Restoring the Romic Property for a Cleaner Future

Feature Story

Restoring the Romic Property for a Cleaner Future

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Romic Cleanup: Restoring the Romic Property for a Cleaner Future
Video Transcript

Narrator: For the past 43 years at the edge of the San Francisco Bay, Romic Environmental Technologies in East Palo Alto has been storing and treating hazardous wastes, such as industrial solvents, in drums and tanker trucks. The soil and groundwater here are contaminated from years of operations dating back to the 1950’s before environmental laws were passed. The U.S. EPA and state partners are proposing a novel way to deal with the solvent contaminants: feed them to the naturally-occurring microbes that live underground.

Strange as it may seem, the remedy involves mixing dried cheese whey – the watery part of curdled milk – with food-grade molasses and water. The solution is pumped from a tank into narrow wells.

EPA’s Ron Leach: It acts as a food source for the natural microbes that are down there. These microbes are very hungry and when they see all this food they start eating it and their populations temporarily grow, grow, and grow. So they eat up all the cheese whey, molasses, and they eat up the solvent contaminants, as well, and ultimately, they break down the solvents into carbon dioxide, water, and salt.
Narrator: The EPA hopes to use this technology at similar cleanup sites in the future. This natural treatment is not only very energy-efficient and cost-effective, at Romic, this technology works better than the traditional pump and treat method.

EPA’s Ron Leach: We’ve demonstrated its effectiveness. In some cases it gets up to 99% reduction in contaminant concentrations in some wells, which is very effective. One of the beauties of this remedy is there’s no need for anybody to come into contact with the contaminated water, it’s all done underground, there’s no tanks, pipes, or treatment systems needed on the surface.

Narrator: Currently 60 injection wells exist, although many more are needed. The Romic facility has started to close down and as the property is cleaned up and redeveloped, the EPA, state, and city agencies will continue to work together with the local community to ensure the revitalization will benefit the community and the local economy.