Davis County residents are turning up the heat on a waste incinerator to force the company to stop burning medical waste or, at the very least, change its technology to stop spewing what they fear are dangerous dioxins into the air.
A petition signed by hundreds of North Salt Lake residents seeks to stop Stericycle's North Salt Lake burn plant from using incineration as a means of disposing of medical waste hauled to the plant from eight Western states.
"I'm concerned because we have inversions," said Melou Cline, a north Salt Lake resident. "Ideally, it should be shut down."
Cline is one of several residents who plan to present the petition to the North Salt Lake City Council on June 1.
Company officials say some hospital wastes must be burned or reduced to ash before being sent to a landfill.
"Certain types of regulated medical waste necessitate incineration," said Pat Altenberger, district manager of Illinois-based Stericycle, the country's largest medical-waste disposal company.
Wastes associated with cancer patients, for instance, must be burned to kill the pathogens, he added. Then there are body parts.
"You can't have that showing up at landfills," he said.
Residents don't like the fact that Stericycle is located directly across the street from Lifeline, a youth drug treatment center, and a few feet from a new housing development, Foxboro Homes. The burn plant, however, has been in its present location since 1991 when BFI, Browning-Ferris Industries Inc., operated it. In 1999, Stericycle bought the BFI medical waste business.
The company's federal air quality permit allows it to burn 1,900 pounds of medical wastes per hour, but company officials say it burns far less than that.
"Our compliance record has been impeccable," Altenberger noted.
State regulators don't believe there have been any permit violations.
"There are very recent and strict standards implemented in the last six or seven years, so we monitor the company very carefully," said Rick Sprott, director of the state Division of Air Quality.
Even so, a Washington, D.C., environmental organization known as Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) on Tuesday protested outside Stericycle's headquarters near Chicago, demanding it shut down all of its burn plants.
"We're advocating Stericycle switch to alternative methods," said Stacy Malkan, HCWH's communication director. "Medical waste incineration is a leading source of dioxin, mercury and other air pollutants linked to cancer, learning disabilities and other illnesses."
The majority of hospital waste, including that generated in Salt Lake City, is sent to Stericycle plants in Colorado or Arizona. In those locations, a process known as "autoclaving" — a kind of steam sterilization or "electro-thermal deactivation," which uses low-frequency radio waves — destroys pathogens so the waste can be recycled or used for fuel in waste-to-energy plants.
Environmentalists say Utah is being dumped on.
"As incinerators have closed due to health concerns in California and Arizona, more waste has been trucked to the North Salt Lake incinerator, and Stericycle refuses to switch to safer methods of waste disposal, as they have in other communities," said Cindy King of the Utah Sierra Club. "This is a direct slap in the face to Utah residents."
E-mail: donna@desnews.com