Cold Creek Compost, Inc. (CCC), a mixed solid waste composting facility located in Potter Valley, has an eight-year history of permit violations and misrepresentations. (See the Newsletter archives on the MEC websiote for a complete account.)
Almost a year ago I wrote about an application by CCC for modifications to their use permit, in which the company was seeking exceptions to mitigations established by a 1998 Environmental Impact Report (EIR).
Recently, I made an appointment to review CCC's file at the county Department of Environmental Health in order to check on the status of this still-pending application. I requested files from August 2001 to the present, as I was interested in reviewing the inspection reports and correspondence between CCC and regulating agencies. I found no inspection records for 2002, and the files had significantly changed. Many documents that the MEC has copied over the years were no longer in the files. Fortunately, we still have them.
CCC is still in violation of Condition 3.2.1 of their permit, which requires material to be stored under the roof or tarped in wet weather. They are asking to be exempted from this requirement in their new use permit. But for the past two years they have been in violation of this mitigation, which was established by the EIR.
Environmental Health has reported this ongoing violation to the Building and Planning Department, which is the enforcement agency in this case. Building and Planning seems to have decided not to require compliance, nor to issue any reprimand to the facility. We want to know why?
Remember that in their change of use permit, CCC is requesting to add sewage sludge biosolids, fishery wastes, restaurant wastes and street sweepings to their feedstocks, which already include waste from industrial poultry farms, grape pumace, lime cake waste from Louisiana Pacific's paper mill in Samoa, and the county's construction wood waste and Sheetrock stream.
Confident that "the solution to pollution is dilution," the government encourages the spread of waste onto our farmlands. They refuse to consider that some herbicides and pesticides survive the composting process, or the bio-accumulation of heavy metals in our food crops. In their haste to get rid of waste, they are compromising our health. As always, consumers beware!
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2002
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