GREENWOOD TOWNSHIP--Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen A. McGinty has announced that the commonwealth is one step closer to completing remediation work on a site in Columbia County where nearly 8 million tires were discarded in the 1980s.
McGinty said the department expects the roughly 300,000 tires that remain at the Starr tire pile will be removed by next summer, which will lead to a better quality of life for area residents. The DEP is encouraging companies to find alternative uses for the tires, rather than dumping them in a landfill.
In 1987, the commonwealth issued an administrative order requiring the property owners, Max and Martha Starr, to stop accepting tires and provide an estimate of the number of tires at the site. After subsequent orders and appeals by the owners, the Starrs and DEP finalized terms of a legal agreement in March 2004 to clean up all the tires that accumulated on the property during the mid-1980s.
Based on records obtained from the Starrs, DEP identified about 40 tire generators that contributed waste tires to the pile. Ten entered into consent orders with DEP and removed about 133,000 tires from the site.
In February 2005, DEP filed a "complaint in equity" in Columbia County Court against the remaining 21 generators that were still in existence. Of those 21 generators, 12 have settled with DEP and have removed 70,217 tires from the site.
This year, two companies, Entech Inc. and Environmental Quality Management, spent the spring and summer shredding millions of tires, which largely completed cleanup in areas A and B. Combined, the two firms removed more than 19,000 tons of tires.
The approximately 300,000 tires remaining are in the remote Area C of the property, along with a couple hundred very large tires elsewhere.
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection
www.depweb.state.pa.us
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