Foam from old docks is becoming significant source of pollution

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Every spring, as scores of volunteers scour the shorelines of the Lake of the Ozarks for trash, most of their haul is chunks of polystyrene foam used to keep boat docks afloat.

State enforcement officers have been doing some scouring of their own in the valleys and remote areas surrounding the lake, cracking down on illegal dumps often piled high with dock foam.

For example, investigators have been trying for years to clean up a former paintball range near the lake that they estimate contains more than 1,000 cubic yards of foam blocks and other debris.

"It's like Stonehenge in plastic," said Philip Tremblay, spokesman for the state Department of Natural Resources' solid waste management division.

AmerenUE, the St. Louis-based utility that operates the lake in southern Missouri, saw this coming when it began forcing residents and businesses to remove outdated foam from their docks in the mid-1990s. A 2002 survey determined about 9,000 docks still were using the outdated foam.

The problem is that technology is only beginning to come up with ways to deal with the foam except stuff it in a landfill.

AmerenUE is not targeting all dock foam, just foam that is not "encapsulated," or contained in some sort of wrapping or container that can preserve the foam longer and prevent it from breaking into pieces.

"Foam tends to create a lot of volume," said Jeff Green, an AmerenUE spokesman. "We want to do our part to reduce that volume. There's probably very few lakes that have the level of development that we have on the Lake of the Ozarks."

But very few of Ameren's efforts have focused on finding a way to get rid of the material once it gets out of the lake.

Betsy Steiner, executive director of the Crofton, Md.-based Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers, an industry-backed recycling advocate, said that reluctance may be because dock foam is very difficult to recycle in the normal ways.

Dock foam often is full of water and oil and contains metal screws and other fasteners that can damage machines used to shred the foam for recycling. In addition, dock foam represents a very small percentage of the overall amount of foam produced very year, reducing the financial incentive for the private sector to collect it.

But she said there are promising developments on the horizon. For example, a plant is set to open in California that would attempt turning foam into diesel fuel.

Missouri companies and researchers have begun coming up with their own ideas.

Washington, Mo.-based BioSpan Technologies, which participated in AmerenUE's pilot project, has developed solvents that melt the foam into a goo, which can then be turned into different products.

The Missouri Department of Transportation is currently testing two products developed by BioSpan and produced by Illinois-based ETC Inc. using dock foam that fills in cracks in roads and fills in potholes.

Department officials said the results are preliminary, and they worry the products might be more expensive than regular asphalt. Sheldon Chesky, BioSpan's president and CEO, said they were using older numbers and predicted his product would ultimately save the state money while cutting the use of oil-based asphalt.

"We're at the cutting edge of this technology," Chesky said. "I'm a taxpayer and I get disturbed when they spend a lot of money to put down road surface."

AmerenUE has even experimented with using the foam as fuel for power generation, although without much success.

Green, however, said the utility is encouraged by renewed interest in the issue and hopes to eventually eliminate what it sees as a major eyesore around the lake.

"Any way we can reduce the volume going into the landfill, we see that as a positive," he said.

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AmerenUE: http://www.ameren.com/