Cleaning up behind biotech

When local leaders sing the praises of Cambridge's vast biotechnology industry, they point to its glittering glass buildings, sophisticated lab equipment, and scientists turning out novel drugs that may someday change the course of human disease.

They don't talk much about people like Britt Gentry.

Around sunrise most days, Gentry pulls on a work shirt, climbs into a green truck, and begins clearing out the stew of hazardous waste produced by the city's hundreds of biotech companies and university labs.

Her day is a parade of flammable solvents and caustic acids, stored in amber bottles and 55-gallon drums. There are biohazards, radiation, freight elevators full of potential explosives. From time to time someone uncorks a mystery flask whose contents are simply unknown.

``I love it," said Gentry, 24. ``Some days some people ask me and I say, `Well, I'm a truck driver.' Or, `Well, I consolidate hazardous waste.' . . . But if they're really interested in what I do, I ask them if they have an hour."

Her employer, Triumvirate Environmental Inc. , is a 150-person embodiment of the specialized regional economy that has grown around the biotechnology industry. Though biotech companies are notoriously volatile businesses, they attract a stream of investor cash that fuels a wide network of related firms, from billion-dollar filter manufacturers to boutique labs that grow worms for drug testing.

One indispensable service is the handling and disposal of hazardous chemicals, or ``environmental management" in industry parlance. Three companies, two based in Massachusetts, compete to dominate the growing business of clearing out the worst materials a biotech firm can produce.

``I get paid for taking over other people's headaches," said John McQuillan , the founder of Triumvirate.

When McQuillan founded his company in the late 1980s , biotech was a fledgling industry, and the operation was essentially three guys and a van. McQuillan hand-packed bottles of old chemicals for hospital and university labs, then brokered them to disposal companies.

Today Triumvirate has an 800 number and a fleet of trucks that rolls out of a sprawling Somerville operations center before 7 a.m. every day. The company counts nearly all the region's top universities and hospital labs as clients, but the real growth is in biotech. Triumvirate's $30 million in annual revenue is growing about 15 or 20 percent a year, McQuillan says, two-thirds of it fueled by life-science companies.

McQuillan and other executives use some surprising words to describe the industry, ``fun" among them. But they also acknowledge the job's tough side.

``It's every bit as risky and dangerous as what a firefighter or Coast Guard person would do," said Bill Geary , general counsel of Clean Harbors Inc. , a competitor based in Norwell. ``It has a danger to it, and it's sort of a unique breed of professional who chooses to go into that career."

By all accounts, biotechnology generates much less waste than the big plants of old-line industries. But what it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in variety. A single lab can use explosive fluids, cyanide, and low-level radioactive isotopes. It might need to throw away hydrofluoric acid, which can penetrate skin and attack the bone.

Like Gentry, many of Triumvirate's truck drivers have chemistry degrees. They need a near-encyclopedic grasp of which chemicals can go in the same drum, and which could explode if they mix.

``It's a very steep learning curve," said Gentry, a chemistry graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

At 6:30 on a recent morning, she and 30 employees gathered around conference tables, eating muffins and drinking coffee while a specialist delivered a seminar on how to dispose of controlled substances without breaking federal drug laws. Then they headed to the garage to pick up their equipment.

Triumvirate's garage is a warehouse of things that most people avoid. Across from stacks of empty waste drums, a rack dispenses rolls of warning labels reading ``Inhalation Hazard," ``Poison," ``Toxic," ``Corrosive," ``Infectious Substance," and ``Spontaneously Combustible." Nearby is a shelf full of respirator cartridges.

Before Gentry pulls out of the lot, she runs through a mental checklist of must-haves. Purple nitrile gloves, for handling chemicals that can dissolve latex. Sacks full of vermiculite, a durable packing material that can slurp up spilled chemicals. And a black duffel bag stuffed with a protective suit, a breathing apparatus, and ``caution" tape.

``Whenever you enter a lab, you have to be fully aware of your surroundings," Gentry said. ``They use things like syringes and razor blades and lots of glass. You've got to have your sleeves down, and your safety glasses on."

When she arrives in a laboratory, Gentry makes a beeline to the fireproof cabinets and taped-off areas where companies store their hazardous materials. Once she packs up the bottles and they leave the building, carefully nestled in drums, she must drive them along prescribed paths through the city. Every time the materials change hands, someone signs paperwork.

Most hazardous materials end up at one of eight licensed incinerators in the United States, none in New England. The ash is buried in a toxic landfill, and the journey culminates in a sort of death notice known as a certificate of destruction.

``We're probably second only to the nuclear industry in terms of the concentration of regulations we have to comply with," said Geary of Clean Harbors.

According to the state, biotech is a relatively clean industry. A spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection said its last action against a biotech company was more than a year ago. The regional office of the US Environmental Protection Agency could identify only one recent complaint against a biotech company.

``Our experience has been, at least in this region, that they do manage a lot of chemicals, and we've found many that have pretty good compliance," said Andrea Simpson , an enforcement attorney for the EPA.

None of this comes cheap. Triumvirate's typical client pays about $100,000 a year to have waste hauled off. The touch-and-go finances of younger biotech firms mean that sometimes Triumvirate gets paid in stock that's hard to trade. But with its biggest and most stable clients, such as universities, the income can be very solid indeed: more than $2 million a year from each.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@globe.com.