Reefer Madness
Thousands of abandoned cool-air containers are fouling the port
Towering above the small houses around Blinn Avenue in Wilmington stands a wall of neatly stacked shipping containers.
The pileup stems largely from America's trade deficit. Last year, the Port of Los Angeles received a half million more containers than it sent out. Piles have grown to as tall as 60 feet in nearby yards - some on land owned and leased by the Port of Los Angeles. Stacked six and seven high, they cause the sun to set an hour earlier in Wilmington, joke residents.
The containers are unsightly, to be sure, but they also represent a little known environmental hazard that has caught regulators off guard. Among the ugly stacks stand discarded refrigerator containers - known in the salty world of international shipping as "reefers." The well-worn units, some environmentalists and now some regulators worry, are hissing chemicals into the air that can cause skin cancer and global warming.
The chemicals, known as refrigerants, are closely regulated in car and building air conditioners, as well as in refrigerators used in homes and stores. Whenever such equipment is serviced or discarded, the chemicals must first be drained and captured either for recycling or proper disposal.
However, the rules governing the refrigerated shipping containers that once bore frozen prawns from the shores of Thailand and garlic from the fields of China appear to have a loophole. That loophole, according to the California Air Resources Board, appears big enough to allow shippers to discard a hundred thousand worn out reefers a year in Wilmington and other communities under the guise of long-term storage and completely evade requirements to properly recycle or dispose of the harmful chemicals.
"There's a storage grave yard," said Angela Johnson Meszaros, general counsel for the California Environmental Rights Alliance. "It's indefinite storage."
She and other environmental justice activists have been pushing the California Air Resources Board to require shippers to drain the chemicals from the reefer containers before placing them in yards like the ones above Blinn Avenue in Wilmington, just off the Pacific Coast Highway. After months of wrangling, the state agency finally appears poised to look into the potential problem.
In an initial report, the agency's staff estimates that 100,000 worn-out reefers wind up at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach each year, holding about 1.3-to-1.6 million pounds of refrigerants that ultimately will leak into the air unless recycled. "A significant number" of the reefers may contain CFCs, a refrigerant banned in the 1990s under an international treaty, known as the Montreal Protocol. The U.S. and other nations signed the pact after scientists discovered that CFCs were destroying the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects life on Earth from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Depletion of the upper atmospheric ozone layer has caused a rash of skin cancer.
The reefer units also contain HFC-134a, a replacement chemical for the harmful CFCs, according to the Air Resources Board report. It still must be recycled from cars and household refrigerators and is a strong greenhouse gas that is 1,300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. In addition to destroying the upper ozone layer, CFCs also are thousands of times more powerful as global warming agents than carbon dioxide, which is emitted by burning fossil fuel.
After a cursory look at the reefer pileup, Air Resources Board staffers are worried that the discarded units ultimately may leak the equivalent of 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere.
Environmentalists say that unless regulators get a handle on the reefers, the problem is likely to only grow in the years ahead.
'The volume of trade through the ports is expected to triple by 2025," said Martin Schlageter, Coalition for Clean Air campaign and advocacy director.
Yet officials at regulatory agencies and the port, while concerned about global warming and environmental protection, seem largely unaware of the problem.
"The things we have been hearing have been about the blight," said Theresa Adams Lopez, Port of Los Angeles spokesperson.
There is no city law that prevents long-term storage of the reefer units, said an aide to Los Angeles City Council Member Janice Hahn, who represents the area around the port.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District has not focused on the reefer units, said spokesperson Sam Atwood. Its rules require recycling of the HFCs and CFCs, but only in larger air conditioning refrigeration units that are stationary or in motor vehicles.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers the reefer units to be covered under its rules for "refrigerated transport," said spokesperson John Millet, for the federal agency in Washington. "When these things get serviced, the coolant needs to get captured and recycled or disposed of properly."
However, when reefers decay and leak the chemicals while in long-term storage yards the requirements do not apply.
Finally, though, the days of leaking refrigerants from the reefers may be numbered, at least in California. Next month the Air Resources Board is expected to approve regulations it intends to adopt to begin cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2010. While the draft list does not require recycling, it does at least call for the agency to study the question.
"We think that's a pretty important step to take," said Johnson of the California Environmental Rights Alliance. She and other environmental advocates are hopeful that the study ultimately will bring an end to what appears to be a bad case of reefer madness at the ports.
Published: 09/27/2007
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