Mercury Disposal Focus of Inquiry
The Oregonian
02/17/03

JIM LYNCH MORTON, Wash. -- Most of the Northwest's infectious medical
waste gets trucked to an inconspicuous processing plant in this tiny
logging town where it is shredded, zapped with radio waves, then dumped
in an Oregon landfill.

The barbwire-ringed plant is run by Illinois-based Stericycle Inc., one
of the nation's fastest-growing companies. And although Stericycle's
recession-proof stock continues to dazzle analysts, its Morton plant
unnerves some health and environmental officials.

Part of the unease is that the plant was the center of a tuberculosis
scare during the late 1990s when three workers contracted the
potentially deadly lung disease and tests showed another dozen had been
exposed to it. A landmark medical investigation concluded at least one
worker's TB came from waste sent from a Portland laboratory.

Now, Washington state officials are investigating whether the Morton
plant is violating its operating terms by processing mercury from dental
offices. The poisonous substance is considered one of the region's worst
health hazards
because even a tiny amount can damage the brain, kidneys and lungs, and
it is hard to get rid of once it enters the body.

Both Washington and Oregon are launching statewide campaigns to wean the
public off mercury-tainted fish, mercury thermometers and other
mercury-laced products. There is also a push to recycle mercury whenever
possible and to dispose of it in special hazardous waste pits rather
than in general dumps
such as the Coffin Butte landfill north of Corvallis where Stericycle
discards its Morton waste.

Oregon officials contacted by The Oregonian were surprised to hear their
Washington counterparts were investigating potential mercury problems
with the region's medical waste. Until now, Oregon had not regarded
Stericycle's truckloads of trash as a possible mercury menace.

"I don't doubt there is an awful lot of mercury going through that
system and ending up in our landfill," said Rich Duval, a landfill
inspector for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Duval said periodic landfill water tests haven't shown alarming mercury
spikes. "In our lifetime, yeah, nothing will probably happen. But two
generations from now, what mess are we going to leave behind?"

The Morton plant began as one of many small regional disposal options,
but grew fivefold during the past decade as it took over most of the
Northwest's medical waste transport and disposal business. It now
receives as many as 20 tractor-trailers a day and nearly 10,000 tons of
waste a year from hospitals, dental offices and laboratories in Oregon
and Washington.

The plant uses a microwavelike technology to heat and decontaminate body
fluids and soiled needles, syringes, gowns, tubing and other medical
refuse capable of transmitting disease. It also receives about 50 pounds
of mercury
a year from dental offices in the Seattle area alone, a King County
study
estimates.

Mike Philpott, Stericycle's district manager, said the plant doesn't
knowingly accept mercury or any hazardous wastes and called the recent
mercury estimates at the Morton plant "speculative and inaccurate."
However,
Philpott said, the company relies on its customers to weed out mercury
and has no detection equipment at the plant.

The Morton plant receives relatively little regulatory oversight. Two
similar Stericycle plants in Wisconsin and Rhode Island are inspected
and regulated by state agencies. The Wisconsin plant receives monthly
surprise inspections.
By contrast, Washington state officials provide no direct oversight of
the Morton plant.

The plant is licensed by Lewis County. Its lone regulator is a county
health specialist who visits the facility several times a year -- rarely
unannounced.

Lewis County's top health official, Diana Yu, said her worries about the
plant go beyond worker safety and mercury issues to general public
safety. "We need to discuss how are we going to be sure everyone is
protected all the way around," she said.

Yu said Lewis County lacks the money or expertise to oversee the plant
and thinks the Washington State Department of Ecology should regulate
it.

Kimberly Field, manager of the tuberculosis program for the Washington
state health department, says the plant's TB flare-up should have
wrought tougher state regulations and better worker protections. "I am
still adamant and passionate that something needs to be done," she said.


Field says the Morton TB investigation is the only inquiry she's worked
in which Wall Street analysts repeatedly called her -- as recently as
2001 -- to better assess the potential impact of her findings on the
future value of a company's stock. Industry overhaul The medical waste
disposal industry was overhauled in the late 1980s after dirty needles
and other hospital trash washed up on New Jersey beaches.

As federal regulators demanded tighter oversight, hospitals and
laboratories -- accustomed to burning their own wastes -- started
shopping for someone to take their infectious garbage and regulatory
worries away.

Stericycle emerged in 1989 as one of many competitors for the new
market. As its name suggests, it pitched itself as a recycling-oriented
company. The recycling end of Stericycle never really took off, but its
finances did.

Today, Stericycle is the largest medical waste handler in the country by
far. With about $400 million in annual revenues and more than 30
regional, Morton-like processing centers, it is 15 times as big as its
nearest U.S. competitor and growing overseas, too.

Fortune Magazine listed Stericycle as one of the top 10 fastest growing
companies in the United States in 2000. Forbes ranked it the 32nd "best
small company" in the country this year.

In 1991, the Morton plant began as a modest operation that Lewis County
licensed as a "solid waste transfer station." The plant wasn't supposed
to accept hazardous or radioactive wastes, and job-hungry Morton
welcomed the business.

With about 1,000 residents set in the hills north of Mount St. Helens,
Morton is a place where one of every eight households is below the
poverty line and storefronts boast they are "supported by timber
dollars."

Stericycle swiftly became one of Morton's biggest employers, using about
a dozen workers a shift to operate a plant where waste arrives in sealed
red bags packed inside large plastic containers. Workers dump the waste
into a pit where it is shredded, then cooked with low-frequency radio
waves in an
oven the size of a Winnebago. The final shrunken product is treated like
household garbage and packed into Oregon-bound trucks. Such a facility
in Oregon would require approval from the state, which also would
oversee plant operations. But in Washington, which has no broad state
medical waste regulations, Lewis County had to create its own rules.

The Morton plant received more attention in 1995 after Stericycle's
Woonsocket, R.I., plant -- one of the company's two other U.S. plants
using radio-wave technology -- was fined $3.3 million by the state for
violations that included "knowingly" exposing its workers to hepatitis
B.

Rhode Island officials also accused the company of doctoring records by
mishandling test strips designed to verify that waste was being heated
to the required minimum temperature needed to kill bacteria. In some
instances, the test strips were allegedly heated in a cafeteria
microwave oven rather than run through the plant with the waste.

Stericycle challenged the findings and the fine and later agreed to pay
$400,000.

Two years later, the Morton plant was in the spotlight after three of
its workers were diagnosed with tuberculosis. Skin tests indicated 13
other workers also were exposed to TB, although none of them had the
active disease.

Company officials asserted -- and still maintain -- the plant was not
the source of the TB. Medical history was on their side. There had never
been a documented case of TB transmitted by medical waste.

A subsequent worker-safety investigation by the National Institute for
Occupational Safety and Health found sloppy plant safety practices --
including unreported incidents of workers being punctured by used
needles -- and spotty maintenance.

But the bigger news flash came when a state-federal medical
investigation used DNA fingerprinting to match one of the workers'
tuberculosis to a rare strain in a woman treated at a Portland
laboratory, which had its infectious garbage trucked to Morton.

An October 2000 article in the Journal of the American Medical
Association called it the first proof that medical waste can transmit
TB, challenging the long-held assumption that the only way to get it was
from someone who was contagious.

As information poured in, Washington state legislators scrambled for
ways to make the plant safer. Recommended remedies included requiring
Stericycle to heat waste before shredding it and demanding that
hospitals and labs
decontaminate potentially infectious waste before it is trucked to
Morton.

Despite repeated efforts between 1998 and 2001, nothing passed the
Legislature.

Stericyle's Philpott said the Morton plant has subsequently instituted
more worker-safety precautions than any other company facility,
including requiring workers to wear respirators at all times.

However, state Sen. Karen Fraser, D-Olympia, says she may revisit plant
safety issues if mercury is deemed a serious problem at the plant: "My
concern for worker safety continues." Report outlines concerns Last
year, the
Washington Toxics Coalition, a nonprofit Seattle-based environmental
group, teamed with health advocacy organizations across the country to
examine Stericycle's industry takeover in a report titled: "Stericycle:
Living up to its Mission?"

Among the report's highlighted concerns was the lack of testing for
"mercury and other toxic substances" processed in Stericycle's nonburn
waste processors such as its Morton plant.

Simultaneously, Oregon and Washington have been devising anti-mercury
campaigns. Oregon's effort is behind Washington's -- including its
campaign to educate dentists about preferred disposal practices. But
similar goals are emerging to dramatically cut mercury releases to the
environment this decade.


Most mercury exposure comes from eating contaminated fish. The national
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined in 1999 that as
much as 10 percent of women carry too much mercury. Symptoms include,
fatigue, depression and headaches. Coal plants and garbage incinerators
are considered
prime mercury sources, but there are myriad others, including
fluorescent lights and some dental amalgams used to fill cavities.

The King County Health Department surveyed mercury-disposal habits of
221 dentists in the Seattle area in 2000. It concluded about 20 percent
of dental mercury waste was sealed in red bags and hauled to Morton. The
little-known study estimated the Morton plant processes 53 pounds of
mercury a year from King County dental offices.

If the estimates held up throughout Stericycle's Northwest service area,
the Morton plant would annually process hundreds of pounds of mercury
from dental offices.

"Everybody agrees Stericycle is not a facility that is set up to handle
mercury," said Gail Savina, a King County health official involved in
the study. "Nobody knows what happens to mercury once it gets there.
You've got all these different agencies, and yet nobody is really
exploring where it's
going."

Rick Volpel, medical hazardous waste specialist for the Oregon DEQ, said
the waste from the Morton plant should be more carefully monitored to
determine whether it belongs in hazardous waste dumps, which typically
charge at least
four times as much for disposal.

Stericycle dumped Morton waste at Oregon's massive Arlington landfill
complex in north-central Oregon until early last year when it began
trucking it to Coffin Butte, where mercury is a greater threat because
the site's increased rainfall could help mobilize it and increase its
chance to seep into
groundwater, said Duval, the Oregon landfill inspector.

Washington's ecology department recently drafted a memorandum of
understanding it hopes to reach with Washington dentists to try to get
them to stop dumping mercury into the waste stream.

"We're saying (mercury) from dentists cannot go to Stericycle," said
Dennis Bowhay, a senior policy analyst for the agency's hazardous wastes
program. "There's no reason it can't be recycled."

A draft copy of an upcoming state report titled "Washington State's
Mercury Chemical Action Plan" recommends that the air and water at the
Morton plant should be routinely tested for mercury.

Stericyle's Philpott said the company will monitor mercury at the plant
-- if it is required -- but that the issue would be better managed by
health officials policing dentists who skirt disposal rules.

Dave Misko, a hazardous waste supervisor at Washington's ecology
department, said the agency is examining Morton's mercury issue, but
also determining whether other dangerous wastes pass through as well.
"The gray area of medical waste regulation needs some clarification,"
said
Misko.

Jim Lynch: 360-867-9503; lynchj@aattbi.com