JFC
ENVIRONMENTAL
UPDATES

JFC Environmental Updates

Scrap metal recycling is the original green industry. It keeps valuable resources out of landfills, reduces waste, and ensures that machines and other materials that might otherwise be abandoned are removed, any chemicals and oils safely treated and disposed of, and its parts and materials reused. At Freedman, we not only implement industry best practices, we go above and beyond to process metals in a manner that’s safe for our environment and our team.

We work in a predominantly enclosed, paved facility that protects employees from extreme weather and limits rainwater from contacting scrap and washing oils, chemicals, and dissolved metals into the watershed. We enforce Acceptable Scrap Guidelines to prevent hazardous materials in our facility. All catch basins have oil filters to catch any stray drips or leaks and keep pollutants out of storm drains. Water used in our recycling process is carefully collected and routed to our condenser. By evaporating the water in a closed environment, we’re able to limit possible contamination risks and reduce the volume of liquid that will need to be disposed as waste.

From their first day, employees undergo extensive safety and environmental protection training as an ongoing process. Over the last five years, we’ve processed about 635,500,000 pounds of materials that might otherwise be waste.

Managing stormwater is part of our commitment to pollution prevention. Rain that falls on our property eventually ends up in Poor Brook, which feeds into the Chicopee River, so we’ve organized a stormwater pollution prevention team to maintain rigorous control measures and update them as needed. We take the following steps:

• Minimize contact between storm water and possible pollutants with careful equipment storage, inspection of inbound material to remove pollution risks, and indoor processing of scrap metal and other sources.
• Maintain a thorough preventative maintenance program.
• Design and use a spill prevention and response plan to quickly remove pollutants.
• Check vehicles for excessive dust and metal fines.

We’ve also invested over $1.5 Million to build a treatment system that filters our stormwater through sand and returns clean water to the water table. Our sand filter catches unwanted particles and matter while allowing water to flow through. This nature-based process:

• Reduces the need for chemical treatment of stormwater.
• Limits noise and exhaust from pumps and other mechanical treatment devices.
• Regulates water flow to prevent saturation of the ground or heavy outflows into the brook.

The sand filter:

• Is about 1/3 of an acre in surface area
• Can hold 218,500 gallons of water at maximum capacity
• Uses 12,700 cubic feet of sand

The stormwater treatment system can store and treat approximately 1.5 times the water quality volume, which exceeds the criterion recommended by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

These are some of the new measures that we have implemented to continue to safeguard the environment to the highest degree possible, and to maintain best practices for protecting the natural world and our employees.