This saves time, but more importantly poses much less risk to the Ecology staff that must handle these dangerous cylinders. Pierce County was the first to try this approach. The officers assess the site and determine if they can safely collect the chemicals and paraphernalia used to make the meth. They take the waste to a secured storage area. Ecology has funded a number of secure hazardous chemical lockers for local law enforcement to use for this purpose.
Ecology then comes to pick up the waste in batches for safe disposal.
This saves Ecology s response capacity for the larger, more complex sites. We believe this saves time for the officers responding to the site because they will not have to wait on-scene for Ecology to show up to clean up the site. These police teams are often working multiple labs per day and the wait for Ecology to come clean up the site can be problematic. Information such as location, type and volume of waste, reporting agency, are tracked in this database. Although not originally designed for managing this type or amount of information, the system has proven to be the best capture of statewide meth lab and dumpsite data available.