Owners of a Salt Lake City rubber plant have paid a fine after discharging too much oil into Mill Creek.
Weir Minerals Rubber Engineering, a molded rubber manufacturer, agreed to pay the Utah Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) $7,000 to settle a notice of violation issued in May 2014.
According to the citation, the plant failed to comply with the monitoring requirements of its permit and did not submit eight mandatory reports to the DEQ between June 2012 and February 2014.
The initial notice ordered Weir to supply the missing reports, but when the plant complied in October 2014, Division of Water Quality engineers discovered that Weir had exceeded the plant’s permit limits for the discharge of oil, grease and suspended solids on six separate occasions between January 2013 and January 2014.
As part of its manufacturing process, the Weir Minerals plant heats rubber parts inside a pressurized autoclave to cure the rubber. During the process, some of the steam from the autoclave condenses and runs off as discharge. Additional water is used to cool the rubber before the autoclave is opened.
The plant is permitted to discharge the waste water — about 8,000 gallons per day — into a storm drain system that collects water from the plant site and ultimately runs off into Mill Creek, said Matthew Garn, an engineer for the Utah Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.
Weir’s plant is an older facility, Garn said, and, like a few other old plants in Utah, has a special permit to allow storm water discharge into the creek, rather than into a sewer system. The amount of discharge from the Weir plant is quite small, he added.
Among the samples sent to the DEQ, the highest amounts of pollutants discharged during those episodes of noncompliance amounted to 1,120 milligrams of suspended solids for each liter of storm water, according to a sample from December 2013, and 51 milligrams of oil and grease per liter of storm water, according to a February 2013 sample.
Weir Mineral Rubber Engineering is permitted to discharge 25 milligrams of suspended solids per liter of storm water and 10 milligrams of oil and grease per liter of storm water, according to settlement documents.
The company ultimately paid $7,000 to settle the matter — $1,000 for each episode, plus an additional $1,000 for an October 2013 sample which was lost in a lab mix-up. – The Salt-Lake Tribune