Hazardous Waste Cleanup: Keystone Cement in Bath, Pennsylvania

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Cleanup Status

On August 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a Final Determination that no further corrective action is required at this time at the Keystone Cement Company, Bath facility.

On July 1990, EPA issued a draft corrective action permit in which identified six areas the required further investigation to determine presence of contamination. Subsequently, Keystone conducted removal of soil on those areas. On September 2001, Keystone completed soil sampling of those areas within the plant to confirm that removal was satisfactorily completed. The results indicates that there are no contaminants above action levels in the areas evaluated.

Based on the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Facility Assessment and the Environmental Indicator (EI) site inspection of the Facility, EPA has determined that corrective action is now complete without controls at the Facility. A more complete explanation of the conditions at the Facility can be found in the Administrative Record and the Statement of Basis.

EPA published a notice in local newspaper detailing the proposed Agency decision of no further corrective action. The thirty (30) day public comment period ended on July 14, 2003 and no comments were received during that time.

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Site Description

Interactive map of Keystone Cement, Bath, PA

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Keystone Cement produces Portland and masonry cement on an 800-acre site along Route 329 in East Allen Township (just south of Bath), Northampton County, Pennsylvania. The manufacturing process at the site consist of four major steps: quarrying and crushing; grinding and blending; clinker production; and finishing grinding and packaging. Keystone operates two rotary cement kilns to produce clinker, the intermediate product, which is ground into cement. The daily clinker production at Keystone is approximately 2,00 tons per day.

Hazardous wastes are received from offsite (primarily from commercial hazardous waste fuel blenders) mostly by tank truck. Each shipment is analyzed for key parameters (e.g., heating value, chlorine content, PCB content) before it is unloaded by Keystone. The hazardous waste is then pumped to one of four permitted tanks where it is stored before being burned in the kilns as a fuel.

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Contaminants at this Facility

In 1997 Keystone completed a multi-pathway human and an ecological risk assessment to characterize the impacts of its operations in the surrounding community. The assessment concluded that the chronic and acute risk predicted for the modeled exposure scenarios are lower that those considered acceptable thus no human exposure or environmental risk at the site.

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Institutional and Engineering Controls at this Facility

Institutional controls were not required at the site.

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Land Reuse Information at this Facility

 The facility is under continued use.

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Site Responsibility at this Facility

RCRA Corrective Action activities at this facility have been conducted under the direction of EPA Region 3 

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