Following a lawsuit from North Carolina regulators over the unpermitted discharge of 1,4-dioxane into a public waterway, a Durham chemical facility has defended its practices. The company released a statement emphasizing that the neighborhood’s new stream of "mucilaginous goo" falls well within its corporate ESG parameters.
State regulatory documents reveal that for decades, the company has discharged high levels of acetone, ethanol, and various synthetic compounds into a creek that flows behind a local elementary school. In a filing submitted to the EPA’s voluntary disclosure portal this week, the unnamed chemical repackaging and distribution company noted that because the toxic runoff is kept in a liquid state, it does not contribute to Scope 1 atmospheric emissions, making the goo a critical pillar of their mid-century decarbonization strategy.
While we understand the state’s sudden interest in the 1,4-dioxane levels near the playground, we ask regulators to look at the broader climate picture and recognize that this mucilaginous goo is entirely carbon-neutral.
The creek flows through a public park in a predominantly Black neighborhood, an area the company’s recent SEC climate disclosure identified as a key strategic partner in its localized waste-to-water transition. According to Haskins, by storing the volatile chemicals in the local water table rather than incinerating them at a specialized facility, the company has successfully avoided emitting thousands of metric tons of CO2, a metric that recently earned the site a Gold Standard certification from several European carbon-credit registries.
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality has requested an immediate halt to the discharges, a timeline the company called overly aggressive and harmful to its long-term sustainability pledges.
In its latest quarterly emissions filing, the distributor committed to a phased drawdown of the mucilaginous goo by 2065, assuming the state's preliminary injunction does not force them to prematurely halt their ongoing thirty-year longitudinal study of neighborhood acetone exposure.