A state environmental oversight board voted unanimously to rescind a controversial proposal that would have permitted California municipal landfills to accept contaminated soil that is currently required to be dumped at sites specifically designated and approved for hazardous waste.
Earlier this year, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) released a draft of its first-ever Hazardous Waste Management Plan, a document intended to guide the state’s strategy on dangerous waste.
The draft plan included a recommendation to weaken California’s disposal rules for contaminated soil — typically the largest segment of hazardous waste produced each year. The potential change would have allowed contaminated soil from heavily polluted sites to be dumped at landfills that were not designed to handle hazardous waste.
Environmental advocates and community members expressed concerns that the rollback could result in toxic dust blowing into communities near local landfills or dangerous chemicals leaching into groundwater. State officials countered by saying that contaminated soil would only go to landfills equipped with liners that would prevent toxic substances from seeping into local aquifers.
At a public meeting on the plan held on Thursday evening, the Board of Environmental Safety — a five-member panel established to provide oversight of DTSC — unanimously voted to remove that recommendation from the state’s draft plan. That followed months of intense scrutiny from residents and environmental groups directed toward the plan. DTSC officials present at the meeting also signaled that they would support the board’s decision to nix the revision.
“I heard you talk about the pollution burdens you already face,” DTSC deputy director Mandi Bane said to the crowd of a few dozen who had gathered at the department’s offices in Cypress. “The worry that DTSC is taking steps that will endanger your community by making that pollution burden worse, and [the] outrage that these steps will be taken without consultation and discussion. As a public health professional, the stress, the fear, the anger that I heard from folks was very concerning … and I do want to apologize that this plan had that impact.”
Heavily polluting industries have tainted soil across California. More than 560,000 tons of hazardous soil are produced each year in California as environmental regulators endeavor to prevent residents from coming in contact with chemical-laced soil and developers build on land in industrial corridors.
However, the vast majority of this soil is not considered hazardous outside of California. The state has hazardous waste regulations that are more stringent than the federal government and most states in the country.
There are only two waste facilities in California that meet the state’s rigorous guidelines for hazardous materials, both in the San Joaquin Valley. Any hazardous dirt in California must be trucked there, or exported to landfills in neighboring states that rely on the more lenient federal standards.
State officials argued the current rules make it difficult and expensive to dispose of contaminated soil, noting that the average distance such waste is trucked right now is about 440 miles, according to the draft plan.
Ahead of the board vote, environmental advocates rallied outside of the DTSC offices in Cypress, calling on state officials to uphold California’s hazardous waste standards for contaminated soil. Angela Johnson Meszaros, an attorney with Earthjustice, said the proposal would effectively forgo California’s regulatory authority and rely on the federal environmental rules — at a time when the Trump administration is repealing environmental policy.
“This plan is a travesty, and I’m calling on DTSC to be better than this,” Johnson Meszaros said at Thursday’s meeting. “If we don’t draw the line with this massive deregulatory effort, there is no line. We will be swept up in the insanity we see at the national level.”
The discussion of hazardous waste disposal has been thrust into the public spotlight recently as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continues to remove toxic ash and contaminated soil from properties destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades wildfires. Because disaster debris is traditionally considered not hazardous, federal contractors have been hauling this material to several nonhazardous local landfills without testing it.
In response to the federal cleanup plans, residents in unincorporated Agoura and the Granada Hills neighborhood in Los Angeles staged protests near local landfills.
Melissa Bumstead, an environmental advocate and San Fernando Valley resident, urged the Board of Environmental Safety to consider factoring disaster debris into the hazardous waste plan. With climate change fueling increasingly destructive wildfires, this will continue to be an issue for years to come, she said.
“This is an opportunity, not just with hazardous waste that is manufactured,” Bumstead said, “but also hazardous waste that is created by wildfires on how to create a plan that is going to protect Californians in the future.”
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