This paywalled headline piqued my curiosity in the Detroit News:
"Michigan businesses cry foul over requests to fund waste site cleanup"
So I started doing some digging.
This involves a chemical company named Detrex, that owned a site on 12886 Eaton Street in Detroit. It was involved with contract hazardous chemical disposal. So, if you are a factory or a car repair shop, and regularly have barrels of hazardous waste like motor oil or used solvents, you contract out to Detrex and they will dispose of it according to EPA guidelines.
Turns out they weren't running their facility according to EPA guidelines and, in what appears to be some sort of agreement with the EPA, they shifted title these facilities to another entity that is ostensibly responsible to clean them up.
The name of this new entity is Trex Properties LLC, that doesn't appear to exist anywhere except legal filings and property records.
What Trex Properties LLC does is send legal notices to companies that previously contracted with Detrex, saying if they don't pay some amount they have come up with, usually between several thousand to tens of thousand of dollars, they would be subject to a federal lawsuit and would have to pay much more later. Possibly in the millions of dollars.
These notices say that Trex is owed these monies as laid out in the superfund act [[CERCLA) However, if you call the EPA and ask about it, they say, as a contractee operating under good faith, you owe nothing to some sub-entity that is tasked with cleaning up your contractor's mess.
Here's an article about a similar scam Trex was attempting with a Detrex site in North Carolina:
https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2...sue-for-shops/
If you poke around on the web, you'll find various legal filings by Trex against these contractees, usually ending up with Trex withdrawing the lawsuit after a motion for dismissal by the defendant. In one motion to dismiss the judge noted that the cleanup estimate that Trex submitted to the EPA was wildly out of line with how much money they were seeking from the defendants, by several millions of dollars. Trex subsequently asked for the case to be dismissed.