Belleville Apartment Complex Proposed For Old Battery Plant Site

BELLEVILLE, NJ — The property at 81-179 Belmont Avenue in Belleville was once the site of a Thomas Edison battery manufacturing plant. But soon, there may be hundreds of local families living there if developers gain approval to turn the property into a mixed-use complex with 232 residential units.

During a recent Belleville Planning Board meeting, representatives of BIOV Belleville MCB LLC presented their plans to redevelop the 9.5- acre property, which was part of the Edison Chemical Works and was used as a battery manufacturing facility for more than 60 years in the early 1900s.

Planning Board Chairman Raymond Veniero said that the plan requires approval from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

A site remediation specialist is slated to talk about the environmental components of the proposed project at the planning board’s April 12 meeting. The project’s developers have said that they plan to clean up the property, NorthJersey.com reported. (Read the full article here)

The New Jersey Sierra Club recently blasted the redevelopment plan, alleging that “high concentrations of hazardous contaminants materials associated with the current/former operations have been found in investigative soil sample and groundwater analysis.”

The owners of the property, Boiv Belleville MCB, plan to “cap” the contaminants at the property, the New Jersey Sierra Club alleged.

“We oppose the mixed-use residential development project in Belleville Township because we are concerned about people living on a toxic site that is not properly cleaned up,” Director Jeff Tittel said.

“Capping the toxic metals will fail and will only put more people at risk,” Tittel stated. “The project is also too dense for the site. The town needs to go back and plan for the site so that it is first properly cleaned up and restored and then come up for a proposal for development that would fit in with the character of the community.”

According to the Sierra Club:

“The southern portion of the subject property was operated as the Edison Storage Battery, Co. Chemical Works. The property was utilized as a battery manufacturing facility from at least 1906 until 1969. These structures included a ‘cobalt building,’ a hydrogen plant, a hydrogen purifying furnace, an oil house, an iron mixing room, an iron reduction furnace, storage rooms for nickel, iron oxalate, and nickel hydrate, a laboratory building, a machine shop, a boiler house, coal bins, and a gas tank. The northern portion of the property was operated as the Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Active Material Division Chemical Plant. It included a central heating plant, a nickel sulfate building, a nickel hydrate building, an iron reduction building, an iron sulfate building, a hydrogen generating building, a red iron oxide manufacturing building, and an oil house. In addition, several materials storage tanks are depicted, including three oil tanks surrounded by a concrete dike, an acid tank, and a caustic soda tank.”

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