After changing the oil in their cars, most Davis County residents can simply toss the used oil in the garbage with the government's blessing.
It's perfectly legal - the county's burn plant incinerates hazardous wastes such as oil, paint, cleaning solutions, pesticides or fertilizer without ill effect, said John Schmidt, chief operating officer for the Davis County Solid Waste Management and Energy Recovery District."Anything in household quantities is considered household waste, and people can throw it away," he said. "Everything in here just gets reduced to elementals."
Everything, that is, except garbage produced by Bountiful residents.
Bountiful is the only city in Davis County that deposits its leftovers in a landfill. That makes hazardous waste, which can contaminate groundwater, more of a problem for Bountiful residents than for their neighbors.
Four years ago city officials began asking residents to bring their hazardous waste to the city shops, 950 S. 200 West, instead of putting it in their garbage or down street drains.
"You don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to come to those conclusions - that people are doing that - if you don't give them an alternative," City Manager Tom Hardy said.
Bountiful has the only public hazardous waste disposal programin Davis County, but Richard Harvey, director of Environmental Health, said county officials are thinking of developing something. Even though the burn plant ostensibly torrefies everything into tiny bits that pose no environmental threat, bad things can happen en route to the burn plant.
"If people put their oil in milk jugs and it is compressed in the garbage truck, it'll leak," Harvey said. He recommended that people soak oil in sawdust and pour paint out onto cardboard to dry before throwing them away.