

“Energy-from-waste facilities are recognized as a safe and environmentally responsible way to manage medical waste,” the county said in a news release. “According to Covanta, any increase in medical waste processed will not have an impact on the environmental performance of the facility.”

Elsewhere, however, medical waste incineration is controversial.

Incineration, especially of the plastics in medical waste, is a leading source of dioxin, a known human carcinogen. Medical waste also contains heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium.

“Part of the waste is transformed into pollutants that are not captured by the incinerator's air pollution controls,” said Joseph Miller, of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. “These pollutants are then released as smokestack emissions, travel great distances in the air, and ultimately wind up in our land, water, ecosystems and bodies.”

And ash left over from incineration still must be safely disposed of. Marion County is responsible for the ash from the Covanta Marion facility.

Some of the medical waste generated on the West Coast has gone to Stericycle’s incinerator in North Salt Lake, Utah.

In December, the company announced it would move that facility to more rural Tooele County as part of a settlement that allowed the company to waive half a $2.3 million fine from state regulators after its incinerator exceeded pollution limits. The company had been accused of rigging a stack test.

The company wants to more than double production at the facility, from 14 million to 36 million pounds burned per year.

Covanta Marion is a subsidiary of New Jersey-Based Covanta Energy Corp., which operates 45 energy-from-waste facilities around the country.

Its Brooks incinerator is on 16 acres east of Interstate 5 on Brooklake Road between Salem and Woodburn. It’s the only garbage burner in Oregon.

To accommodate the Stericycle bins, Covanta Marion has designed a device that attaches to a crane that clamps onto the boxes of waste, feeds them to a hopper, dumps out the contents, then saves the bin and brings it back down for reload.

It already has begun a pilot program, accepting material and amounts already allowed under its existing contract with Marion County.

tloew@statesmanjournal.com, 503-399-6779 or follow at Twitter.com/Tracy_Loew

The Marion County Board of Commissioners meeting begins at 9 a.m. June 29 in the Senator Hearing Room of Courthouse Square, 555 Court St. NE in Salem. A public hearing is not scheduled on the plan but all meetings include time for public comment, Kelley said.

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