Lee — As Housatonic River cleanup efforts drag on, Lee officials and residents were presented with a new approach this week, one that wouldn’t necessarily require an Upland Disposal Facility (UDF) within the town’s borders.
During Lee’s June 6 Select Board meeting, ecoSPEARS CEO Sergio Albino — a former engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — explained how his company’s method to remediate the waterway’s soil, sediment, and liquid could provide a “cost effective and sustainable” solution by treating the PCB sediment and water on site, obviating the need to transport the debris to a landfill.
The technology has been tested on various contaminants globally, he said.
Backstory
From 1932 to 1977, General Electric deposited industrial chemicals, particularly polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), into the Housatonic River, toxic waste from its Pittsfield electric transformer plant. In 1979, the EPA banned the production of PCBs, and in 2000, prompted by federal and other government agencies, GE began its process of cleaning up the river. An agreement was reached in 2020 between five Berkshire towns—including Lee’s former officials—and GE as well as the Environmental Protection Agency that required the most highly contaminated of the waste particles be shipped out of state while disposing wastes containing lower amounts of PCB at a UDF in Lee. Since the signing of that document, Lee’s Select Board has been replaced and its townspeople have gone on record numerous times noting their disagreement with the facility’s slated location.
How it works
The company name—SPEARS—is an acronym for Sorbent Polymer Extraction and Remediation System. For the Housatonic project, the group would use its patented program that inserts plastic spears, or spikes, into the river’s sediment layer. The six-inch spikes contain reagents in their interior cavities. The PCB-laden porewater will migrate through the plastic and mix with the reagent, with the contaminants absorbed into the spikes. With this process, there is no need to dredge the river, Albino said. (See photo.) “It’s like cancer treatment, you treat the tumor and not the whole body,” he said.
The spikes can be removed without destroying the environment’s flora and fauna, Albino said. Sampling tests can determine the rate at which the PCBs are absorbed and the success of the project that may take as long as a decade to complete, with its cost able to spread out over those 10 years, he said. Albino did say, however, that not all of the toxins can be completely removed. “You’re just trying to absorb as much as you can,” he said of the process.
Possible pushback
Joshua Bloom, who was appointed to the Rest of River Municipal Committee last month, said the EPA does not recognize ecoSPEARS’s technology “as being effective” and wouldn’t allow the use of it on a larger scale with this project unless the government entity approves of it and it is more cost effective than the current plan. The Committee, created in 2013, advocates for the cleanup of the Housatonic River and includes representatives from Great Barrington, Lee, Lenox, Sheffield, and Stockbridge.
Albino said the company hasn’t done a project with the EPA regionally and the agency is being “very, very risk adverse.”He explained, “Because we have not done a full-scale project with them, that should not discount us from doing a small project with them, or with the town.”
Select Board Chair Bob Jones said he and Town Administrator Christopher Brittain met with representatives of both the EPA and ecoSPEARS during the week. “This is an education presentation so people understand what ecoSPEARS is about, and we’re trying to make headway using this process; we’re trying to get it on to the table,” Jones said. “There is a signed agreement with the EPA and GE and five towns, including the town of Lee, that nobody at this table is responsible for that but we have to deal with that. But … we want to use whatever influence we can, whatever is going to be effective, to try to impact that agreement and come up with a better arrangement than a disposal facility or at least an improved facility as we go into the future.”
No current technology “will eliminate the need for the Upland Disposal Facility,” says Kelsey Dumville, Senior Community Involvement Coordinator with the EPA’s Public Affairs Office. “The upcoming innovative technology Challenge is an opportunity for ecoSPEARS and other companies to present technologies and approaches for reducing PCB toxicity and/or concentrations in excavated soil and/or sediment before, during, or after disposal in a landfill,” she stated in a June 8 email to The Berkshire Edge. “EPA will evaluate the appropriateness of any potential modifications to the cleanup plan after the challenge is completed.”
At the meeting, the Select Board also:
- Approved a Berkshire Gas permit at 120 Hartwood Road;
- Approved a right of first refusal waiver to purchase 545 Stockbridge Road. The measure was approved in return for retrieving back taxes on a portion of the tract, monies that had benefited the property owner who received a tax exemption for maintaining the property as a qualified Chapter 61 real estate ie agricultural use;
- Approved a grant of conservation restriction at The Mount related to process of selling a Lee property, a house, to The Mount to be part of its museum;
- Reappointed Andrea Wadsworth to the Berkshire Regional Transit Authority Advisory Board;
- Signed a statewide petition advocating a single use plastic bag ban that is currently in place in Lee;
- Approved a temporary sign permit application and fee waiver to the First Congregational Church for an Aug. 12 craft fair;
- Approved a tent permit fee waiver for the VFW’s annual Memorial Day celebration;
- Signed a proclamation announcing the Donna Toomey Reading Room at the library; and
- Signed a contract with Colonial Power.
