Stuff You Should Know - What's a brownfield remediation project?

Episode Date: June 2, 2009

The EPA defines a brownfield as land that is abandoned because redevelopment is complicated by possible environmental contamination. Tune in as Chuck and Josh examine the process of redeveloping a brownfield in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Mississippi, Wanderers Welcome. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Guess who's with me? And I'm Chuck Bryant. That's right. And we're the Stuff You Should Know team. That's right. The fat, lumpy, finger naily, hairy, teethy Stuff You Should Know team. We're Taratoma. I know you hate that. I'm saying it for one listener out there who's racking up right now. Right. That's who that's for. Who is you when you listen to your own podcast next week? No, you. You. Yes. Okay, can we get on with it? Let's do this, Chuck. Hey, Josh, what's a brownfield? That's so funny.

You should ask, Chuck. I know what a brownfield is, and it's even the name of this podcast. So I will tell you as follows. Yes. Basically, a brownfield is any abandoned industrial site, a old dry cleaners, an old gas station, any place where there's a potential for a local environmental contamination. Right. But not necessarily proven to have contamination. Right. It can just be, it can just be something that looks like it or someone might suspect. If there was a bunch of chemicals there at one point in time or over the years consistently, somebody could reasonably say, I'll bet that place is contaminated. Right. Which is not to be confused with the Superfund. Really? You bust the Superfund out this early? Let me redact that

statement. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, Superfund absolutely is contaminated. It is with serious, hazardous waste. Right. And actually, I was looking around on the EPA's website because, you know, that's what I do. Sure. And there's several Superfund sites slated for cleanup in Georgia, but I came across one that I knew you'd be particularly interested in. Oh, hit me. Your house. I'm kidding. Oh, wow. There's, you know, Robbins Air Force Base in Houston County. I think it's a little north of here. Yeah. Is Houston County north of here? I don't know. Okay. Well, anyway, Robbins Air Force Base is up there. And they have an old sludge pond. Okay. And in the 60s and 70s, they said, you know what? We've got these old cans of paint. Throw them in the sludge pond.

We have like all this trash thrown in the sludge pond. So they kept throwing stuff in the sludge pond. Right. Old tires, refrigerators. Right. And then finally, once the 70s rolled around, and there was such a thing as the EPA and Earth Day and all that, the Air Force plant whoops, and covered it up with five feet of loam. What's that? It's like sandy silt. Okay. Like real thick sand. So they made a beach. They just covered it over, right? Which actually, again, like, yeah, that was a stupid thing to do. Right. And now it's a super fun site. Now you can clean up all the loam in addition to everything else. Here's where it gets interesting, why I think you'd be interested in it. Okay. In just a little sense, just kind of crammed in there. They were like,

yeah, there's like old chemical waste. There's old material waste. And also there's unexploded ordinance and Agent Orange. Really? There's Agent Orange in a sludge pond on Robin's Air Force base. So this stuff was left over from Vietnam and they just dumped it there probably. Yeah. Interesting. Yep. So yeah. So a super fun site is a place where there's Agent Orange under five feet of loam. Right. And it's seeping into the groundwater, all that. Yeah. But like you said, these have been clearly identified. The government knows about them. They're doing their best to clean it up. Actually, I don't know if that last part's true, but they know about them. Right. And at the very least, they've gone to the trouble of identifying them, right? Sure. But a brown

field is different. Like you said, it's potentially contaminated. It could be contaminated. It's still a brown field, but it's not so contaminated or the materials that are, that have contaminated are so dangerous. Right. That you can't use the site again. Well, no. In fact, quite the opposite. They're trying to encourage the use of the site. Right. And actually Chuck, what makes brown fields so interesting to me is they're not just like an environmental hazard. They're an economic hazard as well. Right. Because usually like, let's say, you know, we've talked about urban exploration before, right? Sure. There's all these old like abandoned industrial sites or something like that. And they're just sitting there. They're being left to rot. They're derelict

because no one wants to do anything with them. And the reason why is because there's so much potential liability. Like let's say you or I got a wild hair and we wanted to invest in a new mixed use development. Sounds good. So we buy some old industrial site kind of on the edge of town. Heck in the middle of town, right? Atlantic Steel here in Atlanta. Yeah. Atlantic Station was a brown field redevelopment remediation site. Absolutely. So we buy this thing. Everything's hunky dory and we're starting to get some business. We've got some tenants in our buildings. There's people walking their dogs. I see some guy flying a kite. There's a cute little girl with bows in her hair. She looks like she's going to the Gap for the first time ever and pretty excited about

it, right? It wouldn't be. Right. So and then bam, out of nowhere, somebody finds out that the groundwater under our site is contaminated. Right. Old petroleum. Investors pull out. Buddy, you better hope we have investors soon. At this point, yeah, sure. Yeah. If it's all our money sunk into it, not only are we getting sued, we're going to lose all of our tenants, we're in big trouble, right? Yeah. Which is why people stay away from brownfield sites. But if we remediate brownfield sites and we'll get into remediation in a second, if we remediate brownfield sites, not only do these old, hulking, rotting, derelict places get rebuilt, which is bad for urban explorers, but good for everybody else, it actually saves virgin tracts of land.

Woodland, other areas, it keeps green space out there. We don't have to develop green space. Exactly. Because we're reusing land rather than just abandoning it. Right. And that's one of the great things about brownfield areas is that it's not, like you said, completely untouched. So what you've got probably in place is some infrastructure. You have water lines. Yeah. You have gas lines and stuff like that. Any kind of line. Yeah. Any kind of line. So that's awesome. It's not as expensive. No, it's not, in theory. You don't have to lay down that new infrastructure. You don't have to lay the pipes, so to speak. That's exactly right, Chuck. The infrastructure is already there. Pipes and all. You know how many brownfields are in the United States, estimated? I want to

hear it, baby. 450,000. That's a lot of brownfield sites. It is. Yeah. That's a lot of real estate. It is. And what you were saying before, that the fact that there's infrastructure there, there's buildings there, this makes brownfield sites real property. Right. Well, yeah, it means you get whatever is on the property. The buildings are yours. The mineral rights are yours. It's all there for the taking. Okay. So, but if there's so much liability attached, right? How do you overcome this kind of thing? Well, what do you mean? Like, how do you clean it up? Well, no. I mean, like, how do you attract people to brownfield sites rather than, you know, have them go cut down a bunch of trees and just build on land that they don't have to worry about as contaminated?

Well, one way is with incentives, government incentives. Yeah, and there's a ton of them, aren't there? Tons, dude. Yeah. It's happening all over the place. Let's hear about them. Well, I went to the news section of Google to find out, like, the latest breaking news, and there were literally a dozen stories on brownfield remediation, like, this week. It's definitely picking up all over the place. And this is, I should say, brownfield remediation has been, like, a viable alternative, or at least a government-backed alternative since, I think, the early to mid-90s. Right. That's the impression I have you. Yes. Okay. Texas is getting $2.2 million worth of funds. Nice. To remediate some of these brownfields. From the feds?

From the feds. Baltimore has potentially more than 1,000 contaminated properties. I can believe that. I went to Baltimore recently, and hey, Baltimore, shouts out, but I can believe it. Okay. We love you, but boy, it's just like one big brownfield. And actually, they have this place. Remember Buckhead in 1997? Yeah, sort of. I wasn't a big Buckhead guy, but yeah. They have a place there that is Buckhead in 1997. It's like a time machine. It's called Power Station Live, and it looks like a remediated brownfield site. And it's crazy. It's like everybody just finished watching the most recent episode of France. It's a Thursday night, and now they're going out. Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah.

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The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzio, and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk, written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Erin Mankey. Something about all of this doesn't feel right. Hello? Is someone there? Something went wrong here. Olivia, we should hurry. We have a much bigger problem. What is that? Olivia, run! Listen to Bridgewater now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more over at grimandmild.com slash Bridgewater. So getting back to the different projects, Maine is getting about 6.1 million bucks. I don't know much about Maine's Brownfield situation. Well, it's probably nicer looking, I would guess. Sure. But 6.1 million, that's a lot of money, considering Baltimore's only

getting about $400,000. You know, that's the problem with the bailout. One and a half trillion dollars. Six million dollars seems like peanuts these days. It does. You know? Yeah. So Georgia, actually, is happening right here, too, Governor Perdue has signed a bill, which is going to help clean up 600 polluted sites here in our own state. That's awesome. Yeah. I got a friend that works in hazardous waste to clean up. Oh, really? Yeah. He worked at Atlantic Station and when there's like a train derailment and spill hazardous chemicals, he's manages the site. A train derailed in my neighborhood once when I was younger, but it just spilled grain. Well, he practiced it. Well, I don't know. They usually kind of clean up any kind of derailment.

Okay. Yeah. Cool stuff, though. Yeah, it is very cool. So, yeah, like you were saying, there's a bunch of incentive programs. Yes. You're just talking about the feds doling out money. Big time. States dole out money, too. And one of the ways that they do it that's almost specifically for remediation projects and reuse projects is a text increment financing. Okay. Have you heard about this? Yeah. Go ahead, though. Okay. So basically what the government does is let's say it's a local or state government. They say, you know what? If you remediate the site and you turn it into a big mixed use development, all the area around it, if it's successful, is going to start attracting businesses, the real estate values around this area are going to go up. If the real

estate values go up in all these businesses and condos and all that stuff goes up, too, we're going to start as a government, we're going to start making more money off of it. It's going to increase our tax base. So we're going to help fund your Brownfield remediation and reuse project by giving you money based on what we think we can make in the future because you're raising the tax value of the real estate in the area. What a cool idea. It's a very cool idea. Well, they also give tax breaks to people that are doing this, right? Sure. For the cost of the cleanup. Yeah. They're practically giving it. I think we should look into getting a Brownfield together. Seriously. We can build that gap. We can. Sure. If we need some dough, so not a bad idea.

So Chuck, how do you remediate a Brownfield? Well, the first thing you got to do, my friend, is go out to the site, conduct an assessment, take some soil samples, look at what you're, you know, get those tested, see what you're looking at, seeing just how contaminated it is, and confirm what's there, what's not there. And the EPA says that nearly one-third of these sites are 100% contamination free. So that's awesome. If you get lucky and pick the right site, you're gold. Right. And there is a huge process involved, and there's actually a huge, I guess, sub-construction industry, probably related very closely to the demolition industry that is engaged in remediating sites. And it is huge, massive work, depending on how, if the area is contaminated.

Right. And what the pollutant is. Right. Because you remember when we did our webcast, and we, I think it was last week or whatever, we were talking about, no, it was this week, wow, everything's blending together these days. We were talking about the lost nuclear bombs. Yes, missing H bombs. And we're saying in Florence, South Carolina, there's a sizable chunk of Florence, South Carolina that's now in Savannah. Right. What they did was remediate that site. Right, because the bomb exploded, the TNT exploded, not the actual nuclear part of it, thank goodness. Sure. But it was still spewed contaminated metal and stuff all over the place. Yeah. So they scooped it up and shipped it to Savannah. That's exactly right. So removing

soil, contaminated soil, just actually physically getting it out of there and storing it in a safe place, that's remediation. A lot of times the water is tainted, so you have to remediate that. And actually, there's some pretty cool bacteria out there that actually eat petroleum. Right. And convert it into harmless compounds. That's awesome. Yeah. So there's all sorts of water treatment equipment that you run it through and this bacteria just eats the stuff and spits green water out the other end. You can plant vegetation, certain vegetation will suck out the chemicals from the ground. A lot of trees actually, especially a lot of invasive species of trees planted in a brownfield area will just suck it up and then you just remove the trees.

Right. And they did say they mentioned that covering it up can work too, which was what you're talking about with the loam, but clearly not. You can't cover up everything, you know. Right. It depends on what it is. And also, the EPA is starting to really kind of encourage green brownfield remediation. Not brownfield remediation. That's much different. That's actually, yeah, that's totally different. A green brownfield remediation is basically remediation practices that we're already using, but say throwing some windmills on the site to power the equipment you're using, you know, like the equipment that that that remediates the water or decontaminates the water. Right. It uses up a lot of energy. Why not power it with a windmill or solar or

something like that? Trying to use alternative fuels on the heavy machinery that you're removing the topsoil with. Stuff like that. So there's there's a lot going on. And I got to tell you we're at what six billion people. Agriculture has a carrying capacity of 10 billion people. Right. We're coming up on that. I think some some predictions are 2050. Land's important. It's very important. We need to start reusing it rather than just, you know, we are such a wasteful consumer disposable society species even. Yeah, like, oh, that's an old gas station. Let's build a new one across street and just let that one sit there. Yeah. And actually, I used to work in a town in a county down south of here and the mayor's brother

owned a gas station and he sold it to the city. Well, it turned out that the city found out that there was a underground storage tank for the gas that had leaked and the soil was contaminated. And that was that. Nothing ever came of it. Yeah. There's quite a few. I've seen some abandoned gas stations around Decatur. Sure. They've been there for years, like Kudzu swamp. And yeah, because nobody can do anything with it. Well, hopefully, you know, this is changing. Or I shouldn't say no one can do anything with it. It kind of contradicts our entire podcast. Right. Let me say people are afraid that they're not going to be able to do anything with it. Right. But there's a lot of incentives, a lot of tax breaks and a lot of money being doled out.

So if you're a developer, man, I say get on it. Yeah, I think we should get on it too, right after Chuck, since we have nothing to plug listener mail. Right. Are we there? Is that your setup? That was it. Beautiful. Listener mail time, Josh. Okay. Today, I'm just going to call this scary dreams of an impressionable 15 year old girl. Awesome. Fan mail. So Shelby, who says she's an impressionable 15 year old girl, wrote us. She says, guys, you have scared me out of my mind. I had an extremely vivid nightmare last night, and I had way too much in common with your podcast. I was a victim of a second Holocaust in her dream. Just her. I think you have to have more than one person for a Holocaust. Well, give her break. She's 15. Okay. The Disney

Corporation was behind it. Awesome. But I don't know what their goal was in killing millions of people. Anyway, they started mass producing propaganda films and were aiming to rule the world and establish Disneyism as a mandatory global religion. Some might say that's happening for real. Wow. I was in a very large movie theater with one such film being played. And at the end, a Disney rep announced that the entire audience was going to die. The rest of my dream consisted of me dodging bullets being fired at me by various mascots inside of and doing forced labor, making parts for the Disneyland trains, which brought new prisoners from the parking lot and working on the Disneyland railroad. Savage beatings abounded. Awesome. This is so cool. All prisoners

had to be stamped on the forehead with one of those reentry stamps like they that smell like lemons, you know, like amusement park. Yeah. My number was D31749. I can't believe she remembers all this. Wow. The gates of the entrance of the park red work makes you the happiest person on earth and the statue of Walt Disney standing next to Mickey Mouse was replaced with one of Mickey Mouse and Hitler. I can't believe this girl's 15. Poor thing. At the end, the park camp was liberated, but I don't know by who or who. But that's not the point. The point is that I spontaneously had this nightmare with all of these details similar to your podcast before I even knew the title of it. That really creeps me out. I'll keep listening anyway. So what was her name again? Shelby. Shelby,

you have one of the more fertile imaginations I've ever encountered. I think beautiful. I'm sorry you were terrified, but you're going to go places. Yeah. Right now at the Disney corporation here, just they're thinking, we need to find the Shelby. She's onto us. It's like Italy here. It is. Yeah. So if you want to reveal your, you know, innermost thoughts and fears or you want to tell us what you think about the Disney company or just say hi, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? It's been said that a

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