Saratoga Biochar and the DEC

This is a weekly round-up of stories, scroll down to see them all!

by

Saratoga Biochar CEO Raymond Apy said the company still has a long way to go before it can break ground in the Town of Moreau Industrial Park. The first major hurdle has been jumped with the approval of the site plan by the town's planning board. Next up is New York State Department of Environmental Conservation approval of two permits. 

[Scroll down to see all our coverage on this story.]

The planning board approval came with 15 conditions. Many were an attempt by the board to hold the company accountable for the noise, traffic, odors and chemical compounds found in wastewater and air around the site.

A person's opinion of the project at meetings sometimes seemed to hinge on the person's opinion of the DEC can do its job regarding those conditions. A common question: Will the DEC support the community if a problem is found? 

At the most recent meeting, acting board Chair John Arnold, who voted to approve the project with conditions, said many times that the DEC inspectors act quickly when they get a complaint. Board member Ann Purdue, one of two to vote against the project, sounded less sure, and her bigger argument was that the DEC is slow to change the regulations governing which chemicals, and the amount of those chemicals, are allowed to come out of a smokestack or enter the wastewater stream. 

The people who have shown up in opposition to the project have talked about the environmental clean-up — the dredging — of the Hudson River to remove PCBs along the Moreau shoreline; they talk about the higher-than-state-average cancer rates in Saratoga and Warren counties.

The engineers at Biochar say their system will remove harmful chemicals from air and water in a multi-step process. Some of the steps go well beyond current regulations. Their final product, they say, will sequester carbon in the fertilizer, returning it to soil, lowering the harmful greenhouse effects of carbon in the air. Their product will absorb water, keeping it from becoming runoff, holding topsoil in place. The process is "carbon zero" when it is looked at from end-to-end, they say.

Certainly, the past month or two have not been the end of story. Here's some of our recent coverage...