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Photos provided by Raymond Williams show scenes from the hazardous waste cleanups in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and Berger, Missouri (Cal Tobias\/Columbia Missourian).<\/p>\n
Trucks filled with 66 tons of hazardous material left Yazoo City, Mississippi, on Oct. 30, 2013.<\/p>\n
Full of sacks containing plastic dust contaminated with lead, cadmium and chromium, the trucks made their way to the outskirts of Berger, Missouri, a town of 250 people along the Missouri River.<\/p>\n
The next day brought another 85 tons. Then 43. Then another 22. By early 2014, 6,500 tons \u2014 or 13 million pounds \u2014 of powder, stuffed into drums and bags, filled the warehouse to its brim.<\/p>\n
Over the next five years, drums would spill, sacks would rip and dozens of people would be exposed to the toxic material before it was cleaned up, in part, on the taxpayers\u2019 dime.<\/p>\n
Raymond Williams had been in the sandblasting business for decades. His Ohio-based company, U.S. Technology Corp., made a national name for itself by leasing sandblasting material and equipment for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Vietnam Veterans Memorial.<\/p>\n
U.S. Tech also leased the material to federal agencies and defense contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to strip paint off of planes, ships and other vehicles, including the space shuttle.<\/p>\n
The sandblasting material, made of tiny plastic pellets, could be used for several projects before it became too fine to reuse. By that point, it was mixed with paint and metal chips containing lead, cadmium and chromium, heavy metals that rendered the powder hazardous.<\/p>\n
Normally, hazardous material is considered waste and needs to be disposed of at a licensed facility. But under a federal law known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act<\/a>, companies can recycle hazardous materials into products instead.<\/p>\n They have to meet certain requirements first, though. The new products have to be a usable replacement for the regular version, and they can\u2019t come into direct contact with the ground.<\/p>\n Finally, companies can\u2019t sit on the hazardous material forever. To prevent hoarding, most of it has to be recycled within one to two years.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re doing these things, you\u2019re exempt from regulation,\u201d Williams told KBIA and The Beacon. \u201cThat means you don\u2019t have to have a permit to transport it, you don\u2019t have to have a permit to store it, you don\u2019t have to have a permit to manufacture your product. It\u2019s all exempt from regulation.\u201d<\/p>\n By bypassing these regulations, U.S. Tech and its customers were able to save a lot of money. The cost of getting permits and paying to dump the material at a hazardous waste facility would be \u201castronomical,\u201d according to Laura Mills, Williams\u2019 lawyer.<\/p>\n At the same time, military officials were under growing pressure from the Department of Defense to comply with federal waste-minimization regulations<\/a>, according to a ProPublica investigation<\/a> into military contractors, including U.S. Tech.<\/p>\n Recycling the sandblasting powder helped bases meet quotas for eliminating waste, and recycling the material was baked into Williams\u2019 contracts.<\/p>\n During the 25 years Williams oversaw U.S. Tech\u2019s recycling program, he said the company had written approval from 48 states to offer its services to companies and agencies there.<\/p>\n KBIA and The Beacon reviewed many of these approvals, including one from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which said: \u201cThe MDNR does not consider the spent plastic abrasive to be a solid waste if it is recycled according to (federal requirements).\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a very successful program, and military bases all over the country got awards and prizes for participating,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n In a 2007 magazine article, Williams was lauded for his development of a nonporous, stronger concrete block \u2014 made with 10% recycled sandblasting powder \u2014\u00a0that was being used for \u201cre-building the South\u201d after Hurricane Katrina.<\/p>\n \u201cWith two production facilities, one just outside of Canton, OH, and one in Yazoo (City), MS, the manufacturing plants are two of the most advanced of their kind in the world,\u201d the article read.<\/p>\n The Mississippi facility was the outcome of a collaboration between U.S. Tech and a company called Hydromex in 2000. Williams said Hydromex President Dennie Eugene Pridemore approached him with an offer to help recycle his material.<\/p>\n Under this new partnership, Hydromex opened a facility in Yazoo City, a town of 10,000 northwest of Jackson, to recycle U.S. Tech\u2019s sandblasting powder into concrete blocks to help it fulfill its contracts.<\/p>\n It never sold a single block.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cAt some point, they started using less and less cement, less binding agent, to the point that most of their blocks were just crumbling in the yard. They had no structural integrity,\u201d said Richard Harrell, the then-director of the Office of Pollution Control within the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ).<\/p>\n \u201cThen, at some point, (Hydromex) just started pouring it in the ground and pouring pads over top of it,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Hydromex was shut down in 2002, and Pridemore would eventually be sentenced to more than three years in prison.<\/a><\/p>\n At the same time, federal investigators looked into U.S. Tech, ultimately concluding that Williams was a victim of Hydromex\u2019s cover-up, not a conspirator.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Williams took matters into his own hands.<\/p>\n \u201cI went to the attorney general in the state of Mississippi and said, \u2018Hey, we had a subcontractor inappropriately bury this material in your state. It\u2019s going to cost millions and millions of dollars to recover it, and as the party that\u2019s contracted with the government to recycle, we\u2019d like to step in and \u2026 dig it all up \u2026 and put it back in the recycling world,\u2019\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n Mills, Williams\u2019 lawyer, said her client took on the job \u201cbecause otherwise, he would not have been able to continue his lease-and-recycle program with the government, because they would have said, \u2018Hey, this isn\u2019t working.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a matter of stepping up and doing the right thing, but also maintaining the business he had,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Under the federal law that makes it possible to recycle hazardous material, a company must recycle 75% of its material within a year. If it doesn\u2019t, the material has been \u201cspeculatively accumulated,\u201d making it hazardous waste that cannot legally be recycled.<\/p>\n Because Hydromex had speculatively accumulated the material on its site, that material was now hazardous waste in the eyes of the government. But in its offer to help clean up the site, U.S. Tech insisted that it be allowed to recycle the powder, and Mississippi agreed.<\/p>\n In 2003, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Tech entered into an agreed order<\/a>, a legally binding agreement commonly used by the department. The agreement gave U.S. Tech one year, with the possibility of a second year, to remove, process and recycle the material from the site.<\/p>\n It would take until 2007 \u2014 the year after Pridemore was indicted \u2014 to fully recycle all of the above-ground powder.<\/p>\n During a later trial, Mills would question Felix Flechas, an expert witness who used to work at EPA Region VIII enforcing the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.<\/p>\n Flechas said U.S. Tech took a longer time because of the ongoing investigation into Hydromex \u2014 which turned the property into a crime scene \u2014 as well as wet conditions and the sheer amount of material.<\/p>\n \u201c. . . this project is well within the time frames that would be expected for cleaning up and remediating this amount of waste,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Despite the delays, Harrell said the department was \u201ctrying to work with them\u201d because \u201cthe agency encourages recycling.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c(You) had a pretty good collapse in some of the industries at that time, so a lot of the bricks he was making, he was having trouble selling them,\u201d Harrell said. \u201cWe just tried to work with him on schedules and timelines as the economy ebbed and waned.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams did sell blocks \u2014 in promotional material, he claimed his patented \u201cSEALTECH\u201d blocks, which use 10% recycled material, helped build Walmarts, hardware stores and even a \u201cpregnancy support center\u201d in Ohio, where he\u2019s based.<\/p>\n In 2009, U.S. Tech and MDEQ began investigating the scope of the underground material. Two years later, they amended their original agreed order<\/a> to give the company another two years to excavate and recycle the buried powder.<\/p>\n In 2013, before the deadline to have everything removed from the site, Williams reached out to MDEQ to tell it that U.S. Tech had gotten approval from the Mississippi Department of Transportation to use its powder in road base for an upcoming highway project.<\/p>\n MDEQ amended the agreed order again<\/a>, giving U.S. Tech until the end of the year to get all of the remaining material to the MDOT project site.<\/p>\n But in October, the MDOT deal fell through because the department had lost funding for the new highway.<\/p>\n Williams immediately reached out to MDEQ to ask if he could instead move the material to a site a mile down the road from the Yazoo City facility, where he hoped to set up his recycling equipment. Mississippi said no.<\/p>\n \u201cWe already had one contaminated site. We had contamination in the soil. We had contamination in the water around the site. We were concerned that all we would be doing is moving one problem from Problem A to Problem B and generating another site, \u201d Harrell testified in a 2015 court case.<\/p>\n \u201cAt that point, I don\u2019t think we had any confidence that that material was being handled right,\u201d Harrell told KBIA and The Beacon. \u201cThis had been going on for multiple years, and we weren\u2019t seeing near enough progress to remove this material and handle it safely.\u201d<\/p>\n So, Williams turned to the World of Concrete, an industry conference in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n There, he ran into Daryl Duncan, who had worked in abrasive blasting for decades, including as a salesman for U.S. Tech from 2003 to 2005.<\/p>\n \u201cIn our discussions, I related that I had to move 16 or 17 million pounds of recycle material out of Mississippi. Daryl said he would love to get the material since he had completed recycling several billion pounds of glass and liked the recycle supply business,\u201d Williams wrote in a statement.<\/p>\n Duncan\u2019s family owned a large warehouse outside of Berger, Missouri, a small town near the Missouri River east of Hermann. The warehouse, once the home of several factories, was vacant.<\/p>\n KBIA and The Beacon were unable to get in contact with Daryl Duncan, but some of his thoughts were included in a transcribed interview with federal investigators.<\/p>\n In that conversation, interviewers questioned whether Williams and Duncan conspired to dump the material in Berger to save Williams from the cost of properly disposing of it, but Duncan insisted he was \u201ctrying to develop that (site) into an industrial park.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe used to have GenCorps in the building; (it) had 300-400 employees. Was great. They moved out, and we are trying to develop that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n As part of that new enterprise, Duncan and his then-wife, Penny, founded a new company, Missouri Green Materials, of which Penny was listed as the registered agent<\/a>. She declined repeated requests for an interview.<\/p>\n From the end of October through December 2013, trucks arrived at the warehouse almost daily, carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of hazardous powder each trip.<\/p>\n The government would later accuse Duncan of knowing it was hazardous. Prosecutors said Williams had it tested in October, and the results revealed more than seven times the legally safe limit<\/a> of cadmium, a heavy metal and known human carcinogen.<\/p>\n Sacks from Yazoo City and barrels from other U.S. Tech facilities were loaded onto the warehouse floor. When space ran out, they were stacked on top of each other.<\/p>\n According to court documents<\/a>, Williams tried to inform MDEQ in mid-November that U.S. Tech had been shipping the powder to the Berger facility, but the department never responded. When Williams followed up two weeks later, officials told him to contact Missouri regulators.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018I don\u2019t know why. We don\u2019t have a requirement to do that. But if it makes you happy, we will,\u2019\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n When Williams called the next day, Missouri officials said Mississippi had informed them that U.S. Tech was illegally hauling hazardous waste into their state.<\/p>\n Both states ordered Williams to stop moving the material as Missouri launched its investigation. Ultimately, regulators at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources deferred to Mississippi\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n \u201cIf MDEQ has evidence that this material is\/was hazardous waste, then we would consider the material to be hazardous waste, contrary to Mr. Duncan\u2019s claim,\u201d Anthony Pierce, then an environmental specialist at Missouri DNR\u2019s Hazardous Waste Program, wrote to Steve Bailey, an MDEQ employee who oversaw the Hydromex site, in December 2013.<\/p>\n In his conversations with Mississippi and Missouri officials, Williams argued that the material was not hazardous waste because it had been granted a recycling exemption under the agreed order.<\/p>\n When Williams volunteered to clean up the Yazoo City site and recycle what was there, Mississippi regulators decided to exempt him from permit requirements. But according to Bailey, the exemption never changed the status of the material itself, which had been speculatively accumulated by Hydromex.<\/p>\n \u201cSince we have deemed it hazardous material, any time it is transported to another facility, it has to be properly manifested as a hazardous waste,\u201d Bailey later testified. \u201cWe exempted it (for) them on (the Yazoo City) site.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams also argued that the 2011 amendment to the agreed order allowed him to send the material to a \u201cmanufacturing facility designated by U.S. Technology.\u201d<\/p>\n However, when Mississippi approved using the material for the road base, it amended the agreed order. It removed a section allowing U.S. Tech to use the material to make blocks and replaced it with a section allowing it to use the powder for the new highway.<\/p>\n That meant that under the new version of the agreed order, the highway project was the only legal way for Williams to recycle the material.<\/p>\n Because the highway project was made impossible by Mississippi\u2019s state budget decisions, Williams argued U.S. Tech could revert to the previous amendment.<\/p>\n \u201c. . . because the road base opportunity went away beyond our control, we reverted to the prior agreed order and shipped it up here to Missouri Green Materials,\u201d Williams told federal investigators. \u201cThey were going to buy the equipment off of us and manufacture concrete products with the material.\u201d<\/p>\n But even if MDEQ had agreed to revert to the previous version of the agreed order, that version said that how much could be sent to a facility \u201cshall be controlled by the production capacity of the facility.\u201d Missouri Green Materials\u2019 capacity was unknown, as it had never recycled this material before and didn\u2019t yet have equipment installed.<\/p>\n When Mills, Williams\u2019 lawyer, pressed Harrell in court about what U.S. Tech was supposed to do after the highway project fell through, Harrell replied, \u201cI believe we always left the alternative that he could ship it to a proper hazardous waste permitted facility.\u201d<\/p>\n Which would be costly. Williams estimated the cost to dispose of 13 million pounds of spent blast media would be around $6 million.<\/p>\n By moving the material without permission, U.S. Tech violated the agreed order, the only thing allowing it to transport the material without permits, Harrell said.<\/p>\n Under federal law, the material had been speculatively accumulated and was therefore hazardous waste. Mississippi\u2019s exemption applied only within its own borders, meaning that in Missouri or elsewhere, the material would be treated as hazardous waste, according to an environmental lawyer and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act expert who spoke with KBIA and The Beacon on background.<\/p>\n It would be several years before federal prosecutors accused Williams and the Duncans of illegally transporting hazardous waste and dumping it in Berger to save Williams from the cost of disposing of it properly.<\/p>\n In the meantime, the trucks had stopped coming. By the time the last truck left the facility, 9 million pounds of powder from Yazoo City and another 4 million pounds from U.S. Tech\u2019s facilities in Arkansas, Georgia, Ohio and Utah filled the Berger warehouse to the brim.<\/p>\n Despite federal and state authorities knowing about the site, the material would continue to sit on the outskirts of the tiny town flanked by the Missouri River for five years.<\/p>\n This article<\/a> first appeared on Beacon: Missouri<\/a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>. Photos provided by Raymond Williams show scenes from the hazardous waste cleanups in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and Berger, Missouri (Cal Tobias\/Columbia Missourian). Trucks filled with 66 tons of hazardous material left Yazoo City, Mississippi, on Oct. 30, 2013. Full of sacks containing plastic dust contaminated with lead, cadmium and chromium, the trucks made their way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/thebeaconnews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/20251212_dumpedinberger_CT_021-1024x683.jpg\")
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\u2018Doing the right thing\u2019<\/h4>\n<\/h2>\n
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A different route<\/h4>\n<\/h2>\n
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To be recyclable or not recyclable<\/h4>\n<\/h2>\n
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