PROVIDENCE – N.E. Environmental Services Inc. has paid $30,000 into the state’s environmental response fund, and agreed to pay an additional $77,250 to the R.I. Department of Environmental Management by June 15, 2008, to settle felony water-pollution charges under an agreement announced today by the DEM.
The deal was approved Thursday in Providence County Superior Court by Magistrate William J. McAtee, the DEM said. Also under the agreement, NES received a five-year deferred sentence, while all charges against the company and its owners – company president, Peter J. Beauregard, and vice president, Todd L. Smith – were dropped.
If no further violations occur in the next 5 years, the company’s record will be cleared.
“This is the end of a process resulting from an unfortunate and unintentional violation of DEM regulations,” Smith said in a statement. “We have always taken pride in being environmental champions.”
Beauregard added, “In the past 11 years, NES has been a leader in the field of recycling … waste oil and antifreeze that formerly were taken to the Rhode Island landfill; we have been innovators with creating reuses of recycled oil and antifreeze.”
NES, at 20 Industrial Road, Cumberland, recycles antifreeze and waste oil filters.
The company had been it had been charged with nine felony counts relating to the illegal discharge of waste oil and glycol at its former facility at 1201 Douglas Pike, Smithfield, which NES had leased from PJS Properties LLC. The site has been cleaned up, in compliance with the DEM’s order, and its septic system and leach field have been replaced, NES said.
NES said the problems were caused when the recycling operation’s treated discharge was discharged into the Smithfield facility’s wastewater system, which company officials thought fed into a municipal treatment system.
The site has been cleaned up, in compliance with the DEM’s order, and its septic system and leach field have been replaced, NES said.
