Work to "clean" Reynolds site beginning

Plan is to isolate, contain decades of waste at Longview aluminum plant

The final, major cleanup of the old Reynolds Metals Co. site, contaminated by six decades of  aluminum production, has begun — 22 years after the plant shuttered.

Cleanup contractor Envirocon Inc. is mobilizing equipment and workers to the site this week, Garin Schrieve, project manager for the state Department of Ecology, said Wednesday.

The vast majority of the contaminants will remain on the site but be consolidated and isolated by mini, engineered landfills. 

It’s a strategy that has had local critics. However,  the State Department of Ecology is confident it will work and will cost a fraction as much as removing contaminants from the site.

Addressing the pollution will make the 536-acre site along Longview’s Columbia River waterfront more marketable to potential redevelopers, said Ted Sprague, president of the Cowlitz Economic Development Council.

The site “is one of the most valuable pieces of industrial property in the western United States. … There is no other large deep-water access, large-acreage sites in the western United States that is as ready to go (with utilities and other infrastructure) as that site,” Sprague said.

Work is expected to take two summers to confine the fluoride, cyanide and petroleum residues contaminating soils and groundwater on about 45 acres. Work is scheduled to wrap up in the fall of 2024.

Northwest Alloys, a subsidiary of Alcoa, estimated last year that the project would cost the company $28 million. 

Alcoa did not immediately return calls for comment Wednesday.

Alcoa bought out Reynolds for $4.5 billion in 2000 and sold the Longview plant (but not the land) to controversial Chicago investor Michael Lynch. Lynch shut it down in 2001 after getting millions of dollars in federal payments during the Enron-related  energy crisis (Aluminum production consumes massive amounts of electricity.)

Ecology  officials chose the plan in 2015, and Northwest Alloys formally agreed to it in 2018. Under it, most of the contaminated soils and materials will be kept on site but dug up and consolidated into smaller areas. They will be mixed with special pollution-absorbing soils, then capped with a water barrier and soil and planted with grass. 

These areas will look like three small hills — less than 30 feet high — that will essentially be landfills designed to prevent the pollutants from spreading,  Schrieve said. 

Consolidating the material will reduce the footprint of contamination at the site by roughly half and concentrate it two locations: on the east side of the property adjacent to Weyerhaeuser Co.  and along the Columbia River about 2,000 feet westward of the Reynolds dock.

Contamination in areas shown in purple and yellow will be concentrated into just the yellow areas under a cleanup plan starting at the site of the former Reynolds Metals Co, plant in Longview. This map was produced for the Washington Department of Ecology.

These areas will be barred from development permanently, but the vast majority of the old site will remain open to redevelopment, including most of the waterfront.

The plan also calls for removal of a small amount of petroleum-fouled soils and construction of a barrier trench to intercept contaminants before they reach a drainage ditch on the northwest corner of the property.

During public hearings held on developing a cleanup plan, conservationists and other members of the public advocated that the contaminated material be completely removed. 

Ecology’s studies, however, showed that doing so would cost $344 million — more than 12 times the cost of the adopted plan — but result in little additional benefit. State law allows cost to be a consideration.

During the plant’s 60 years of operation, Reynolds disposed of waste potliner on the plant site. That is largely the source of  the soil and groundwater contamination, Schrieve said.  (Potliner is the material that lined steel pots that smelted the aluminum. It must be scraped out and discarded after several years.) 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1988 listed spent potliner as a hazardous waste. It leaches fluoride and cyanide into water, is corrosive and can produce flammable and explosive gases when it reacts with water.

However, the waste potliner at the Reynolds site was reprocessed to extract cryolite — a material used in the smelting process — before final disposal. It contains lower levels of fluoride and cyanide than the wastes from other aluminum smelters, Schrieve said.

(Fluoride is a naturally occurring element used in toothpaste, drinking water and mouthwashes to prevent tooth decay. It can lead to bone and joint weakness in high doses. Cyanide is a naturally occurring chemical compound released from foods and plants and is used to make paper, textiles and plastics. In large doses it starves cells of oxygen and can be fatal.)

The on-site disposal of spent potliner was “standard practice at the time” before the advent of environmental laws in the late 1960s and 1970s,  he said.

“Now we know better that those practices can have a negative effect on the environment.”

Final clearance for the cleanup project came in February, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a Clean Water Act permit for the project.

Recent demolition of the long buildings that house the immense potlines — where aluminum production took place in steel pots under high heat — is unrelated to the cleanup.

The plant came on line in 1941 — just in time to help make aluminum for America’s WW II war effort. At its peak it employed about 900 workers. 

Implementing the cleanup plan was delayed somewhat by the pandemic and the complexity of the effort, according to Schrieve and Alcoa.

Millennium Bulk Terminals, which leased the property from Alcoa, tried unsuccessfully to build a coal export dock there and pleged to clean up the site if it got a permit. Alcoa, however, ultimately is responsible for cleanup through its purchase of Reynolds.

Cleanup of contaminated river sediments of the site took place several years ago.