A great deal of animosity was evident Thursday, November 21, from the Shepherd community at a public meeting regarding the idea of Pacific Steel & Recycling (PSR) building a repository to store scrap metal waste near the corner of U.S. Highway 87 North and Shepherd Acton Road.
PSR is planning to develop a roughly $2.5 million repository to support its Lockwood plant where cars, trucks and white goods are shredded and processed as scrap metal. The leftover material, called Auto Shredder Residue (ASR), is thought to contain minerals, rubber and plastics that will be valuable in the future, which is why the company wants to build a repository to store ASR for future use.
In October, Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) posted PSR’s application to build the repository, which DEQ considers a “landfill” for permitting purposes, for public comment. A group formed called “Stop the Shepherd Landfill” to resist the project based on their view that ASR waste contains “hazardous, cancer-causing particles.”
The group includes Kit Charter Nelson, whose family farms in the area; Anellise Deters, who lives two miles from the proposed site on Shepherd Road; and Tricia Mae, who has had experience as a project manager for a wood waste landfill, and lives on Yeoman Road over three miles from the site.
At last Thursday’s meeting, held at the Shepherd High School gym, DEQ Solid Waste Supervisor, Fred Collins, gave a brief overview of the permitting process. Any entity wishing to build a landfill must first fill out a 272-page license application which often includes hundreds more pages of attachments and indexes. They must also draft an Environmental Assessment (EA).
Next, DEQ publishes the draft EA and application for public comment. “We review any substantive comments,” said Collins. “So, any comments that are dealing with the topics of interest as far as the groundwater concerns, wildlife, things like that.” He said staff does not review “non-substantive” comments like, “We don’t want it,” because “it doesn’t read more
