By Sara Bixby

I wish it had been some noble social concern that first drew my attention to methamphetamine. Instead, it was my brother-in-law’s story about a man who received life-threatening freezer burns when he tried to drain anhydrous ammonia into a 5-gallon LP tank using jury-rigged equipment in the middle of the night. Anhydrous ammonia, a common but controlled agricultural fertilizer in Iowa, is also a key component used by do-it-yourselfers to cook methamphetamine (meth).

Meth is a popular, illegal drug that can be made quickly using ingredients purchased at local grocery and hardware stores. It is “cooked” in a couple of processes that use ephedrine or pseudoephedrine (cold tablets) as a primary ingredient. Everyday items like drain cleaner, paint thinner, starter fluid, coffee filters, lithium batteries, matchbooks, glass jars, coolers, and plastic pop bottles may also used in the production.

Because the cooking locations (labs) are kept small and portable, they’re frequently found in houses, apartments, outbuildings, cars, and secluded rural areas. A recent Iowa news report attributed a fire in a hotel to a guest manufacturing meth in a bathroom.

Meth is a huge drug enforcement issue in the Midwest. The state of Iowa was second in the nation with 1,266 seizures of meth labs, manufacturing equipment, and dumpsites in 2003, according to the federal statistics. Officials predict final statistics for 2004 will show it was another record-setting year with more than 1,400 seizures.

But I became more concerned about meth as it dawned on me the drug is as much a waste management issue as a drug enforcement one. The issues are with hazardous wastes, with illegally dumped wastes, and longer-term with demolition debris.

Each pound of “cooked” methamphetamine is reported by the Minnesota Department of Health to leave behind 5 to 7 pounds of hazardous waste.

When meth labs are discovered and closed by law enforcement agencies, they are treated as hazardous-waste sites. Local and state law enforcement agencies work with the federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which has a nationwide contract with a hazardous-waste firm to handle meth lab cleanup. The DEA also pays for disposal of meth wastes, which currently costs a minimum of $3,000 per lab, according to an official from the Iowa Division of Narcotics Enforcement.

It isn’t the labs closed by law enforcement agencies that concern me. It is those that just show up in our operations.

Last winter, my landfill staff and the road crews from our county’s secondary roads department sat through a training session on identifying meth lab waste. The key message was “If you find it, don’t pick it up. Call law enforcement.” The next day, one attendee somewhat sheepishly noted to a deputy that he had previously found a portable air tank while mowing ditches and took it home for his own use. The tank had corroded valves, a clear sign of anhydrous ammonia being stored in it. Other road crew members have since reported finding coolers of meth-making paraphernalia sitting in ditches. Those have been reported to deputies so they can be properly handled.

The safety compliance officer for a neighboring landfill notes that operators there have also been trained in identifying illegally dumped meth lab waste. The training was revisited after a paper picker sent to collect litter along the highway leading to the facility found meth lab contents along the road, picked them up, and brought them back to the landfill for disposal.

Our regional collection center for household hazardous waste won’t take waste from meth lab cleanups. Transportation to a collection point is too dangerous and the costs are too high, officials say. They go on to caution that labs and dumpsites are sometimes booby-trapped to deter snooping. Thus, picking a cooler or plastic bin of lab components from alongside a road represents a safety risk for employees, for “adopt-a-highway” participants, and in a Bottle Bill state like Iowa for people who walk the roadside collecting cans and bottles to redeem.

Now, the Iowa Department of Public Health has begun working with landlords to try to develop standards for cleaning rental units that have housed meth labs. The cooking process leaves behind a sometimes toxic residue soaked into carpeting, seeped into walls, and accumulated in drains and septic systems. Exposure to even very low levels of the residue over a long period of time may cause health problems, especially among young children and the elderly.

Cleanup methods, according to draft guidelines published by the Minnesota Department of Public Health, can range from ventilation to washing to removal to, at worst, demolition of the property altogether. “Only the most heavily contaminated meth lab furnishings and vehicles require special disposal,” the guidelines say. “Most can generally be disposed of in regular landfills and salvage yards.”

As the manager of a “regular landfill,” I will be spending more time this year trying to make sure landfill operators know how to respond when those wastes arrive.

A member of MSW Management’s Editorial Advisory Board, Sara Bixby is with the South Central Iowa Solid Waste Agency and can be reached at 641-828-8545 or sbixby@sciswa.org.

MSW - May/June 2005