KALAMAZOO — Federal environmental officials recently announced an agreement with Georgia-Pacific Corp. to begin work on capping a Kalamazoo Township landfill filled with material laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, part of a federal Superfund cleanup of the Kalamazoo River.

As part of a previous remediation project on the Kalamazoo River, a black silt curtain is used to help contain toxic sediments as dredging takes place near Plainwell. (Photo courtesy EPA)

As part of a previous remediation project on the Kalamazoo River, a black silt curtain is used to help contain toxic sediments as dredging takes place near Plainwell. (Photo courtesy EPA)

Design work on the $13 million project will begin this year and be complete sometime in 2010, said Michael Berkoff, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s project manager in charge of landfills on the Superfund project.

According to the settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids late last month, Georgia-Pacific will design and construct a landfill cap at the 30-acre Willow Boulevard/A-Site Landfill portion of the Superfund site, which it owns. Groundwater monitoring and erosion-control systems will also be designed and installed.

The company has also agreed to pay $225,509 for EPA’s past response costs at the site and will pay EPA’s future costs related to this portion of the site.

Berkoff said that housing PCBs in landfills and capping and monitoring them is “a very good preventative approach” to ensuring public health. PCBs, a byproduct of the paper manufacturing industry that once thrived along the river here, are considered a health threat to people and wildlife by the EPA.

Humans and animals may be exposed to PCBs by eating contaminated fish or through contact with tainted soils or inhaling PCB-contaminated air, the agency has warned.

“PCBs don’t migrate in water, they bind very well to soil,” Berkoff said. “What we know through monitoring [at PCB landfills across the nation] is that we don’t pick up PCBs traveling out of those landfills.”

The Superfund site consists of an 80-mile stretch of river, a three-mile segment of Portage Creek, a number of now-closed paper mill properties and four landfills, including the Willow Boulevard/A-Site Landfill, which has historically been addressed as a single unit.

PCB contaminated material dumped in these landfills from past paper manufacturing and recycling activities has contributed to the overall PCB contamination in the river, prompting the need to adequately house the material in order to stem leaching and erosion.

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the first significant cleanup project on the river since its Superfund declaration in 1990. The project, which took place along a nearly two-mile stretch of the river near Plainwell — about 10 miles north of Kalamazoo — is complete.

An event marking the milestone will take place June 8 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. at the end of 12th Street off M-89, just north of Oaks Crossing. Officials from the EPA, Michigan departments of Environmental Quality and Natural Resources, Georgia-Pacific and area state legislators are to scheduled to attend.

The EPA could announce plans for future cleanup projects along the river at the event, said Mick Hans, spokesman for the agency. Cleanups were tentatively slowed earlier this year after Millennium Holdings LLC — which along with Georgia-Pacific was responsible for financing cleanup projects — filed for bankruptcy protection in January.