Volume XIII, Issue 4, December 1996

A Profile of Pacific Iron and Metal

In 1989, as a result of the Lander Street Separation Project, Metro became aware that Pacific Iron and Metal’s discharge to the combined sewer occasionally contained high levels of copper, lead and zinc, among other storm-caused contaminants.

These contaminants would threaten the biological waste treatment process at the West point Treatment Plant, where much of the south end’s industrial waste stream is eventually delivered.* As a result, Metro began working with Pacific Iron & Metal to bring the discharge from its 4th Ave. S. scrap metal yard into compliance.

Pac-Iron, one of several companies owned by Seattle’s Glant family since 1917, had already been affected by a drop in scrap metal prices due to a boom in recycling. Increased regulation was not welcomed, and the stringent limits on discharges set by Metro were not easy to meet. Yet the company decided to take responsibility, not only for the high volume of industrial waste in its runoff after storms, but as an example of environmental stewardship to the entire West Coast scrap metal industry.

"In this part of the country, rain carries enough copper out of a yard like this to cause a problem," said Rick Sternoff, Pac-Iron’s executive vice-president and operations manager.

The first step to measure the extent of that problem was to obtain samples of the yard’s waste stream, which entered local sewers through a number of drains. The results of those tests were high enough to surprise Sternoff, who had worked in the industry for years. He found the company’s options limited.

"We could have moved outside of Metro’s regulatory area, but that’s not something we thought about." Sternoff said. Realizing that local regulators were there not just to assess penalties, but for advice and assistance as well, Sternoff persuaded the partners in the business to hire an environmental consultant to design a pretreatment system and produce a manual for other scrap metal yards.

"We are the only nonferrous scrap metal dealer around with a stormwater treatment system," Sternoff said. "It cost us a little more that we wish it would." he added, detailing the ins and outs of Pac-Iron’s five-year movement through the regulatory maze that still hands the company an occasional violation. But the move brought rewards, too, such as the Seattle Rotary Club’s 1994 Environmental Excellence Award.

Yet, " it’s getting tougher to comply," Sternoff said during a recent tour of the company’s scrap metal yard. Changing federal limits, for instance a drop in allowable lead in 1990, were making life harder.

Twenty-ton deliveries of scrap metal are not uncommon at the relatively small yard on the eastern edge of Seattle’s industrial area. Getting a pretreatment system designed and working has involved many hours of staff training on best management practices and much monitoring, consultant work and rerouting of drains, but "I think we made the right decision," Sternoff said.

He noted that a few accounts have come Pac-Iron’s way even though other bidders were somewhat higher, and "one of those for sure came to us because of our environmental stance."

"What I found most striking about Pacific Iron was the unique circumstance they found themselves in and how they responded to it," said Christie True, the Metro Industrial Waste investigator first assigned to Pac-Iron. "Pacific Iron considered itself a company that solved waste disposal problems by turning wastes into recyclable materials, then they realized that they also were part of the problem because their own runoff was full of contaminants that were going into the sewer. It did not fit their image. They developed a deliberate approach with necessary financial support to meet their sewer discharge permit."

The pretreatment system has not been without problems. One local sewer backup blew the top off of a settling tank, and fine-tuning the treatment of stormwater can use up valuable employee time. However, Sternoff said the system has more than met expectations.

"There was even a worry that the system has a bypass, but when the last 100-year storm occurred, we didn’t bypass," he said.

*(By the 1980’s, King County required all significant industrial dischargers to pretreat wastes to remove these metals and other contaminants because of the harm they could do to the waste treatment process, especially digesters. The West Point plant was upgraded to secondary treatment in 1995.)