N.H. Agency Finds Operation Out of Compliance

A scrap yard in West Lebanon, N.H. has been deemed “out of compliance,” according to a letter sent by the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.

The state agency had sent a letter last week to Janci Metals to bring its operations into compliance with environmental standards. Fred Janci, president of the scrap recycling company, said that Janci had worked out an agreement with a Maine-based company, Lin-Cor Environmental earlier this year. According to Janci, Lin-Cor was charged with performing the transportation and processing of the recyclables brought to the facility. However, since early this year Lin-Cor has failed to uphold its end of the arrangement.

Janci said that his company has been talking with the New Hampshire agency for several months to force Lin-Cor to clean up the site. However now, he adds, the company is refusing to move off the site.

While the facility has been found out of the compliance, the violations are not too extreme. Some of the more apparent problems include having different types of recyclables commingled, tire piles too high, standing water, and unmanaged piles of material.

While Janci received the letter from the NH DES, Janci adds that his company has been talking with the state agency since this summer over Lin-Cor’s failure to uphold its end of the operation. “We have provided photographs from April (when the agreement between the two companies began) to prove that the site was working before.”

Janci has been at the site since the mid 1980s. Under an initial plan Janci was looking to develop a joint recycling operation that would run until 2018, the length of the lease he signed with the city.

Earlier this month a Superior Court judge ordered Lin-Cor to stop taking metals at the landfill on Nov. 4 and to be completely off the site by last week.

According to Valley (N.H.) News, an attorney for Lin-Cor has has asked the judge to extend that deadline. "We think the site's improved. We're getting close to getting all the inventory out and hope we can work out something in terms of permission to do that," said Tom Csatari, the attorney for Lin-Corp.