GROVE CITY, Pa. - A New York company has been given one year to remove millions of pounds of lead-tainted glass and other materials from five warehouses in Northwest, Pennsylvania, including one in Grove City.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection announced earlier this month that it has denied a request by Nulife Glass NY for a variance that would have allowed the company to classify as solid waste, millions of pounds of processed or used cathode ray tubes currently being stored in those warehouses.

Cathode ray tube materials include the vacuum tubes and associated materials found in older model televisions and computer monitors.

These materials contain high lead content and exhibit toxic characteristics, according to the DEP.

According to the company website, Nulife Glass NY was building a furnace in Dunkirk, New York that would be used in part of a process to remove the lead from recycled cathode ray tube materials.

Since May 2014, Nulife transported approximately 17 million pounds of CRT materials to Pennsylvania warehouses while attempting to obtain a permit to construct and operate the furnace.

Since that time, DEP has been informed that Nulife will cease its lead smelting operations at the Dunkirk facility and surrender its Title V Air Permit.

CRT glass is being stored in five warehouses in northwest PA: two in the City of Erie, and one each in Girard, Lake City and Grove City.

The DEP says it denied the variance request because Nulife failed to adequately address the criteria for a variance under the Federal CRT Rule, including:

  • The manner of recycling the CRT materials
  • When the material would be recycled
  • The reason the stored CRT material had accumulated without being recycled.

Nulife also failed to provide adequate assurances of its financial ability to properly dispose of the accumulated CRT materials, says the DEP.

As a result of the variance denial, the DEP has issued an order requiring Nulife to remove all 17 million pounds of stored CRT materials from all five warehouses within a year.

The order requires Nulife to remove a minimum of 5 million pounds of CRT materials by June 30, 2017, and continuing to remove CRT materials within a designated time frame until all CRT materials are removed by no later than February 28, 2018.

“DEP has an obligation to prevent pollution and to protect the health and safety of its citizens,” said Jim Miller, regional director of Northwest PA DEP. “While we encourage new industries and technologies to address the recycling of older televisions and computers, those entities must do so within the rules and regulations established to protect Pennsylvanians.”

DEP denied a similar request in October 2016.

Pennsylvania’s 2010 electronics recycling law bans the disposal of CRTs and other electronic waste in landfills and established an electronics recycling program that collects CRTs and other products for recycling to be paid for by electronics manufacturers.

At a hearing in March 2016 by the Joint Legislative Air and Water Pollution Control and Conservation Committee, everyone involved in the program from local governments to recyclers said the law does not work and needs to be fixed because electronics manufacturers were not paying for all the material being collected.