PENNSALT CHEMICAL SUPERFUND SITE

Over the course of my childhood I have had the ‘pleasure’ of having connections to 4 industrial locations that subsequently were put on the Super Fund list – one that I grew up near, one I assisted one of my friends investigate during the years I attended Lafayette College, majoring in Chemistry, and 2 I actually worked for.  I gather working for Super Fund sites was and is an occupational hazard of chemists.

I grew up near a small industrial site that housed a former PennSalt Chemical facility.  In the years after the site was abandoned by PennSalt, parts of it were occupied by a shooting range for a local gun club, Deal Products, which manufactured industrial scaffolding, Wyatt Automotive, and buildings used for storage by Brownie the Junkman and by an unlined landfill.

I grew up on the last street south in South Easton, Pennsylvania and we could see the industrial area that included the abandoned PennSalt plant from our house about a half mile away.  The PennSalt plant had been abandoned when PennSalt moved whatever it was that was produced there to a plant in Bristol.  My neighbor Roy Schirner, who worked there in a capacity unknown to me, moved there with his wife, and her sister, who lived with them up the street.

There were a number of buildings abandoned when PennSalt made their move, but the material they left in large heaps on their property most likely contributed to the site’s designation on the Super Fund list.  I remember it as being gray to white and not all that heavy.  One area where some had obviously removed was where the gun club has their shooting range. As children we would actually play around on these heaps of material with no apparent harm. 

In later years, Chrin’s started a local landfill there, unlined in the late 50s, and that contributed to the Super Fund designation probably more than the chemical plant.  I remember driving past that landfill on a windy day and seeing the fence rows festooned with trash that sometimes blew out of the landfill faster than they could cover it with earth. 

This is not the same identical location as the lined landfill Chrin operates on another part of the site presently.  The current landfill is operated by current landfill regulations and does not exhibit the smells or other problems of the first landfill.  They can only take so much in a day and has to be covered to the specified depth by the end of the day.  There are monitoring wells for water quality and methane gas, a byproduct of all landfills, at various locations in the immediate area. 

The size this landfill has grown to, serving a small area as it does, indicates to me that we have to come up with a better way of handling municipal waste, whether it be recycling any waste there is a use for, or finding ways to produce less household and industrial waste.  I think incineration with scrubbers on the flue gas is the way to go.  Resulting would be an inert ash that if land filled would take up far less space than what is currently placed into landfills. Of course this ash would need to be continuously tested, so chemists like me would be needed.  Many of the tests can be automated or done with instruments.