Improperly incinerated special medical waste from Curtis Bay Energy in Baltimore, pictured in a landfill on Feb. 24, 2020. One wintry morning an investigator with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office teamed up with a federal agent to surveil America’s largest medical-waste incinerator. They watched from nearby as employees at the south Baltimore facility used a front-end loader to lift inadequately burned waste into a container, then they tailed it on its way to a landfill in Virginia.
That surveillance in early 2020 was part of an investigation that spanned several years and led to what Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown said Tuesday is among his office’s largest penalties ever in an environmental case. The company was sold in 2021, before the plea agreement, and Brown said the new ownership has taken responsible measures to stop the illegal behavior. “They’ve invested in infrastructure, they created a new regulatory oversight position, and they brought in qualified people to do the work,” he said.
The investigators also looked into inadequately burned medical refuse, leading to the surveillance that wintry morning the next month. The incinerator is designed to burn the waste until it is reduced to a fine, black ash before it is taken to a landfill.