Despite the tiny amount, those needles cost $15,000 to dispose of, Carstensen said. (Radium paint was once common but is no longer widely used because of the health hazards.) Someone else brought in antique medical needles, which had radium in the tips. Recently, someone brought in old paint that workers determined contained the radioactive element radium.
#Metro south transfer station full#
Workers have received containers full of the material, and if it gets a tiny bit wet and a spark goes off, it could explode.Ĭarstensen and his coworkers also use a radiation detector. When it hits water, it produces an extremely flammable gas. Calcium carbide, used in old mining lamps, is one example. Within the blast room, there’s a “boom box” - a reinforced steel container for storing suspected explosive materials before they can be analyzed. “It’s actually a blast room, if something explodes.” Containers with unknown contents are carted into a smaller room with another thick door. For products that came in labeled, workers run further tests and aggregate like substances together, preparing them for shipment to a processor.įor more nebulous liquids, things get real technical-and perhaps unnerving. Laminated sheets with lists of chemicals (and what they react with) are taped to a steel table. Just inside the hazardous waste building, at the west end of the 30-year-old Metro South campus, drums and buckets full of labeled substances occupy a room with bright red walls, metal grating floors, and thick steel doors. That tells them whether a container of motor oil also contains gasoline mixed in and must be separated, for example. These materials are further analyzed to confirm their contents, using tools like a PID (photoionization detector) meter, which measures volatile organic compounds offgassing from the liquid. The technicians separate and aggregate what they know to be flammable liquids, aerosols, motor oil, antifreeze, paint. There, household hazardous waste technicians load the materials onto a cart, where the filtering begins. When a vehicle arrives, if its material is deemed potentially hazardous at the check-in gate, an AFSCME-represented traffic controller directs the customer to the hazardous waste area. “We have to have some kind of knowledge on what everything is,” Carstensen says.
At the transfer station, workers must identify what a substance is, and prepare the material for transportation to a downstream processor. It could be flammable, corrosive, poisonous, explosive. That typically means there is a toxic or otherwise environmentally damaging substance contained within the product, and it requires special treatment. Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Their job at Metro South is to handle materials that aren’t allowed to go into a landfill, per U.S. Carstensen serves on its executive board, and Lee served as an elected delegate at AFSCME’s international convention in Philadelphia in July. Both are active in their union, AFSCME Local 3580. Lee and Carstensen are two of the 15 household hazardous waste technicians at the Metro South transfer station. That’s when Cheyenne Lee and Dana Carstensen get to become chemical detectives. And more often than you might think, unlabeled containers holding unknown liquids are dropped off. It also gets its fair share of lightbulbs, medical sharps and other identifiable discards. | PHOTOS BY COLIN STAUB On the job with AFSCME Local 3580: You name it, Metro’s hazardous waste workers handle it. The job combines science, a strong stomach, and a whole lot of caution.Īt the Metro South transfer station in Oregon City, the hazardous waste department handles a lot of paint. CARSTENSEN’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: Dana Carstensen and his fellow hazardous waste technicians handle a lot of unusual items, and some they collect in a back room shelf, from antique cleaning products to jars of snakes in brine.
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