Letter to the Editor: Excel Recycling continues to slip through environmental checks

As of the last day of June, Excel Recycling, LLC has operated its metal shredding and recycling facility in Freetown 426 days without a local license and 164 days with no building permit. If this pisses you off then go to the next court hearing on July 10, 2 p.m., New Bedford Superior Courthouse.

Feel sorry for this business? Try swimming in your pool with auto fluff or spending your weekends sweeping lead and mercury off your deck and repairing cracks in your walls and floor tiles.

Anyone who throws a car into a shredder and sells the crumpled-up, fist-sized metal pieces overseas to be used in the manufacture of a new car is a commercial metal recycler. Excel sold itself to the town as a scrap yard, a processor at worst, and got a no rules, just-want-to-go-faster free ride. Well, the town got wise and is now making Excel pay.

Meanwhile, residents are on the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection like flies on fill-in-the-blank. For Excel’s three-year tenure as a locally licensed facility in Freetown, MassDEP allowed it to operate without requisite mercury certification for scrap recycling facilities. For two-and-a-half years MassDEP allowed it to operate without requisite hazardous waste generator status and identification number.

Last July, MassDEP signed off on a questionable, if not fraudulent, sound test report. The report was prepared by Epsilon Associates, Inc., the company hired by Excel to conduct sound testing. Testing, which was mandated in by MassDEP on Oct. 16, 2017 due to perpetual non-compliance, was conducted May 31, 2018. Epsilon coordinated the testing with Excel and MassDEP; MassDEP having approved the sound test protocol.

Excel sent Epsilon’s report findings in a letter to Dan DiSalvio, compliance and enforcement chief of the Bureau of Air and Waste at MassDEP’s southeast regional office. The report found Excel in compliance.

Compliance, however, was disputed within MassDEP, as is evidenced in departmental emails and documents obtained through a public records request.

In an internal email dated June 5, 2018 and headlined as “Confidential – Enforcement Sensitive,” compliance was not observed by Compliance and Enforcement, present on the day of testing.

According to records obtained, ambient sound data collection of anomalous noise, as opposed to regularly occurring noise, alleged by residents to have been set up so as to decrease decibel range between ambient and operational noise levels in an effort to accommodate MassDEP’s noise policy criteria, was not excluded from decibel determinations as it should have been per sound test protocol, and was indeed “significant to the recorded readings, possibly increasing [ambient] sound readings close to 10 dbA.”

10 dbA (decibels) over ambient warrants non-compliance. At all three residential test sites readings came in at between 7.5 and 9.2 dbA over ambient, just within the window of threshold. Had that window not been artificially closed by increasing ambient sound levels, the opening between ambient and operational sound levels would have been wide enough, well over 10 dbA above ambient, to find Excel in non-compliance, yet once again.

Also revealed was an exchange between DiSalvio and Marty Costa, owner of Excel Recycling. During testing of operational sound levels, as opposed to ambient, DiSalvio told Costa that crane operations seemed quieter than what he had observed in the past. Costa responded saying he had to pass the test. Caught loading quiet lightweight fluff, or shredder residue, into trucks instead of the planned loud heavy scrap to manipulate sound levels, Excel was at no loss for tricks.

Sure enough, as mandated by the MassDEP, had a state of non-compliance been determined, the facility could have been ordered by MassDEP to suspend all operations of offending equipment, including that of its auto-shredder.

Yet, on July 18, 2018, Maria Pinaud, then deputy regional director of the Bureau of Air and Waste at the regional office, signed Excel’s return-to-compliance letter. She has since been transferred out of the office. Seth Pickering, a nineteen-year veteran of MassDEP as a former air quality engineer, has taken her place.

To this day, MassDEP will not call Excel a recycler; both continue to blow smoke.

So, to honor the racket that MassDEP has helped facilitate, throw your metal in the trash. Massachusetts, from a regulatory standpoint, does not recycle metal.

Marty Costa, owner of Excel Recycling, cries that he’s the victim of an industry with a bad reputation. He’s not the victim of it. He’s the poster child for it.

Leia Adey

Freetown