Environmental profile: Soil Processing Inc.

• Author: Maschmeyer, Gloria
• Position: Company Profile

One local company finds educating residents is part of its environmental-remediation job.

When three truck loads of heavy equipment arrive in a small Alaska community, residents warily raise an eyebrow. When they discover the equipment is going to be used to clean petroleum-contaminated soil, they wonder where pollutants will go. When they see smoke billowing from the stack at the site, they become alarmed and sometimes enraged.

This a scenario that George Cline, president of Soil Processing Inc. (SPI), tries to avoid. His Anchorage-based company, one of several in Alaska, specializes in cleaning petroleum-contaminated soils through thermal remediation.

When Cline brings his unit into an area to work, he also works with the local community to help them understand the process. On one job, villagers became concerned when they noticed the company working through the night. Residents thought SPI was releasing harmful gases into the air under the cover of darkness.

Chuck Bailey, SPI's superintendent, invited members of the community to the site to observe the process. While they were there, the company performed a little experiment.

"We had a villager blow cigarette smoke into the intake tube of the monitor that we use to monitor air quality from the stack. The printed readout showed the cigarette smoke was three times higher in carbon monoxide than that allowed by the ADEC |Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation~," Cline says.

That is three times higher than what ADEC allows SPI to release through thermal remediation. The state requires that carbon monoxide gases be under 100 parts per million (ppm) during any given hour. SPI runs from 25 ppm down to 3 ppm, Cline says. The cigarette smoke registered 400 ppm.

"The criteria that we have to meet to operate in the state of Alaska is very, very stringent," Cline says. "More stringent than people driving around in cars where you see blue smoke rolling out."

In the past three years ADEC has made a major push on cleanup in Alaska. ADEC has found that many old underground storage tanks are leaching petroleum products into the soil, and the agency has made it a top priority to clean up the contaminated sites.

Contaminants originate from a variety of sources: broken fuel lines, leaking underground storage tanks, waste at construction sites and residue from gas stations. Businesses as well as individual property owners are responsible for cleanup.

"It's a cradle-to-grave law. If you dump a fuel...