EPA Reaches Agreement with Scrap Yard

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has reached an agreement with the owners of a scrap yard in Pelham, N.H. to recover part of the cost of a hazardous waste cleanup on the property.

Under the consent decree entered in U.S. District Court in Concord, Frederick and Elizabeth Gendron, the owners of the yard, will arrange to pay EPA $650,000 for the cleanup. The Gendrons claimed they were not able to pay all of EPA's costs at the site.

EPA spent about $2.6 million on the cleanup effort, which began in April 1998 and was completed in December 2000.

"This agreement finally brings to a close EPA's work at the junkyard site and underscores the agency's commitment to making sure that those responsible for pollution pay for at least part of the cost of cleanup," said Ira Leighton, acting deputy regional administrator of EPA's New England office.

The scrap yard, originally an auto repair yard, turned to scrap metal recycling, including shredding automobiles. The auto shredding at the site began in the mid 1970s.

In 1997, at the request of the state, the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services and EPA began investigating environmental contamination at the property. The agency found about 10,000 cubic yard of auto shredder residue at the facility. The ASR pile was contaminated with cadmium, lead, and polychlorinated biphenyls. These contaminants had leached from the pile and polluted the surrounding soil. Test found that the ASR pile was contaminated with PCBs over 200 parts per million, and lead over 5,000 ppm.

EPA's cleanup of the site included three steps:

Excavating and treating the 6,000-ton ASR pile and shipping it to an approved landfill for proper disposal.

Extensive sampling effort to determine where the ASR-contaminated soil was.