07/24/08 — City of Meadville and Crawford County recycling officials are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On July 18, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection ordered the Erie-based World Resource Recovery Systems Inc. and its president to either comply with the conditions of its waste permit or have the permit suspended.

The company, headed by Frank M. Lasky Jr., operates a dual-purpose facility. In addition to being a waste transfer station, where household waste is consolidated and loaded into large trucks for transport to landfills, the facility also accepts and stores recyclable materials collected in accordance with contracts with several municipal governments and a number of commercial customers.

If corrective actions aren’t taken, DEP will suspend the facility’s waste permit, making it unable to accept either waste or recyclables. The company has 30 days from receipt the order to file an appeal.

If action is taken, many trash-removal customers in Crawford County could be directly affected. World Resource is the parent company of Northland Refuse, the operation that currently has contracts for picking up household waste and recyclables in the City of Meadville as well as recyclables collected at Crawford County Solid Waste Authority’s recycling centers.

Tim Stoke, founder of Northland Refuse, sold the company to World Resource in July 2004. In March 2007, he returned to active duty in response to a personnel crisis that resulted in sometimes-spotty service during the winter of 2006-07. He currently serves as vice president of operations for Northland Refuse.

Since January 2007, when Crawford County Solid Waste Authority closed its Crawford County Recycling Center, Northland has been hauling both city and county residential recyclables to the Erie County facility operated by its parent company.

It was not reported how many Crawford County customers Northland serves. Neither Lasky nor Stoke responded to requests from the Tribune for comment Wednesday.

According to DEP’s northwest regional director, Kelly Burch, World Resource and its president “failed to follow its waste processing permit, resulting in a rat infestation that threatens the public’s health” at the company’s 1631 East Ave. facility in the City of Erie.

When the facility was inspected by DEP on June 12, rats were observed moving throughout the transfer facility and the recycling site “in such numbers that the piles of source-separated recyclable materials and municipal waste appeared to be moving.”

According to Burch, “In violation of its permit, the company leaves garbage on the transfer station floor overnight rather than removing it to a landfill and then cleaning the floor. ... In addition, there are large holes in the roof of the building, walls are missing, the floor is cracked, and floor drains do not function properly — leaving pools of water in the work area.”



Clean up the act ... or else

On June 16, DEP gave the company a list of corrections to be made either immediately or by July 1. During the most recent of several follow-up visits, inspectors “found some improvement, but not of a magnitude that addressed the major issues.”

According to DEP, this isn’t a new problem. In fact, since December 1991, when World Resource began operation in the facility, the department has issued a long list of documents including 12 notices of violation and two field compliance orders.

Today, DEP officials are meeting with officials from Meadville, Crawford County, Erie County, Erie and Millcreek Township to discuss the situation.

“World Resource provides recycling services to several communities in Erie and Crawford counties,” DEP spokesman Geoff Bristow said Wednesday afternoon. “If for some reason they can’t comply with the order or otherwise they shut down and are no longer taking care of recyclables, we want to make sure communities are prepared. We don’t want to see materials piling up in containers.”

Not just a local problem

Crawford and Erie counties apparently aren’t alone. In May, the Holmes County Board of Health in Millersburg, Ohio, ordered the gates at the Holmes County Landfill locked to haulers until access roads were cleared and water seepage had been contained. The county-owned landfill is operated by World Resource.

According to Holmes County’s health commissioner, Dr. D.J. McFadden, access roads had become so blocked with trash that haulers, unable to reach the facility’s receiving area, had started going as far as they could and then dumping the waste.

Although steps have been taken to resolve the issues, and the gates have re-opened, McFadden expressed reservations during a Wednesday interview.

“We’re seeing a pattern that is similar to last year in that when we applied pressure that things were done,” he said. “We are seeing that action is being taken. The situation is being remedied. My concern is that last year after the situation was remedied there was a gradual slide back into disarray and appropriate pressure needed to be applied again.”

As for the future, “It appears as though (World Resource) responds to pressure — legal, public and political,” he said. “My concern is what happens when we stop applying pressure.”



New hauler needed? Not yet, officials say

Despite serious problems being faced by trash collector-processor World Resource Recovery Systems Inc., Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection officials aren’t urging anyone to find a new hauler at this point, “We’re telling them to be aware — ‘You need to have Plan B in your back pocket,’ ” DEP spokesman Geoff Bristow explained.

“We had some concerns that if material isn’t being marketed and was sitting on the floor near where municipal waste was sitting, that the recyclables would harbor rats. Therefore, we are saying that anybody who is going to apply for performance grants for recyclables that were sent to World Resource is going to have to present documentation that the items were recycled,” he continued. “World Resource tells us that they keep those records, so it shouldn’t be any problem for the communities to get those records.”

Both Brenda Schmidt of Crawford County Solid Waste Authority and Rick Williams of the City of Meadville hope so. However, the required reports haven’t been exactly forthcoming so far.

“The city should be receiving a report of how much stuff is being recycled,” Williams said Wednesday, noting that the annual report is due in February or March. “We had to beg for it for 2006 — and we’re still waiting for 2007.” While he and Stokes have talked about the 2007 report, he added the wait continues.

The authority, whose hauling contract calls for monthly reports to be submitted within 10 days after the end of each month, also continues to wait. “The contract went into effect in April,” Schmidt said Wednesday. “We should be receiving monthly reports — but they have yet to do it.”

According to Schmidt, the authority will lose $30,000 in DEP-funded performance grants this year if there’s a problem proving that recyclables collected from the county’s bins were actually recycled.

— Mary Spicer