As some neighbors seek to close it, Wayne Disposal hazardous waste landfill looks to expand

• Wayne Disposal Inc., one of the largest hazardous waste landfills in the country, is seeking to further expand its facility in Wayne County’s Van Buren Township.
• The landfill’s acceptance of toxic waste from a 2023 Ohio train derailment, and plans to take radioactive wastes from a World War II-era atomic bomb development facility in New York, have raised ire.

A hazardous waste landfill in Wayne County’s Van Buren Township — one of the largest in the country — is seeking state environmental regulators’ permission to grow even larger and add new hazardous waste treatment processes.

And the area’s lawmaker in the state House of Representatives is outraged about how she found out about it: from a small public notice of an upcoming informational meeting by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy on the back pages of the Belleville-Area Independent, a small community weekly newspaper.

“I’m appalled,” state Rep. Reggie Miller, D-Van Buren Township, told the Free Press. “My staff found this in a local newspaper on Page 13. We were not notified, none of the mayors were notified.”

Wayne Disposal Inc., off Interstate 94 freeway near Belleville, has caused outrage among its neighbors in recent years. The landfill’s acceptance of trucked-in hazardous vinyl chloride waste from a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023 led to protests from local, state and federal officials, eventually pressuring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to halt the shipments and dispose of the waste at facilities outside Michigan.

Anger arose again last August, when the Detroit Free Press broke the news locally that the landfill was preparing to accept 6,000 tons of soil and concrete with elevated levels of radiation from a site in New York where the Manhattan Project developed the atomic bomb during and just after World War II.

Wayne Disposal now seeks to increase its disposal capacity by nearly 23%, from 22.5 million cubic yards to 27.6 million cubic yards. The request involves a vertical expansion “to fill in a low spot in the existing landfill footprint” that’s now allowable because of the closure of a runway at the neighboring Willow Run Airport, said Melissa Quillard, a spokesperson for Phoenix-based waste giant Republic Services, owner of Wayne Disposal. The vertical expansion wasn’t previously allowable because of regulations regarding that runway’s flight path, she said.

Site is operating on an expired license

“This vertical expansion will not increase landfill acreage or reduce greenspace,” she said. “The requested vertical expansion will bring this section of the landfill in line with other areas and help ensure we maximize available capacity to meet demand for safe and responsible waste disposal.”

Wayne Disposal is also seeking EGLE’s permission to add a new hazardous waste treatment process, “the ability to immobilize debris, such as lead-contaminated pipe, to address a growing need for this type of treatment,” Quillard said.

EGLE “has requested additional details on the treatment proposal,” agency spokesperson Josef Greenberg said.

Wayne Disposal’s hazardous waste facility license with the state expired in May 2022, but the company filed for a license renewal and has been allowed to continue operation under the terms of the previous license as it works on a renewal with EGLE staff.

The public notice in the Belleville-Area Independent was for a May 28 informational meeting in Belleville about Wayne Disposal’s renewal application. That meeting will now be rescheduled “due to scheduling conflicts,” Greenberg said, with a new date not immediately set. Miller and others noted that many local and state officials would be out of town that day for the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual Mackinac Policy Conference.

Asked why a broader public notification wasn’t made regarding a site that has generated so much public interest and controversy in recent years, Greenberg said EGLE was “in the process of notifying legislators and interested parties, through public notices, GovDelivery alerts and phone calls.”

Licensed to receive 722 different types of hazardous waste

Landfills had operated in the area of Wayne Disposal since the 1950s, and the site was identified as a good dumping area for more potentially hazardous industrial wastes by 1970 — before much of the research on the health and environmental impacts of such wastes, and before passage of federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

Michigan Disposal, a hazardous waste processing facility within the footprint of the Wayne Disposal landfill property — now the largest hazardous waste processing facility in North America — began operation in 1974. Wayne Disposal became a licensed hazardous waste facility in 1980.

A Free Press investigation published in September 2023 found that from 2019 to June 2023, Wayne Disposal brought in 1.8 million tons of waste for landfilling; Michigan Disposal more than 1.2 million tons for processing. Wastes received include some of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind: dioxins; polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs; cyanide compounds; nonstick “forever chemical” PFAS compounds; arsenic; asbestos, and hundreds more.

Wayne Disposal is licensed to receive 722 different types of hazardous waste, compounds considered too potentially harmful to the public or the environment for disposal in a conventional landfill. It is one of only 12 landfills in the U.S. licensed to receive PCBs, and the only such facility in the Midwest.

Federal law regulates so-called “acute” hazardous wastes more stringently than those that are only ignitable, corrosive, reactive or toxic. Acute wastes are those that could kill, permanently incapacitate or otherwise seriously harm people through even small exposures. EPA manifest data shows Michigan Disposal received nearly 500,000 tons of acute waste from 2019 through June 2023, with Wayne Disposal landfilling nearly 3,700 tons of acute waste.

And that may not be the full extent of it. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has identified some 323 “chemicals of interest” that “might be targeted for theft or diversion as weapons of mass effect” by terrorists. Chemicals on the list range from propane, phosphorus, concentrated ammonia, TNT and nitroglycerine on up to “venomous agent X,” or VX, one of the most toxic and rapidly acting nerve agents in chemical warfare.

If either Wayne Disposal or Michigan Disposal is receiving these chemicals of interest, the public doesn’t get to know. Any chemicals on the list are removed from publicly viewable e-manifest data and are not reflected in total quantities of hazardous waste that a facility is receiving. If a manifest consists of only chemicals of interest, it is excluded completely from public reporting.

Numerous violations found through the years

As science discovered more and more problems arising from improper disposal of toxic chemicals, the laws evolved and became more strict — and facilities like Wayne Disposal found themselves in frequent noncompliance. As recently as 1998, state environmental regulators considered Wayne Disposal in “significant noncompliance” with environmental law, citing more than 11 violations.

Violations over the years have included a leak in the hazardous waste landfill’s primary protective liner; toxic leachate spills into surface water; improper venting and monitoring of stored underground hazardous waste, and disposing of hazardous waste in nonhazardous waste areas at the 500-acre landfill. At Michigan Disposal, the frequent problem was a failure to control chemical reactions while processing mixed hazardous wastes, resulting in fires — some much bigger than others.

But any time over the years that Wayne Disposal has sought to expand, either its footprint or the toxic wastes it receives, it has eventually been approved by regulators, sometimes with modifications and requirements.

When Wayne Disposal in 1997 sought and received EPA approval to receive PCB wastes under the federal Toxic Substances Control Act, outraged Van Buren Township officials filed legal action in U.S. District Court attempting to stop it. Township officials argued the EPA had failed to consider evidence of a groundwater connection to the site, failed to consider the facility’s record of noncompliance with regulations, or the economic impact of the decision on the community. A federal judge ruled against the township.

When Wayne Disposal’s operating license was renewed by state regulators in 2012, the state also approved the facility to double its capacity, from 11 million cubic yards to more than 22.4 million cubic yards. It was also approved to expand its waste streams to include dioxins and reactive sulfides.

Of Wayne Disposal’s latest plans to expand, Miller said, “I have no words to describe how shocked I am that they would be willing to do this, knowing how the public feels.”

EGLE’s Greenberg said the environmental agency must examine whether Wayne Disposal is in compliance with relevant state and federal laws.

”EGLE does not have the authority to approve or deny the application based on public support or opposition,” Greenberg said.

Even limiting or taxing out-of-state hazardous waste coming to Michigan is a nonstarter, thanks to a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on imported garbage.

In that case, St. Clair County officials attempted to prevent a local landfill from accepting out-of-state waste, and Michigan’s Solid Waste Management Act at the time required a county to approve such imports. The Fort Gratiot Sanitary Landfill Inc. sued the state, and the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices in a 7-2 opinion in June 1992, declared the trash “articles of commerce” — essentially a commodity or good — whose interstate commerce could not be restricted under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

‘Dirty business in our neighborhoods’

Chris Donley, a Van Buren Township resident, is an organizer with Michigan Against Atomic Waste, a grassroots group trying to stop the elevated radioactivity and other hazardous wastes coming to Wayne County.

”EGLE just doles out permits to (Wayne Disposal) — anything they ask for, it seems they get,” he said.

“Now it’s nuclear wastes from states that have deemed it unsafe to keep in their own backyards. It comes here, and Wayne Disposal just points and says, ‘Hey, we are permitted to do it,’ and they are happy to make their millions and millions of dollars off of it, and it just snowballs.”

Donley noted that similar hazardous waste landfills are located in more arid and remote locations in the southern U.S., while Wayne Disposal has 350,000 people living within a 10-mile radius. Two tributaries to Belleville Lake are just off the landfill property.

Wayne Disposal has facilities to capture and collect hazardous waste-containing fluids leaking through its protective membranes. But Belleville in recent years has had several huge rainstorms, including one in August 2023 where 7 inches of rain fell in one night.

If such rainstorms overwhelm community storm drains and retention facilities, why wouldn’t that happen with Wayne Disposal’s system? Donley asked.

“My question is: What is Wayne Disposal’s capacity before they have to divert from the public sewer system to storm drains, or they just get overflow?” he said. “Every system has a capacity; what is theirs? How many times has it been reached? What amount of material was released? Where was it released? What was in it, and at what levels? Nobody’s asking.”

Community concerns should be considered before expansions are greenlit, Donley said.

“They are doing their dirty business in our neighborhoods,” he said. “They could be having a devastating impact on future generations and our health. But we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Donley wants a “complete end” to out-of-state elevated radioactivity wastes coming to Wayne Disposal, and more.

“I would like to see rigorous, independent, offsite testing of our water, ground and air, to make sure the people of this community are safe,” he said. “With the eventual long-term goal of taking this hazardous site in a vulnerable waterway and community, and moving this material somewhere else that makes more sense — that is capable of containing this without endangering large populations.”

Quillard, however, said Wayne Disposal is an effective facility.

“We provide safe, responsible and essential waste disposal services for industries in Michigan and throughout the region,” she said. “The facility is permitted and equipped to securely manage these waste streams and operates in compliance with all regulatory requirements.”

Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@freepress.com.