For over 30 years, Portland police officers have traveled 38 miles to Marion County with blocks of powdered fentanyl, baggies of marijuana, and pebbles of confiscated crystal meth.
In order to ensure that the narcotics do not do any more harm, they have been incinerated in an Oregon Sonly municipal trash incinerator to produce electricity.
However, all of it ended in December.
After using the incinerator for decades, police and sheriff’s offices throughout the state now need to find another location to get rid of drug evidence, drug paraphernalia, and other illegal items.
They are frantically looking for an alternative that hasn’t been found yet, while simultaneously keeping the drugs in their property rooms and evidence warehouses.
Sgt. Kevin Allen, a Portland police spokesperson, stated that there isn’t a clear solution that emerges.
There are possible legal and logistical issues because the nearest incinerator that burns medicines that have been seized is located in Spokane.
It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and require environmental permissions for Oregon police departments to run small regional incinerators, similar to a Tennessee model.
According to Allen, destroying the narcotics is a significant and well-planned responsibility.
“Once every six weeks, a team from Portland would travel to the incinerator in Brooks,” he said.
The drugs would be loaded into a van after being weighed by four evidence control technicians. A marked police car with two security guards would follow the technicians in the van.
At the incinerator, the van would reverse up to a conveyer belt. While the other two technicians waited for each box to fall into the 34-foot-deep fire pit, two of the technicians would load each box straight onto the belt.
Because it’s so hazardous if it ends up in the wrong hands, we really want to make sure the thing disappears, Allen added.
Portland police and the pound paid the incinerator almost $2,500 year to dispose of loads of narcotics evidence, along with paperwork, biohazards, and garments from crime scenes.
Jackson County Sheriff Nate Sickler said his staff thought about smearing the pills with a liquid chemical to destroy them after the incinerator closed.
However, it was deemed too dangerous. According to him, evidence officers or technicians would have to take medicines out of their package, which would expose them to fentanyl needlessly. He said that the approach probably wouldn’t adhere to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s guidelines.
According to Sickler, officers would have to take time off of patrol or other responsibilities to drive to the Spokane incinerator, which would require a two-day turnaround time from southern Oregon.
Furthermore, he told state lawmakers recently that since police powers don’t always transfer across state lines, bringing seized drugs to Washington would probably need some sort of agreement to give the officers transporting the drugs more authority.
Every year, his office burns over 1,000 pounds of pharmaceuticals, and it usually visits the Brooks incinerator twice.
According to state police Capt. Kyle Kennedy, Oregon State Police handled seven to ten tons annually, visiting the incinerator every three months.
Building out a new drug disposal system requires careful design to limit both the physical risks of exposure and the risks of misusing or abusing the medications, according to Shawn Henderson, an evidence management expert from Texas who teaches about drug evidence disposal.
It’s a safety issue. It is a problem with security. “It’s a resource challenge and a logistical challenge,” he remarked.
Henderson remembered working for a police station in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas, where he drove a horrible big crime scene van loaded with foul-smelling drugs.
The closest incinerator—the only game in town for police in northern Texas—was two and a half hours away.
STATUS INACTIVE
Since 1986, Reworld Marion, formerly known as Covanta Marion Inc., has run the state’s sole solid waste-to-energy incinerator.
Before it ceased taking in new rubbish on December 31st, it processed up to 550 tons of garbage every day. As a result, it is currently burning materials that were supplied before that date.
One of the main reasons for the shutdown, according to the firm, was that it was unable to comply with Oregon’s new emission reporting standards to monitor specific dangerous chemicals and pollutants more regularly.
In order to create electricity, the incinerator uses two boilers to burn waste at temperatures higher than 2,000 degrees. The heat from the combustion process turns water into steam, which powers turbines.
Facility manager Steve Nipp informed the state Department of Environmental Quality in a letter dated January 10 that the incinerator will temporarily halt operations once it has finished processing the remaining waste and enter an inactive condition while additional talks with Marion County are conducted.
The incinerator was previously just required to perform yearly monitoring and reporting, according to state senator Deb Patterson, a Democrat from Salem, who was one of the main supporters of Senate Bill 488 in 2023, which necessitated the greater tracking.
The U.S. Forest Service and the environmental organization Beyond Toxics conducted research near the incinerator and discovered toxic compounds such dioxins and heavy metals that are known to be damaging to health.
According to Patterson, the site is close to a small business, a food processing plant, a community college campus, a school, and residences. Every Oregonian has a right to clean water and air.
According to state environmental documents, Reworld Marion asked for and was granted extensions to submit a monitoring and sampling plan to state authorities.
However, Reworld Marion’s lawyer, Brien J. Flanagan, wrote to the state in October saying the firm was still worried that many of the requirements were either not technically possible or could not be realistically fulfilled in the allotted time.
Additionally, the incinerator was the only one in Oregon that burned hospital infectious waste, thus the nearest one that took medical garbage was in Kansas.
Sen. Kevin Mannix, a Republican from Salem, expressed his hope that the state will look into ways to temporarily continue operating the Brooks incinerator while attempting to find another private sector company to collaborate with Marion County to operate the incinerator using a boiler system that emits no emissions.
He told The Oregonian/OregonLive that we must approach this problem creatively and aggressively.
Allowing them to continue operating and bringing in efficient, contemporary incinerators that don’t emit any pollutants would be a more visionary course of action, he added, and they could resume their task of eliminating illegal substances, medical waste, and ordinary rubbish.
Unless another way that complies with state environmental standards is discovered, medical waste will probably need to be trucked out of state, increasing the cost of disposal, according to Craig Campbell, governmental affairs director of the Oregon Refuse and Recycling Association.
He responded, “It must go somewhere.” You’re still transferring that environmental impact from one location to another, even though I know trucks are getting cleaner and cleaner.
This legislative session, Marion County commissioners intend to introduce a bill to repeal the stricter monitoring requirements.
House Bill 3244, according to Commissioner Kevin Cameron, would allow the incinerator to continue turning garbage into electricity and power Salem in a way that significantly lowers the carbon footprint that a landfill (and the transportation of that waste to a landfill) requires.
Patterson will oppose that endeavor, claiming that the House bill would undo the progress achieved two years prior.
According to her, the large corporation that is releasing pollutants from this incinerator appears to be interested in continuing to make money and wants SB 488’s provisions to be repealed.
THE REGIONAL FIX
According to Jackson County Sheriff Sickler, police enforcement organizations are thinking of starting their own tiny incinerators with state assistance.
According to him, the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police and the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association are investigating the viability of installing four to five incinerators at state police headquarters or other sheriff’s offices that neighboring agencies may utilize.
He estimated that the cost of purchasing and setting up the incinerators would be around $200,000. He stated that after reaching out to the state Department of Environmental Quality, the groups were instructed to follow up once they had concrete plans.
They want to follow in the footsteps of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which operates incinerators in four cities: Knoxville, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Jackson. Drop-offs are scheduled by police departments.
The Tennessee model requires police departments to deliver the drugs to the incinerator and hold them there until an incineration operator releases them, along with forms detailing the kinds of drugs, approximate weights, and total number they wish to destroy.
According to Josh DeVine, a spokesman for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, an independent state body, police departments in Tennessee burned about 8,700 pounds of drug evidence between the four incinerators in fiscal 2023–2024.
According to him, around 20,000 pounds of evidence have been destroyed since the incinerators began in 2016.
The Tennessee bureau obtained approval from the state’s Department of Environment and Conservation and used federal money to purchase the incinerators. According to DeVine, the agency spent less than $20,000, mostly on gas and maintenance.
“We provide this as a service supported by our grant programs, and we don’t charge state and local law enforcement agencies to incinerate,” he said. For the state, we see it as a great success.
The next move in Oregon, according to Sickler, must be taken while lawmakers are still meeting in case they need to assist with funds or amend state law.
As he stored the unnecessary drug evidence and other contraband, he declared, “We’re going to be OK for six months.”
However, he stated that we must address this while the Legislature is in session. You have fentanyl and other hazardous drugs lying around. It’s unhealthy. Your staff shouldn’t be exposed to such risk for very long.
— Maxine Bernstein writes about criminal justice and federal courts. You can contact her via [email protected], 503-221-8212, X@maxoregonian, or LinkedIn.
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