North Haven residents raise concerns over first-of-its-kind waste facility - WTNH.com

North Haven residents raise concerns over first-of-its-kind waste facility

NORTH HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — A first-of-its-kind, 45-acre waste reclamation facility could be coming to North Haven.

AB Eco Park is eyeing 90 acres off Universal Drive and is currently moving through the approval process, but not without pushback. Residents have concerns like increased traffic, pollution and smell, so News 8 took those concerns to the owners.

“I understood what their concerns were, and I think we can address all of them,” said AB Eco Park LLC CEO Bill Gambardella.

Bill Gambardella wants to take the acres of contaminated land, filled with dumped tires and railroad scraps, and transform it into AB Eco Park.

“It’d be the first of its kind in the world,” Gambardella said.

AB Eco Park will then transform trash that typically ends up in a landfill into usable products, equipped with a welcome center, glass and plastic sorting plant, a metal and paper sorting plant, and a power plant to make the facility fully self-sufficient.

Gambardella said the trash will be coming from throughout the region, estimating around 25 percent of Connecticut’s trash and recycling that is currently being shipped out of state and costing millions.

“We calculated about $30 million in savings for people who use our facilities on an annual basis. Just the town of North Haven would be half a million,” Gambardella said.

Gambardella said the power plant will convert 650 tons a day to resource-derived fuel that will burn on its own with no fossil fuels, but an environmentalist News 8 spoke to said it won’t be clean.

“Air does not observe geographical borders. It will waft into the most environmentally compromised areas in New Haven,” New Haven Environmental Advisory Council Chairwoman Laura Cahn said.

“The trash comes in and is dumped into a deep pit, the doors close, and there is negative air pressure, and there are things called biofilters about a half-acre in size and the air gets sucked through the building, through the biofilter and is clean. It doesn’t smell,” Gambardella said.

Residents also pushed back against the increase in traffic.

“Trucking in trash from all over the state to New Haven is not OK,”Cahn said.

“The route they are going to be taking is a route that’s used every day by trucks now,” Gambardella said.

During Wednesday night’s Inland Wetlands Commission meeting in North Haven AB Eco Park were hammered with questions, and their application was not approved. Despite needing additional permits both locally and from the state, Gambardella said they are confident.

“We’re very close. The engineering is done. The planning is done. Now we just have to meet the last few steps of getting those permits,” Gambardella said.

The approval to build on the 2,000-square-foot wetland was tabled to the commission’s next meeting on Jan. 24.

AB Eco Park hopes to be up and running by December 2025.