From 1942 to 1960, two firms, Mettalloy and Lithium Corporation of America, produced lithium carbonate for the U.S. military, primarily for use in batteries and lifesaving equipment, from a property located at the end of Edgewood Avenue just off Cedar Lake Road in St. Louis Park. But while the company was carrying out its patriotic duty, it was also leaking lithium, fuel oil, and miscellaneous metals into the soil and groundwater beneath its plant. In 1960, a company called Food Producers, which made toppings for Dairy Queen, bought the site. Food Producers later became a subsidiary of Omaha-based ConAgra Foods, which produced fruit toppings at the location.
In 1998, ConAgra sought to sell the site, which is located close to the interchange of I-394 and Highway 100. Many potential buyers looked at the site, but the contamination, which ConAgra had little to do with, caused them to back off. During the two years that the property sat vacant, drug addicts used the site for a meth lab, vandals shattered windows, and the building became a canvas for graffiti. ConAgra finally sold the site in 2003 to Real Estate Recycling, a Minneapolis developer that specializes in cleaning up properties like these. With help from taxpayers, Real Estate Recycling began removing the site’s dirty legacy in the fall of that year, then redeveloped the property. The site now houses a 79,000-square-foot office building called the Edgewood Business Center.
Brownfield redevelopment typically requires government funding. ‘There is no incentive to spend money to clean up a dirty industrial site in the inner city when you can plunk down a property in Woodbury.’
Companies like Real Estate Recycling have done a lot to spruce up the Twin Cities urban core and inner-ring suburbs since the 1980s, when numerous old-school industrial companies completed government-mandated surface cleanups of their contaminated sites. But why would a company spend millions to clean up its property, then simply abandon it? Plenty of reasons, nearly all of them buried: mercury, arsenic, ash, and oil, to name a few. (See our “Filthy Five” sidebar on page six for a list of top contaminants.) Even when a tidied-up property doesn’t pose a threat to human health or the environment, that doesn’t mean that it has been decontaminated enough to be redeveloped. The name for such a property is a brownfield.
Brownfield sites are one of the legacies of the heavy-industrial economy that began to wane in the 1970s. “Usually, these sites are in the inner city,” notes Meredith Udoibok, director of the Brownfields and Community Assistance Unit at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). They’re typically close to railroad lines or major highways, which means they’re located in potentially prime locations for new, cleaner businesses. But “no one is going to clean them up without public money,” Udoibok says. “There is no incentive to spend money to clean up a dirty industrial site in the inner city when you can plunk down a property in Woodbury.”
