In recent weeks, my community has been roiled by a series of podcasts and letters to the editor suggesting that an old "red bed" on the edge of the county is going to destroy our local environment. Red beds are disposal pits for the residue of smelting aluminum from bauxite ore. Very little aluminum smelting gets done in the U.S. any more, the local manufacturers having been subjected to new environmental standards that drastically reduced the more troublesome trace products in the residue, while simultaneously making the process so much more expensive that recycling is now more cost-effective. Apparently the U.S. currently relies more on recycled aluminum than mined, though China, for instance, is still smelting like crazy. Nevertheless, decades of previous smelting have left a lot of red beds full of bauxite residue.
Red beds don't take their lurid color from anything exotic, just a high proportion of iron oxide (rust) in the bauxite. The usual bad rap against aluminum smelting is not so much the chemical byproducts as the fact that it's an absolute electricity hog, because the smelting process is a kind of electrolysis, like a giant battery. In addition, however, red mud is extremely alkaline (pH 10 to 13), so you definitely do not want it to escape its confinement and flow into any waterways in high concentrations. In a few highly publicized disasters, such as one in Hungary, this has happened on a large enough scale to sterilize a waterway, at least temporarily. Dilution apparently clears the problem up eventually, but it's serious. What's more, although red beds that dispose of relatively new and cleaner smelting may be chemically fairly benign other than their alkalinity, the fact remains that residue from older or dirtier smelters may contain a variety of toxins such as mercury and various hydrocarbons, including flouride compounds. In the case of a smelter in the county to our north, the red beds were of a particularly vile sort that dumped enough mercury into the bay system to prompt a Superfund designation. The mercury levels have been reported to have dropped substantially in the years since the designation and remediation.
The red bed at issue in my own county today is on the other end, to the south, and is not a Superfund site. Until today, all I could find out from people with their hair on fire was that they feared this complex of red beds was like the red beds to the north, or like other worse examples elsewhere in the world. The state version of the EPA, called Texas Council on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) doesn't think so, but of course there is the usual suspicion that they're in league with industry flacks, as must be anyone who believes a word TCEQ says. Also, it's obvious that the red beds are deadly because the complex paid a lot of ad valorem taxes without ensuring that the locals participated somehow in their profits. I need more than the first argument to be excited into action, and the second argument I reject with contempt.
This morning, however, to my delight, someone forwarded me a genuinely helpful and informative document: a soil- and water-testing report, admittedly over 20 years old, attached to a TCEQ motion filed in 2016 in the federal bankruptcy proceedings of the former owner of the red beds. I can't tell offhand how serious are the problems it identified, but it did identify some, thus establishing that at least some of the red mud at this site came from some of the older and dirtier smelting sites, and some of the problems did make their way into some groundwater. With that lead, I can figure out what happened in the bankruptcy, including who is the current owner and what entities are still stuck with the clean-up liability, which was reported to have been estimated some years ago at $10MM minimum. Did TCEQ manage to find a solvent entity to undertake remediation, and was it effective? Have followup tests been done? The concerned citizens this time around allege that TCEQ is engaging in a "closure" rather than a remediation, which may be true; it may even be warranted. Evidently the most common strategy for red beds is to leave them alone and let them dry in place, while controlling red dust in dry and windy conditions. There's some effort to learn cost-effective ways to extract their more valuable trace elements, but I don't think anything like that is being attempted here.
In the meantime, people are posting podcasts showing the bright red ponds and letting that image work on the public's feelz. This is a state-law regulation issue, not a county one, but the concerned citizens believe, with some justification, that if TCEQ is dropping the ball then the county leadership should investigate and light a fire under them. I'm willing to do the investigation. I'd have been more willing sooner if I'd been approached with more light and less heat, and far less jumping to conclusions about the ulterior motives of anyone whose hair isn't equally on fire. Why do people think it's a winning strategy to appear at a public meeting to denounce motives? Even a skeptical governing body would be more likely to be brought on board if the concerned citizens concentrated on providing clear evidence of a problem instead of speculating about cover-ups for nefarious purposes. The defensive rage spurred by a question like "But what makes you conclude that TCEQ's remediation efforts have been ineffective to date?" is amazing. "Stop attacking me! You're part of the problem! You must think money is more important that preventing the poisoning of our bays!" There's also a serious difficulty in distinguishing between being attacked and not being believed uncritically--especially not being believed about things that even the concerned citizen hasn't investigated yet, let alone ones that I personally haven't investigated yet.
I'm not running for this office again, I'm done at the end of 2022. This has been enough service, I guess. I may paint and crochet for the rest of my life with a perfectly clear conscience.
Well, thank you for your service (as people like to say).
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