Indiana Report Details Remaining Capacity, Import Rates
At current dumping rates, Indiana's 32 landfills have a combined life expectancy of about 13 years, according to Indiana Department of Environmental Management records. But the state is not likely to run out of space, since many of the facilities have significant space remaining for expansion. IDEM officials noted that the state has seen its number of landfills decline from 130 twenty years ago to a quarter of that number today, but with potentially more capacity. Other IDEM figures noted that in 2001 Indiana imported 1,739,778 tons of solid waste. More than 1.6 million tons of that total is from Illinois, most of it coming from Chicago and transported to Newton and Fulton counties...Read More »
Sub-Surface Waste Management Wins S.C. Solvent Cleanup Contract
Sub-Surface Waste Management Inc., a subsidiary of U.S. Microbics Inc. (OTCBB:BUGS), has been awarded a project contract for cleanup of a chlorinated solvent release in South Carolina. The confidential client is a specialty metals producer for automotive and aerospace component manufacturers, and requires the use of chlorinated solvents to clean metal surfaces prior to finishing the final product. SSWM will characterize and quantify the release, and prepare a preliminary cleanup plan...Read More »
PDGEnvironmental Announces First Quarter Profit
PDGEnvironmental, Inc. (OCT BB: PDGE) has announced first quarter profits of $0.02 per share on revenues of $8.4 million. For the quarter ending April 30, 2003, the company's net after-tax profit was $227,000. In the same period last year, the firm reported a loss of $227,000, or $0.02 per share, on revenues of $10.9 million. The company has won significant contract awards in both asbestos and mold remediation, and its backlog stands at $29.0 million. Company officials noted that the drop in revenue for the first quarter over the same prior period stemmed principally from the sale of PDGEnvironmental's St. Louis operations in July 2002 and from a large asbestos abatement project in New York...Read More »
EPA Releases Draft Groundwater Report On Tainted Florida Site
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a draft report on groundwater at the Stauffer Chemical site in Tarpon Springs, Florida. The objectives of the groundwater study included determining ocean tides' effect on groundwater flow; determining a connection between the surficial aquifer and the deeper Floridian aquifer; and evaluating groundwater movement beneath the site. The EPA entered into an enforceable agreement with the Stauffer Management Company that requires the company to conduct geophysical studies, evaluate the effect of groundwater on the remedy, and conduct treatability studies before the agency makes a final remedial decision...Read More »
NYC Garbage Sits Uncollected In Buffalo
Three hundred eighty-eight containers of garbage from the New York City area have been rotting in a Buffalo, New York, railyard since December. The city has sued the shipper, Chem-Rail, and Canadian Pacific Railway (Toronto: CP.TO) to get the trash removed from a rail yard she described as an island in a business and residential district. The trash containers were overloaded, so the trucks that carried them got stuck in the mud at the rail yard. But officials with Express Intermodal, which was unloading the containers, says the problem was that the shipper, Chem-Rail, ran out of money...Read More »
Solutia Initiates Suit To Recover Cleanup Costs At Alabama Site
Solutia Inc. (NYSE: SOI) has initiated a lawsuit on its behalf and on behalf of Pharmacia, a wholly owned subsidiary of Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama seeking a fair and equitable sharing of past and future cleanup costs with 19 other companies that contributed to environmental contamination, including PCBs and hazardous metals, in and around Anniston, Alabama. Solutia estimates that nearly a third of the $54 million it has spent to date on environmental investigations and remediation has addressed materials and contamination not generated by the former PCB operations in Anniston...Read More »
Perma-Fix Begins Treatment Plan For Radioactively-Tainted Mercury Waste
Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Inc. (Nasdaq: PESI) has announced that it and a technology partner, ADA Technologies, Inc., have successfully completed development of a new treatment process and have begun to treat radioactively contaminated waste containing high levels of mercury in excess of 260 ppm at Perma-Fix's facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Perma-Fix has a backlog of approximately $3.6 million of this waste that it can now begin to treat. Since the early 1950s, mercury has been widely used throughout the Department of Energy for activities associated with the production of weapons and there now exists an estimated 50,000 cubic meters of low-level radioactive and transuranic waste co-contaminated with mercury...Read More »
New Orleans Landfill Class Action Suit Could Proceed Soon
A class-action lawsuit by residents seeking compensation for living atop an old and contaminated New Orleans landfill could go to trial next year. Last Friday, Civil District Judge Nadine Ramsey ruled that the 1993 suit should proceed. The suit was filed against the city of New Orleans, the Orleans Parish School Board and the Housing Authority of New Orleans. The three agencies said they would appeal. Residents want to be included in a 10-year health program to identify potential medical problems and to be compensated for lost property value, the cost of relocation and emotional damages. The residents include people who lived in two residential developments built atop the Agriculture Street Landfill, the city's main landfill from 1909 to 1958 and now a Superfund site...Read More »
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