A Kendallville manufacturer unknowingly used metal blended with a dangerous radioactive isotope to make parts for 1,000 La-Z-Boy recliners in the 1990s.

The discovery of that contamination – which received virtually no publicity at the time – triggered a federal and state effort to keep the chairs out of living rooms, a Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found.

The isotope – Cobalt-60 – used by No-Sag Products Co. of Kendallville, had been blended in Brazil into metal that No-Sag used in 1998 to make brackets for the chairs, according to Rex Bowser, director of the Indoor Air and Radiological Health Emergency Response Program of the Indiana State Department of Health.

The tainted material was discovered when No-Sag sent the metal leftovers from the bracket job to a scrap yard, Steel Dynamics in Butler. That company detected the contamination and refused to accept the load, Indiana health department documents show.

The June 1998 discovery set in motion a coordinated effort to identify and stop the distribution of the Reclina-Rocker chairs, which retail today for as much as $2,600.

“It barely showed up on our detection equipment,” said Barry Smith, Steel Dynamics’ radiation safety officer. “Each individual part by itself, the amount of radiation was so low you would never detect on a Geiger counter. Even the whole truckload together was low level.”

To track down the chairs with tainted brackets, Bowser worked with officials in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and authorities in Tennessee, Missouri, Michigan, Mississippi and Utah.

Scott Douglas, vice president for law of No-Sag Products’ parent company, Leggett & Platt Inc., said No-Sag decided to voluntarily recall the chairs quickly, even though the company considered any health threat minimal.

“Even though it wasn’t a scientifically based solution, we just thought, ‘Let’s not go there,’ ” Douglas said. “The consumer doesn’t want radiation in their products. We recognized that.”

In the end, none of the 1,000 tainted chairs had yet left warehouses, and Monroe, Mich.-based La-Z-Boy recalled all of them, Bowser said.

SDI scanners

The La-Z-Boy situation was one of 333 cases in Indiana in which radioactive metals have turned up in scrap yards, trash dumps and manufactured goods, according to NRC reports. The cases are compiled in the national Nuclear Material Events Database, a little-known library of 18,740 radioactive cases, the vast majority since 1990.

“Every year we find stuff,” Bowser said.

Steel Dynamics’ Smith said finding radioactive metal is rare but serious. The Butler plant had radiation-scanning equipment in place before it opened in 1993.

Every truck and rail car entering the plant passes through scanners sensitive enough that a truck driver who has had a barium stress test recently will set them off. Another set of scanners is placed where the material is dumped by magnets into the buckets that will take it to the furnaces. There’s another set in the bag house that collects dust from the operation, and yet another set before the casting furnaces.

“We have zero tolerance for radiation,” Smith said.

Disposal difficulty

There is now nowhere for an Indiana metal company to dispose of the contaminated material it finds.

That is because in July 2008 a site in Barnwell, S.C., closed its doors to the low-level radioactive waste it had accepted for 37 years.

When a scrap dealer finds material and contacts Bowser, he said he tries to enlist support from the federal Energy Department and the EPA to help pay for and oversee cleanup, which can cost thousands of dollars.

If federal authorities can’t help, Bowser has a list of “radiation brokers” who will help find a burial site for a fee. But, in the wake of the shutdown of the Barnwell facility, those brokers face the same disposal difficulty.

Bowser said more Indiana scrap yards and processing outfits are voluntarily installing detectors and, as a result, catching more radioactive items that in the past would have entered the metal manufacturing stream.

Those detectors, costing $100,000 or more, can be too expensive for many dealers. “The guys that take in the neighborhood (scrap) can’t afford that,” he said.

With Steel Dynamics’ 2007 purchase of OmniSource, the company is now one of the largest metal recyclers in the country. Smith said that while mom-and-pop operations may not have scanners, everyone else does.

“Every scrap yard I’ve seen has some sort of radiation detectors, at least for inbound traffic,” Smith said. “It’s industry standard, now; … I have no problem rejecting a load because it’s suspicious. One time I rejected seven rail cars in one day.”

The rail cars contained clay, which often has naturally occurring radiation, in this case enough to set off the scanners. Smith sent them back. Because radioactive material is expensive to deal with, the company simply rejects it, leaving it to the company selling it to deal with.

Despite the spread of radioactive metal through Indiana, Bowser does not want to mandate radiation detectors. He thinks businesses are responding to the economic incentives to not be stuck with the metal. “I’d rather see self-regulation than laws,” he said.

But Leggett & Platt Vice President Douglas said the industry would benefit if the government set an allowable level of radiation in consumer products, similar to how a certain amount of lead is acceptable in drinking water.

“To the extent that the government would come out with risk-based standards, that would be helpful to industry,” Douglas said.

Dan Stockman of The Journal Gazette contributed to this story.