News Release: October 20, 2003
Contact: Steve Wilson, ext. 245The New Jersey Business & Industry Association will present Merck & Co., Inc. of Rahway with its Environmental Quality award during the 2003 Awards for Excellence Dinner to be held at the Westin Princeton at Forrestal Village on October 21.
The Environmental Quality Award is annually presented to companies that have done outstanding work to preserve or enhance the quality of the natural environment. Merck is being honored for the innovative technology it used to decontaminate the soil at its 100-year-old Rahway/Linden facility.
"When Merck decided to prepare its Rahway-Linden facility for modern expansion, it faced the problem of trucking out hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated soil," NJBIA President Philip Kirschner said. "So Merck did what one might expect from a leading pharmaceutical research and development company. It found a better way. And in the process, Merck saved millions of dollars and spared area residents the truck traffic and noise that would have accompanied the soil removal."
Merck employed a new technology to clean the approximately 200,000 tons of soil on-site-its Merck Soil Cleaning Unit. The unit uses heat to remove moisture and separate the contaminants from the soil in much the same way a clothes dryer uses heat to remove moisture and capture the lint in a trap.
The Soil Cleaning Unit (the technical name is Low Temperature Thermal Desorption unit) heats the soil until the contaminants become volatile and turn to gas. The clean soil is removed while the gas stream travels through a cyclone that removes larger particles. The gas is then oxidized in a thermal oxidizer and cooled in an evaporative cooling chamber.
Merck also developed and patented a dry absorbent, MerQSorb, that captures and removes 99.5 percent of mercury from the gas, thus lowering the amount of mercury in its emissions.
The benefits go well beyond environmental quality. Treating soil on-site helped Merck move forward with the construction of 17 new and refurbished buildings representing a $1 billion investment.
Since 1984, NJBIA annually has honored a select group of its members with an Award for Excellence. The Awards for Excellence winners demonstrate outstanding achievements in one of three award categories: Environmental Quality, Outstanding Employer, and Enterprise. A Public Service award is also presented to one or more individual business professionals. All NJBIA member companies are eligible to be nominated.
An independent panel of judges comprised of members of the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE) selected the winners along with three NJBIA policy committee chairs: JoAnn Trezza, Human Resources Committee; Edward Hogan, Environmental Quality Committee; and Tim Carden, Economic Development Council.
WithumSmith+Brown, the New Jersey-based accounting and consulting firm, verified the information supplied by the winning applicants.
With more than 20,000 member companies, NJBIA is one of the nation's largest state-level employer associations.
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