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Background:
The Project was a toxic polluting scheme that would have been located a stone’s throw from a residential community, baseball fields, community swimming pool, and a park. It was successfully defeated on February 1, 2021, mainly due to the hard work of the residents of Endicott and NoBurnBroome.
The Proposal: SungEel, a joint South Korean and American company, proposed to operate a lithium-ion battery recycling plant at 801 Clark Street in Endicott with a battery storage facility located nearby in South Franklin Street. The facility would have run 12 hours a day, 5 days a week to process 1 ton of batteries per hour by using high-temperature incineration. The use of incineration in the recycling process was to capture the expensive metals (cobalt, nickel, and more) in the fly ash. The ash would be sent to South Korea for further processing. The Air Permit that the state issued to SungEel on March 30, 2020, noted that at least four known human carcinogens would be emitted, as well as other toxics. NoBurnBroome’s science group discovered that this project would release PFAS (the toxic forever chemicals) and that they weren’t included in the Air Permit. Upon confirming this, the state put the Air Permit on hold in May.
There was near-unanimous opposition to this toxic polluting venture. The state was prepared to invest $1.75 million in SungEel to set up in Endicott, a health-compromised town that had been victimized by industry for many decades. The last industry was IBM, which had a huge workforce in Endicott. IBM dumped enormous amounts of Trichloroethylene (TCE) into the ground and established the village as one of the largest known examples of vapor intrusion, a phenomenon in which volatile chemicals creep from far underground into the air of buildings above (mainly family homes).
These resources were previously featured as important announcements on the home page.. One can also access all the news articles to get a flavor of the campaign .