A hazardous lack of options in Pike County

What does a homeowner do when the Round-Up (glyphosate ), or bug spray containing DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide), or fertilizer (phosphorus), or ant traps (thallium sulfate) they have on hand are no longer needed or wanted?

Chances are you have recently used a pesticide or herbicide, an oven cleaner, a paint thinner, or any number of other unpronounceable hazardous products. Naturally, you'd want to find an environmentally friendly way to dispose of them. Good luck with that, especially if you live in Pike County.

Who do you call?

Some people believe the local fire department should take or know what to do with potentially flammable materials. We have terrific firefighters, and they are volunteers. But it should come as no surprise they are not equipped to deal with disposal issues like this.

A curbside residential garbage collector, County Waste, said they can't take hazardous waste to their landfill and suggested going to Earth911.com to find a disposal site. The closest one is in Sussex County, which offers two days a year for dropping off nearly any hazardous waste you can think of. But it is for Sussex County residents only. They suggested calling the county health department, the township building, or municipality.

Dingman Township suggested reaching out to ChemSweep, run by the county Department of Agriculture. A message was left for James Cunningham. A call next to Pike County’s Health Department office in Honesdale revealed it was not the right office. The next suggestion was to call the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in Scranton. That office said to contact their Emergency Response Program Manager in Wilkes Barre. Another call to the DEP’s waste management supervisor was not returned. The DEP would prefer all inquiries to go through their public relations spokesperson.

The problem

Jim Cunningham, the pesticide specialist at the Department of Agriculture, called back.

“Pike County does not have a hazardous household waste disposal program,” he said.

He explained why residents might have a difficult time trying to do the right thing.

An independent contractor collects and packages pesticides for incineration through the Agriculture Department’s ChemSweep program, he said.

So, when can a Pike County resident take advantage of the program?

“There is a four-year rotation among the counties," he said. "We will be back in Pike County in 2022."

If willing to wait three more years, Pike County residents trying to dispose of pesticides can take advantage of it. But only pesticides -- Cunningham said acids and lead paints, for example, cannot be incinerated.

What to do?

What is a resident to do? DEP spokesperson Colleen Connelly offered some helpful information. The following suggestions are from a department brochure:

If your community doesn’t have an hazardous household waste collection program, and if you must throw the material away before the next collection, you may put it in your regular trash, provided:

A. You have complied with any disposal instructions on the label.

B. There are no free-standing liquids. If water-based, allow the liquid to evaporate. If not water-based, absorb the liquid into vermiculite, cat litter, sawdust, or other absorbent material.

C. You have carefully packaged any residue to prevent leakage while the material is being transported to a disposal facility.

D. You have only a small quantity. Divide larger quantities and dispose of them over several collection periods.

“Every county in the state is required to follow the DEP regulations regarding storing and disposing of household hazardous waste," Connolly told the Courier.

She said the DEP doesn’t set limits on how much waste can be taken by a curbside trash collector and, despite a decrease in this fiscal year’s budget, "it is not having an impact on how the department regulates household hazardous waste and how it responds to any emergency situation regarding such materials.”

The Agriculture Department’s Jim Cunningham suggested that residents ask the Pike County Commissioners to establish a disposal event in Pike County, which doesn’t have a recycling program. Chair Matt Osterberg said the commissioners are working on a disposal event for electronics, but nothing is on the horizon for toxic waste. However, he said he would look into it, and suggested that a program in which townships collaborated on a household hazardous waste recycling day may be an option. As for the now defunct countywide recycling program, he said it had cost the county too much money and was unmanageable.

“Recycling was a mess with people throwing (non-recyclable) trash into the recycle containers," he said.

Osterberg said recycling cans are now being provided by residential garbage collectors. Only Milford Borough and Matamoras have their own garbage pick-up service, he said, and for a nominal fee, residents can get a recycling can.

But the question remains: now that China has banned most of the garbage we used to export there, where do we bring previously recyclable garbage we cannot export? Some reports indicate it ends up in a landfill.

Where do the toxins go?

Putting the recycling issue aside, questions remain: How much household hazardous waste ends up in a landfill, and for how long? Will residents go to the trouble of dividing and neutralizing the materials, or waiting until they evaporate? Will frustrated residents toss their toxic waste into the woods? Onto private property? Onto the roadside?

John Hambrose, a spokesperson for Waste Management, says the company must comply with regulations set forth by the DEP. If a resident follows the instructions for safe disposal, he said, then it isn’t considered hazardous.

He said Waste Management landfills are multi-layered, with liners and a drainage system. Any wastewater on the bottom of that liner would be treated like sewage, and, in some cases, processed through sophisticated treatment systems that would make it safe and purified enough to be released into rivers and streams. Hambrose said collection crews watch for things like electronics, tires, and other items they cannot take to the landfill.

Do we live in a perfect world? No. Despite our best intentions as consumers, and the best efforts of waste disposal firms to monitor for toxins like mercury, it may be impossible to know for certain what’s being dumped.

Any effort on the part of county officials to establish a day or two each year for residents to dispose of these hazardous wastes would be a welcome relief to residents who want to keep the environment clean and safe.