Trident Seafoods Corp. to Pay $2.5 Million to Resolve Clean Water Act Violations and Spend More Than $30 Million to Upgrade Processing Plants
Settlement to reduce discharges of seafood processing waste by more than 100 million pounds annually
US Environmental Protection Agency, Release date: 09/28/2011
(Seattle–Sept. 28, 2011) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today announced that Trident Seafoods Corp., one of the world’s largest seafood processors, has agreed to pay a $2.5 million civil penalty and invest millions in seafood processing waste controls to settle alleged violations of the Clean Water Act (CWA). Unauthorized discharges of seafood processing waste lead to large seafood waste piles on the seafloor, creating anoxic, or oxygen-depleted, conditions that result in unsuitable habitats for fish and other living organisms.
“Today’s settlement is truly a ‘game changer’,” said Dennis McLerran, EPA Regional Administrator in Seattle. “Trident is definitely changing course and seriously investing in waste management and increased fish meal plant capacity. We share Trident’s view that this settlement will be better for the environment as well as their bottom line. We’re establishing a new 'best management practices' yardstick for Alaska’s seafood processing industry.”
“This agreement will benefit the quality of Alaskan waters, which host a critical habitat for the seafood industry,” said Ignacia S. Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “The upgrades will enable Trident to achieve and maintain compliance with the Clean Water Act, and will protect Alaskan waters, eliminate waste and create efficiencies that will serve as a model of best business practices for the seafood processing industry.”
The agreement requires Trident to invest an estimated $30-40 million, and potentially more, in source control and waste pile remediation measures. The source control measures include building a fishmeal plant in Naknek, Alaska, that will have the capacity to handle at least 30 million pounds of seafood processing waste annually, taking in both its own fish waste and potentially that of other local processors. Trident has also agreed to reduce the amount of seafood processing waste discharged from the Akutan, Cordova, St. Paul and Ketchikan, Alaska, facilities and monitor the amount of seafood processing waste discharged into Starrigavan Bay in Sitka, Alaska. The actions taken will reduce Trident’s fish processing discharges by a total of more than 105 million pounds annually.
The company has also agreed to remediation measures including studying seafloor waste piles at Trident’s facilities in Akutan, Ketchikan and Cordova. Based on the results of these studies, Trident will remove or partially remediate the piles. One seafood processing waste pile in Akutan Harbor is currently estimated to be more than 50 acres in size.
The EPA complaint, also filed as part of this legal action, alleges that Trident had more than 480 CWA violations at 14 of its on-shore and off-shore Alaskan seafood processing facilities. The alleged violations include discharging without a necessary permit, exceeding discharge limits, failing to comply with permit restrictions on discharge locations (including discharges into at least two National Wildlife Refuges), creating oxygen-depleting “zones of deposit” or underwater piles of fish processing waste occupying more than the allowed one acre of seafloor. The company also allegedly failed to conduct required monitoring and implement required best management practices.
Over the past decade, Trident has been a party to multiple administrative enforcement agreements and judicial consent decrees resolving similar violations at many of the same facilities.
The settlement was lodged in federal court in Seattle, Wash. and is subject to a 30-day public comment period.
More information on the settlement and a copy of the consent decree: http://epa.gov/compliance/resources/cases/civil/cwa/tridentseafoods.html
More News Coverage:
Seafood processor fined $2.5 million over Alaska 'dead zones'
Alaska Dispatch, Amanda Coyne | Sep 28, 2011
One of the largest seafood processors in Alaska, Trident Seafoods Corp., has agreed to pay a $2.5 million fine to settle 485 violations of the Clean Water Act in Alaska and invest up to $40 million in waste pile remediation. It's the biggest Clean Water Act fine that any processing company has faced in Alaska. The public will have 30 days to comment on the settlement, after which a federal judge must approve it.
The fine, levied by the EPA an the Justice Department, was for violations beginning to be investigated prior to 2008, when the EPA ceded its authority to monitor such waste to the Alaska State Department of Environmental Conservation. All the violations took place between 2005 and 2010 and involved multiple infractions, including the unauthorized discharge of seafood processing waste from Trident's onshore and offshore processing plants. Trident has 14 such plants in Alaska. The waste includes fish heads, skin and bone which are ground up and then dumped. Only about 35 percent of a salmon ends up on a plate.
Ed Kowalski, EPA's director of the office of compliance and enforcement in the region, said in a conference call on Wednesday that the agreement is an opportunity for the state and processing industry to work together to protect Alaska waters. “This is the start of a much larger effort,” he said.
Mike LeVine with Oceana, an environmental group focusing on the world’s oceans, welcomed the settlement. "We have clean air and clean water in Alaska and we're glad to see the EPA doing its job to protect those vital resources," he said
Trident has received at least six other enforcement actions throughout the years, which apparently didn't result in systemic change in the way the company handles its waste. This time, however, the EPA has "gotten the company's attention," Kowalski said. "We've seen a different Trident at the table this time," he said.
Sharon Morgan, manager of DEC's waste water discharge authorization program, said that since the state took over Clean Water Act investigation and enforcement, it has not fined a fish processing plant. Trident did not return a call requesting comment.
Currently, the fish waste from Trident’s plants is pumped onto the seafloor anywhere from 60 to 100 feet from the plant, where it creates what Tara Martich from the EPA described in the conference call as “massive carpets of gelatinous goo." Such carpets suffocate sea life and create "dead zones" on the ocean floor. One such pile in Akutan Harbor in the Aleutians is about 50 acres, roughly 38 football fields, Martich said. It's a pile that has existed for probably 20 years, and is added to every season. At its deepest, it's anywhere from 10 to 20 feet and thins as it spreads.
As part of the agreement, Trident must reduce the size of that particular massive carpet of goo to no more than 25 acres by Dec. 31, 2017; and not more than 5 acres by Dec. 31, 2022, according to court documents.
Among other things, Trident has agreed to build a fish meal plant in the Bristol Bay town of Naknek, which the EPA says will be able to handle 30 million pounds of fish waste. The Trident plant there produces about 7 million pounds of waste a year. Kowalski said that the additional space could be used by other fish processors. The plant must be built by 2015. In the meantime, Trident will continue to dump its waste on the ocean floor.
Trident has also agreed to reduce its fish waste in Akutan, Cordova, St. Paul, and Ketchikan, and will monitor waste in Starrigavan Bay and Sitka.
All the activities will reduce the discharges by more than 105 million pounds a year, Kowalski said.
Alaska is the only state where onshore processors dump the waste directly onto the ocean floor, Martich said. Because of its remote location, Alaska processors have been able to skirt regulations that processors in other states must abide by.
Trident fined $2.5M for fish-waste discharges
Seattle Times, September 28, 2011
A major Seattle seafood-processing company has agreed to pay a $2.5 million penalty and spend millions more upgrading fish facilities throughout Alaska to settle federal charges it violated the Clean Water Act.
A major Seattle seafood-processing company has agreed to pay a $2.5 million penalty and spend millions more upgrading fish facilities throughout Alaska to settle federal charges it violated the Clean Water Act.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had accused Trident Seafoods of nearly 500 violations at 14 processing sites over how it handles tens of millions of pounds of fish waste. The company was accused of discharging fish waste without permits, illegally dumping fish waste into national wildlife refuges and creating dead zones in marine waters by discarding fish waste in piles on the sea floor of up to 50 acres in size.
At issue is how Trident disposed of the heads, tails and bones from fish it processed at sea and at shore-based facilities from St. Paul to Cordova, Sitka and Ketchikan. EPA officials said the company killed marine life by allowing decaying fish waste to pile up over years and create dead-zones waters at sites throughout Alaska.
In one area, the fish waste has piled up underwater into a "massive carpet of gelatinous goo that suffocates sea life and disrupts the entire ecosystem in that area," said Tara Martich, permit coordinator with the EPA.
"Trident's facilities have had a long history of noncompliance," she said. "We know through monitoring that the company's piles are still there sometimes decades later."
The violations initially came as a surprise to Trident's leadership, said Joe Plesha, the company's chief legal officer, who said lower-level employees weren't following the letter of the law. He said the company takes responsibility for its failures, which occurred from 2005 to 2009, and has since increased its internal auditing.
According to a settlement agreement filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle, Trident also will spend at least $30 million to better manage its fish waste in Alaska.
In Naknek, the company expects to build a plant that will safely dispose of 30 million pounds of waste by grinding it into fish meal that can then be sold as protein to fish farms.
Federal officials said the changes should reduce Trident's waste discharges by more than 100 million pounds a year.
EPA officials said they hope changes at Trident, one of the largest fish-processing companies in the world, with 8,000 employees, will encourage other processors to do more to better manage fish waste.
"One of the reasons we're bringing these enforcement actions is to point out to the seafood industry that we're really looking at these types of issues," said Ed Kowalski, director of compliance and enforcement for EPA's Northwest region.
