Carthage could be liable to pay to dispose of all the hazardous waste collected for the past three years at the annual household hazardous waste collections.
Carthage City Attorney Nate Dally said Hazmert, the Rogers, Ark., based company that collected all the hazardous at the last three one-day collections, filed for bankruptcy recently and apparently has not been disposing of the waste it collected from more than 200 businesses, individuals and cities such as Carthage and Joplin.
So under the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality and probably numerous EPA standards, since we were the suppliers of that waste, we may or may not be liable for what may or may not be at the facility,” Dally told the Carthage City Council at its regular meeting on Tuesday. “They have a list of every person that they have any invoice of ever delivering anything to that place. Some of them are, for example, (individuals) who may have brought a computer to these people to be disposed of and are now being drug into this possible cleanup effort.”
Dally said no one has inventoried the waste at Hazmert’s site to find out exactly what is and is not there.
In fact, the ADEQ has not taken possession of the operation, according to Carthage Public Works Director Zeb Carney.
“At the meeting on Feb. 5, we were informed that the site there Rogers, Ark., is still an unsecured site and there is activity continuing on that site,” Carney said. “That’s another problem they have there.”
Dally said the owner of the company admitted in a bankruptcy deposition that he switched labels on containers and co-mingled some of the liquid waste such as paint or paint thinner, making it difficult to tell where the waste came from.
“The letters may have been somewhat premature as the current owner claims he still has the money to get it all hauled out of there,” Dally said. “Then Arkansas is claiming if we didn’t get these disposal slips that are supposed to be given by any disposer of hazardous materials to show that our waste made it from that facility to proper disposal, then we’re liable for whatever we sent down there because we can’t prove it was disposed of. However, in talking to Joplin and their city attorney and Region M, household hazardous waste isn’t required to have that disposal slip so those wouldn’t have been generated to any of the 20-some cities that are also on this list and the material they took down there. Now we do have some invoices back showing that our products were sent to be either reused or recycled. Whether that gets us out of it, I don’t know.”
