Information from the City of Offenbach in accordance with the Hessian Environmental Information Act

An outline of facts and figures from the booklet "Altlasten" (1988 published by the Hessian Ministry of the Environment) on the history of contaminated sites in Hesse:

Particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, the economic upswing was often at the expense of nature: wastewater, exhaust air and waste were carelessly released into the environment, trusting in the self-cleaning power of nature. Most municipal waste disposal sites were unsecured at the time. Controlled and environmentally friendly waste disposal was only initiated by the waste laws.

The first Hessian waste law came into force on October 21, 1971 and the first federal waste disposal law on June 11, 1972. Many uncontrolled waste dumps were replaced by central, authorized landfills due to the new legal situation. Between 1971 and 1974, a total of 2647 municipal waste sites in Hesse were closed and recultivated. However, the deposited waste mostly remained on site and was only monitored in exceptional cases. From 1979, Hesse began to systematically record these waste sites (the technical term for this is old deposits). By July 8, 1988, 4,933 old landfills in Hesse alone were listed in the register of old landfills of the responsible state authority, at that time the Hessian State Institute for the Environment (today the Hessian State Office for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology). At the same time, the nature of the deposited substances had to be determined in order to assess the potential hazards posed by the old deposits for air, soil, water and human health and the urgency of remediation measures. A research project carried out by the Federal Environment Agency in 1986 dealt with potential contamination in the context of production processes. From the results, it was concluded that the same groups of pollutants (including heavy metals, arsenic, cyanides, chlorinated compounds and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) could also occur as waste in old landfills. Existing lists of substances such as the Kloke List, the Dutch List or the English List, which included reference values for the heavy metals lead, cadmium, chromium, copper, nickel, mercury and zinc for background contamination in soils or concentration data for slightly or heavily contaminated soils, were very different and therefore unsuitable for a uniform assessment of the hazard potential. The Institute for Substances Hazardous to Water in Berlin was therefore commissioned to develop a comprehensible, scientifically based evaluation model for the state of Hesse for the assessment of hazards and evaluation of old deposits and old sites. This model was available at the end of 1988.

At federal level, the 37th Conference of Environment Ministers initiated the establishment of the Federal/State Working Group on Soil (LABO) in November 1991. Its permanent Contaminated Sites Committee was tasked with dealing with contaminated sites. One of the main results was the enactment of the Federal Soil Protection Act in 1997 and the Federal Soil Protection Ordinance in 1999 with standardized national test values for selected, frequently occurring pollutants.

The example of Pechhütte shows the impact of the development of the legal framework in the area of contaminated sites in Offenbach in the 1980s and 1990s and the pioneering work carried out by the responsible authorities and offices concerned. As early as 1989, historical and environmental investigations were carried out at the old Pechhütte landfill on behalf of the municipal environmental agency. The investigations were concluded in 1995 with the result that the topsoil in the landfill area contained high levels of lead in particular. The Darmstadt Regional Council therefore initiated formal contaminated site proceedings in 45 cases in order to prevent impairment of the general public. The remediation plan for the affected properties, which provided for the aforementioned topsoil replacement, was completed on April 18, 1996. The approval of the remediation plan and the necessary additions (examination of the variants for the grave barrier) was granted by the Darmstadt Regional Council on April 21, 1997. The remediation work began in the fall of 1997 and was completed in the spring of 1998.