The EPA announced Tuesday that Sims Metal Management's facility in Redwood City had violated federal clean water laws by releasing automobile shredded residue into a creek that flows directly into the bay.
The agency made the announcement after issuing an enforcement order that lists six ways the company violated the Clean Water Act, including discharging the contaminants into waters where ships typically pick up shredded cars and other recycled metals to haul across the ocean.
"All of the things we found are toxic, and they should not be going into the bay," said Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA's Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest. "Once we find something illegal of this nature, we need to make sure the facility takes immediate steps to eliminate those discharges into the San Francisco Bay."
A spokesman for Sims Metal Management, which claims to be the world's largest metal and electronics recycler, said the company was cooperating fully with authorities.
The EPA has given the metal shredder until Monday to submit a plan outlining how they will change their operations to prevent further discharges, and Blumenfeld said the company could face penalties in the future.
EPA investigators first started probing the facility last March, when they determined pollutants scattered on the ground were being swept into Redwood creek, and into the bay.
In August 2011, EPA investigators took samples of debris and soils in the areas where the facility loads up ships with shredded material, and tests revealed high levels of PCBs, mercury and lead.
The most recent pollution may have come from
shredded auto debris falling off a huge conveyor belt that loads such material onto ships, the EPA's Blumenfeld said.
"We're not sure how it got there," he said. "But we know it did get there. In order to comply with the law, they are going to have to make some significant changes to their operations."
Another federal agency also is warning Sims about the pollution. On Dec. 15, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sent Sims a letter stating that fibrous residue from the auto shredding that "may contain plastics, rubber foam, residual metal pieces," and other waste is regularly blowing, or being washed, 800 feet across the water from the Sims site and is contaminating Bair Island. Bair is part of the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge.
The pollution has contaminated a 140-acre property that was being transferred to the wildlife refuge from the nearby Pacific Shores development, slowing the land transaction, said Mendel Stewart, manager of the refuge complex. In an interview, Stewart said employees of Cargill Salt, which owns an adjacent property, complained to his agency that large amounts of fluffy gray material are blowing from the site onto Cargill's property. The same material is blowing in the water, Stewart said, and onto the wildlife refuge that contains endangered species. He said no dead fish or birds had been observed in the area, but because of the toxic metals involved, he wants the pollution stopped.
The Port of Redwood City, a deepwater channel visited by cargo ships and barges, dates back to the 1850s, when lumber companies shipped redwood logs dragged by teams of oxen from the Peninsula hills and Santa Cruz Mountains out on schooners to San Francisco. In 1936, voters approved a bond to construct modern wharves, docks, deep channels and railway lines. Today, in addition to Sims, the port is home to a number of other bulk commodity companies, including Cemex, a cement producer, Pabco Gypsum, and Hanson Aggregates, formerly Kaiser Cement.
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