Fires Lead Council To Approve New Recycling Plant Rules

Numerous fires at El Paso recycling plants over the past four years, including one back in September, led city council Tuesday to approve a new set of rules for the dozens of plants in our area.

The fires have been hard for El Pasoans to miss. The plumes of toxic smoke can be seem for miles around every time one ignites and that’s always met with a lot of concern for residents and our firefighters.

But Tuesday, despite the pleading by the owner of one recycling plant, City Council did something about it.

“Since 2007, we’ve had nine fires with several hundred thousand dollars worth of damage and impacts to the neighbors of these recycling plants,” El Paso Fire Chief Otto Drozd said. “What this ordinance does is it tries to marry the needs of both the industry along with the community so that they can live in harmony with each other.”

City Council unanimously approved these new recycling plant rules:

-Loose storage units cannot exceed 8 feet in height -Containerized storage units cannot exceed 12 feet in height -All storage units must be separated by 20 feet -Storage units must be kept at least 20 feet from the fence

“Perhaps now we cannot have as many fires as we have in these facilities,” City Representative Emma Acosta said.

Another big complaint about recycling facilities is something called “fluff,” the matter that floats out of these plants.

“I think that anybody in this area, that’s going to concern them,” said Andres Velasquez, who works next door to Newell Recycling at USD, Inc. “I think safety for everybody, that’s key. I don’t care who you are or where you live, I think we’re all for that same common goal — be safe where you work.”

Still, Newell Recycling officials, who have had two fires in the past two years, tried to get City Council to reconsider.

“The actual extent of these fires was rather contained contrary to news reports,” said Newell Recycling’s Joel Newell.

City Representative Steve Ortega replied: “I don’t want to have to put pictures from the fire up on the screen. There’s also a YouTube video of the fire and I think most reasonable people would categorize the situation as horrendous and unacceptable.”

If recycling plants break the new rules, twice in a year, their permit will be revoked. Also, if a permit violation is discovered during or after a fire at a plant, the permit can be immediately revoked. The plants are also now required to carry at least $1 million in liability insurance.