DEQ Rehabilitates Land for Productive Use

Environmental Challenge

Since Oregon’s early days of statehood, industrial growth has sometimes come at a cost to the environment, particularly before the institution of environmental protection laws. Chemical pollution can bring serious threats to the environment while causing commercial and industrial properties to become unusable. These abandoned, polluted properties are known as “brownfields.”

Success Story

Through the DEQ Brownfields program, DEQ Environmental Cleanup staff work with landowners and other agencies to return abandoned, polluted properties to productive use. Since 1995, DEQ has helped clean up more than 500 brownfield sites in Oregon, turning them into clean, safe, usable properties.

In 2008, the Phoenix Awards Institute recognized DEQ for transforming an abandoned gas station site into the nation’s first all-biofuel service station in Eugene. To clean up the site, DEQ staff developed grant funding from the Environmental Protection Agency, Lane County, Oregon Economic Development Department, and SeQuential Biofuels, who would buy the cleaned up site from Lane County.

A new vision for the property began to take shape in fall 2004 when Lane County foreclosed on the property and entered into negotiations with DEQ and SeQuential Biofuels to clean up and revitalize the site.

Cleanup began a year later with the first of a two-phase approach. The first phase—the “Big Dig”—resulted in the excavation of more than 600 cubic yards of contaminated soil. This approach was chosen to reduce time and cleanup cost, and it allowed SeQuential access to the site during the second phase for site redevelopment.

The Big Dig approach provided another win-win partnership between Lane County and DEQ. Excavated soil was taken to a closed Lane County landfill in Cottage Grove where it was successfully aerated and reused as fill-in for sink holes in the former landfill.

Says DEQ project manager Jim Glass, “The success of this project is a showcase for DEQ staff creativity and the assets we and our brownfields partners can bring to the table to promote reuse of contaminated properties.”