This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
First, Stericycle cut a $2.3 million fine in half by promising the state that it would move out of its North Salt Lake neighborhood and take its tons of nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds and small particle pollutants with them.
Then the operator of one of the nation's few remaining medical waste incinerators tentatively won the state's permission to emit even more poisons at its new Tooele County facility as long as it promised to continuously monitor some of the more dangerous emissions and set their machines to automatically shut down when limits are exceeded.
The option of Utah just deciding that it would no longer allow itself to be the host of a toxic and perhaps unnecessary medical waste incineration business was not considered. Because state and federal law do not give the Utah Division of Air Quality, or anyone else, the power to stop it.
It all smacks of the supposed habits of the old-time county sheriff. The one who might not think it worth his while to arrest the menacing stranger, but drove him to the county line and told him to keep moving.
The problem is that, even if Stericycle does transfer its flag to a newer, more technically sophisticated facility in the less-populated area of Tooele County, it will still be pouring some really nasty stuff into the same airshed it has already been compromising for decades.
That is balanced against the hope that, unlike the current location, where residential neighborhoods grew up around it, the new incinerators will be in an area that is and, for a long time, should remain very sparsely populated.
The DAQ has published a draft permit for the new facility and is taking public comment on it through April 23. It expects a great many comments, particularly from people with health and environmental worries who are reasonably concerned that large-scale medical waste incinerators are unsafe at any speed and should be shut down, not expanded in a new area.
But even if regulators mistrusted Stericycle as much as the activists do, their powers are limited. Many of the various pollutants the company does and would emit are, by themselves, in quantities small enough to fly under the regulatory radar.
And the legal and political culture in Utah is strongly influenced by the idea that almost anything that creates jobs is a good thing.
Past instances of air quality violations – and a willingness to mislead the state about their size and nature – are more than enough to believe that DAQ should be on guard about the new Stericycle, keeping a very close watch on an operation and setting the alarms to sound long and loud and where everyone can hear them.