A Serial Environmental Violator is in Charge of Cleaning Up Mead
Clean Harbors is the company in charge of cleaning up the environmental disaster in Mead, Nebraska, where AltEn accumulated mountains of pesticide-contaminated waste that poisoned soil, waterways, and animals, as Pete Ricketts’s toothless Department of Environment and Energy (NDEE) repeatedly and ineffectually asked them to stop. However, the cleanup company itself has officially earned the status of “significant noncomplier” with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the last three years. We don’t know the ultimate fate of the waste that Clean Harbors is currently processing at the AltEn site in Mead, but some of it ultimately may head to the Clean Harbors hazardous waste incinerator in the Nebraska panhandle, which has chronically violated environmental regulations.
In the 1980s, Clean Harbors mostly dealt with oil spills and other cleanups, but its young founder, Alan McKim, a Massachusetts native, wanted to expand. Clean Harbors tried over and over to build a hazardous waste incinerator in Massachusetts that would burn toxic chemicals at super high temperatures. But every town they tried in Massachusetts gave the same answer: Warren? No. Haverill? No. Gardner? No. Freetown? No. McKim’s hometown, Braintree, was so opposed to the incinerator that two thousand residents formed a human chain on a bridge to protest. Nope, not here, they said–we are not going to risk cancer, birth defects, and permanent environmental damage.
Perhaps these Massachusetts towns were guilty of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). But their opposition was a far cry from the reaction of the small town in western Nebraska that would soon become the site of one of the first superhot hazardous waste smokestacks in the country. Kimball, Nebraska, said PIMBY–“Please In My Back Yard.” (Kimball is also notable for its storage of Minutemen nuclear warheads and its failed attempt to woo a private company to build a prison there.)
In 1990 the state of Massachusetts officially rejected Clean Harbors’ attempt to build an incinerator in Braintree, the company’s fifth failure to find a community in Massachusetts that was hospitable.
In January of 1994, a Colorado corporation, Ecova, completed construction of a hazardous waste incinerator in Kimball at a cost of 70 million dollars. Only seven months after opening, while they were still in trial phases to make sure they passed environmental tests, Ecova abruptly abandoned the plant. Ecova’s publicly stated reasons didn’t make a lot of sense–they said the incinerator was just not financially viable because of too much competition in the market. (You would think that executives would perform a basic market analysis before spending $70 million on an incinerator.) Then, before Ecova had even fully shut down the plant, Clean Harbors announced that they would be purchasing the Kimball incinerator to do exactly the kind of waste burning that towns in Massachusetts had refused to allow. Kimball’s mayor at the time, Tom Wilson, said that the town had “won the lotto” because it had such good luck finding a company that would keep the incinerator open.
Read more: https://seeingrednebraska.com/environment/a-serial-environmental-violator-is-in-charge-of-cleaning-up-mead/