Entek leaders say state concerns about pollution came out of blue

Scott Swanson

Entek, one of east Linn County’s largest employers, is facing off in court with state agencies over its emissions of a solvent used in making its products.

The company was granted a temporary restraining order on April 7 by Linn County Circuit Court Judge Tom McHill regarding a “communication plan” by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to launch meetings with local residents and company employees to discuss air quality monitoring near the plant.

The issue surfaced after an April 6 meeting between Entek officials and officials from the DEQ, the Oregon Health Authority, the Department of Justice and OSHA. State officials said they were concerned about the company’s emissions of trichloroethylene, a solvent that, at elevated levels, has been linked to various cancers, possible effects on fetal development and other health conditions.

On April 10 and 12, Circuit Court Judge Carol Bispham heard arguments from both sides regarding whether a longer stay should be imposed and said she was concerned about “inaccurate information or information that escalates a risk that has not been proven to be at that level.”

The company said it was set to submit updated and more comprehensive air quality data to the state Monday, April 24.

As The New Era went to press this week, Bispham had yet to rule on the case.

Entek CEO Larry Keith invited about 40 local leaders, including members of the local press, to visit the company’s Lebanon plant, at 250 North Hansard Ave., on Friday, April 21, for a tour and a presentation of the company’s side of the story.

“We’re trying to be open and transparent to the community,” Keith said. “Unfortunately, we’ve been in the media lately.”

Entek uses TCE to remove oil from thin sheets of silicon that are then dried, sliced into usable lengths and shipped to customers to be used as separators for lead plates in batteries for cars, trucks, golf carts and a wide range of other products.

The company employs about 400 people in Lebanon, and more than half of those work in the division that makes silicon-based battery separators, thin sheets of material that feels like plastic.

The company’s separators end up in 80 percent of the after-market car batteries sold in the United States, and 95 percent of the new vehicles sold in the U.S., said Dr. Kirk Hanawalt, one of the company’s owners.

Entek is the largest producer of battery separators in the world, three to five times the size of any of its five competitors – four in Asia and one in the United States.

It produces 180 million square meters of the separator material each year, working 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, which is slightly less than half of the total material produced in the world.

The company has two other divisions, one producing separators for lithium batteries, and the other extruders and separators used by other firms to create plastic parts.

Hanawalt said the meeting with the state agencies on April 6 was a surprise to the company.

He and toxicologist Dr. Laurie Haws, a consultant retained by Entek, spent about an hour describing the chemical makeup and history of TCE use generally, its use in the company’s battery separator manufacturing process, and how the company and the state monitor air quality for TCE.

Hanawalt said that, over the years, Entek’s complex process for recovering and reusing TCE has been refined to the point that it recovers 99.9 percent of the solvent, using 135,000 pounds of carbon in beds outside the plant.

According to the state, Entek emits an estimated “70 to 90 tons” of TCE each year – the company says it was 75 tons in 2016 – and in court documents points out that its state permit “expressly provides that TCE may be emitted from the facility in the mount of 127 tons per year.”

“Our intent would be to have zero emissions,” Hanawalt said Friday. “But we have some because of the volume we’re using.”

It must recover 99.75 percent of its TCE simply to comply with DEQ requirements. Hanawalt said the company typically hovers around 99.85 percent recovery.

Entek’s efficiency in recovering TCE today is a result of DEQ setting stringent requirements 30 years ago, he said.

He noted that the state has repeatedly referred other companies to Entek as a model of what can be done.

Hanawalt said the sequence of events that led to the company’s recent troubles began last fall when the federal EPA told the state DEQ that it was doing modeling to determine potential problem air pollution problem areas based on computer analysis of existing data.

“We didn’t know they were modeling,” Hanawalt said.

In February the DEQ contacted Entek and asked that the company begin air monitoring, which uses instrumentation to actually measure contaminants in the air and thus is a more accurate measure of air quality, Hanawalt and Haws said.

Entek contracted with CH2M Hill, “one of the best,” to monitor air quality via five stations located around Entek’s 28.44-acre campus.

He said that Entek was scheduled to submit that data on April 24.

On March 15 DEQ officials asked to see the preliminary numbers from CH2M Hill’s monitoring.

“Reluctantly,” Entek submitted it, Hanawalt said. “They kind of insisted, so we did,” he said, adding that the preliminary numbers were based on a short time span and the company preferred to wait until the full monitoring was complete.

DEQ officials then informed Entek that they wanted a meeting on April 6, to which they planned to bring representatives of other state agencies, he said.

Hanawalt said the DEQ was reluctant to divulge details, but he learned that the list of participating agencies included high-level officials from the DEQ and the Oregon Health Authority, along with OSHA and a Department of Justice lawyer.

“I thought, ‘Holey moley,’” Hanawalt said. “I’ve been working with the DEQ for 22 years and the only person I’ve worked with was a permit writer.”

He said when he asked what the meeting agenda was going to be, he was told he would find out.

At the meeting, state officials told Entek they were concerned about its TCE emission levels and were planning to embark on a “communication plan” to alert the public and company employees about potential dangers from TCE.

“They wanted to get a press release out,” Hanawalt said. “We were not consulted.”

Court documents say the state acknowledges that Entek has been compliant with all its permit requirements, a fact Hanawalt noted Friday.

“DEQ and OHA say we go beyond our permit conditions,” he said.

Hanawalt and Keith said the state appears to be rushing things, “trying to implement rules that are not actually out,” Hanawalt said. He said state officials appear to be trying to build public support for more stringent requirements “at our expense.”

That, he said, was why Entek asked for the temporary restraining order, which as of Monday remained in effect.

Haws, who was a toxicologist for the state of Texas before going into private consulting, said the computer modeling by EPA is used to “broadly” assess risks to public health, not to focus on specific problem areas. She cited the EPA’s own documents stating that using computer modeling to identify specific problem locations is “not recommended.”

“Air monitoring is an actual, real measurement,” she said. “It’s more accurate.”

She noted that five sites where air monitoring had been done around Entek’s campus earlier in the week in response to DEQ requests represented a “worse-case scenario” for TCE contamination, since they were close to the source of any leakage from the plant.

The numbers at those sites, she said, were gathered over a 24-hour period and represented values “substantially lower” than what CH2M Hill’s preliminary data indicated. The highest individual reading among the five monitors was 1.56 milligrams per cubic meter over a 24-hour period, directly downwind from the plant. The other four monitor readings were one-third or less of that amount.

According to figures provided by Entek, that would be comparable to 15 drops of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool or 1½ pennies in $50 million.

Haws also said that health-based guidelines for TCE emissions are set very conservatively, and that research on the health effects of TCE emissions on humans is “mixed and inconclusive.”

TCE, Hanawalt noted, was initially used as an inhaled anesthetic. It has also been used as a disinfectant, to extract caffeine from coffee and oils from other plants, as a mechanical degreaser, in dry cleaning, in corrosion inhibitors and waxes, and in pet food –“hopefully not in the U.S.,” Hanawalt added.

Haws said she was present at the meeting between Entek and the state and said the state’s plans for taking concerns about Entek public were “inappropriate.”

“From my experience with regulation, you don’t go out and start scaring people unless you have real information. That data needs to be real good and solid and reliable and it’s not. “

Hanawalt said he suspects that state officials at the April 6 meeting may not have been particularly familiar with TCE.

The OHA, he said, has 633 different substances within its purview, one of which is TCE.

“I wouldn’t bet the state is all that familiar with that one,” he said. “Based on the meeting on March 6, I didn’t get the feeling they’d done a lot of research.”

Working things out, Hanawalt said, “is going to take time.” Entek was to deliver its monitoring data on Monday, April 24.

“This is going to take time,” he said. “We’ll go review it with them.”

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