Poor recordkeeping on hazardous waste disposal points to the potential for bigger problems, according to a new study.
By Kristina Marusic, Daily Climate
PITTSBURGH — Waste from the oil and gas industry contains toxic and radioactive substances. Disposal of this waste is supposed to be carefully tracked, but 800,000 tons of oil and gas waste from Pennsylvania oil and gas wells is unaccounted for, according to a recent study.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University initially set out to investigate whether sediment in rivers and streams near landfills accepting higher volumes of oil and gas waste contained higher levels of radioactivity. But they discovered significant problems with the records meant to track this waste.
“We set out to write a different paper,” Daniel Bain, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the authors of the study, told Environmental Health News (EHN), “but once we got into the records, we realized there was no hope of being able to meaningfully do this kind of assessment.”
The study, published in the journal Ecological Indicators, compared records on Pennsylvania’s oil and gas waste from 2010-2020, and uncovered significant gaps between what oil and gas operators reported they’d sent to landfills and what the landfills reported receiving. The records were so different that the researchers couldn’t find a single case where the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) Oil & Gas Report figures on this hazardous waste matched reports from the landfills receiving it.
This type of waste often contains toxic chemicals and carcinogens, including high levels of heavy metals like arsenic, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and radioactive materials. Previous research has shown that radioactive contaminants from fracking waste can linger in local waterways and wildlife for decades.
“You assume the people regulating hazardous waste would be double-checking these records,” Bain said. “We thought they could be off by maybe 10% — we didn’t expect anything like this.”
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