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When Mississippi attorney Tim Holleman was approached by furious community officials in Gulfport to stop BP and its contractor from dumping tar balls and oil-stained byproducts into a local landfill, he sent out an e-mail asking if there were alternatives to deal with the waste.

At least five companies replied, offering possible ways to reuse or recycle the oily waste -- an option that BP has yet to implement in its cleanup efforts of what scientists now say is the largest accidental release of oil into water in history.

Instead, tar balls, oily sand and vegetation, and soiled gloves and suits from the thousands of temporary BP workers who've been working to clean up beaches along the Gulf of Mexico are being dumped in landfills along the Gulf Coast.

BP has collected close to 40,000 tons of "oily solid" waste from the cleanup activities.

All the dumping has sparked enough consternation among the community in Harrison County, Mississippi, where the Pecan Grove Landfill is based, that the board of supervisors there even passed a resolution this summer not to accept BP waste. Residents there worried that the estimated 1,200 tons of oil-tainted byproducts dumped at the landfill would contaminate its soil and water.

"We're left to deal with it 15, 20 years later if and when this landfill has a problem. BP is long gone, and we're stuck with the problem. Nobody is going to say I'm sorry," Holleman said. But if the solid waste is not dumped, where can it go?

Waste Oil Collectors Inc. of Gautier, Mississippi, was among those who wrote back to Holleman, describing a process in which the oil waste can be shredded into uniform bits and then heated to 2,500 degrees in a kiln. That recovers energy from the waste and breaks it down into mineral components, some of which can be used in asphalt.

Another local engineering firm proposed the use of a sand agitator, which "cooks" and separates sand from the tar balls collected on beaches. The two products are then further processed, turning the emulsion into a recycled sand product that can be returned to the beach, while the oil product can be accumulated, sold and reused.

Bobby Knesal, owner of the firm, is partnering with several other companies and hopes to bring the agitator to the Gulf Coast.

"This is a technology that's not new to the oil industry," he said. "It's what they do every day, but they've never done it on a volume of a sand beach."

Knesal said he is waiting for state environmental officials to tell him to what extent he must treat the processed sand before it can be returned to the beaches.

Others say their products have been tried and tested and are good to go. Russell Markesberry, president of Hydra-tone Chemicals, also got in touch with Holleman and proposed the use of a coconut oil-based detergent that can be sprayed to clean booms or oil washed ashore on beaches and marshes.

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