Ohio EPA seeks millions from dump operator who accepted toxic waste under guise of C&D recycling

A trial began May 3 to determine whether the operator of an East Cleveland waste dump would be responsible for paying back more than $9 million in cleanup costs spent to rid the site of toxic waste, Cleveland.com reports.

George Michael Riley was an operator of Arco Recycling, which ran a six-acre landfill located in an impoverished area of East Cleveland that was purchased from the city in 2014. According to court records, Riley billed Arco Recycling as a construction and demolition (C&D) recycling site to avoid regulation and the need to pay disposal fees. All the while, Riley allegedly used the location to dispose of toxic materials containing arsenic, lead, asbestos and other hazardous materials. This waste posed the threat of causing groundwater contamination and gave off emissions that made area residents ill.

“So why did he bother calling himself a recycler? Well, it’s to purposely exploit a loophole in the law,” Assistant Ohio Attorney General Pearl Chin told Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Shannon Gallagher during her opening statement. “Mr. Riley believed that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) couldn’t touch him because it didn’t regulate facilities that recycle construction and demolition debris.”

After the site was closed in January 2017 following OEPA intervention, regulators assessed the site and found it to contain 327,000 cubic yards of waste—enough to fill a football field 10 stories high. The dump later caught fire due to the nature of materials. After more than eight months, the Ohio EPA successfully cleared the site of more than 180,000 tons of material.

The OEPA, represented by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, sued in 2017 and is asking for Riley and a demolition company he operated known as Residential Commercial Industrial Services to repay the money needed for cleanup, along with an unspecified amount in fines.

The state also asked for Riley, who now goes by the name Anthony Michael Castello, and Residential Commercial Industrial Services, to be banned from working in the state’s C&D industries.

Also at the trial, an OEPA employee has testified about the conditions he saw when visiting the Arco site repeatedly in the first half of 2017. An early May news article on the Cleveland.com website has the regulator describing a site where the “ratio of materials dumped on the site versus what owners sold off for reuse was low.”

Photos shown during the trial portrayed stockpiles 30 feet high in a residential neighborhood, according to the article. It also quotes the OEPA regulator as saying recycling efforts made by Arco were “rudimentary” compared with other C&D recycling facilities he has inspected. “Instead of using multimillion-dollar machinery that sorted materials by weight, size and type, Arco Recycling’s efforts involved six or seven people sifting through debris,” the article states.

As for his defense, Riley is claiming that then-girlfriend, Christina Beynon, was the owner of the site since her name was listed as such on paperwork. Beynon, however, contends that Riley was abusive and made her sign her name to the paperwork to protect Riley from possible prosecution, even as he served as the one overseeing Arco’s day-to-day operations.