City of Meadville and Crawford County recycling officials are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On July 18, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection ordered the Erie-based World Resource Recovery Systems Inc. and its president to either comply with the conditions of its waste permit or have the permit suspended.

The company, headed by Frank M. Lasky Jr., operates a dual-purpose facility. In addition to being a waste transfer station, where household waste is consolidated and loaded into large trucks for transport to landfills, the facility also accepts and stores recyclable materials collected in accordance with contracts with several municipal governments and a number of commercial customers.

If corrective actions aren’t taken, DEP will suspend the facility’s waste permit, making it unable to accept either waste or recyclables. The company has 30 days from receipt the order to file an appeal.

If action is taken, many trash-removal customers in Crawford County could be directly affected. World Resource is the parent company of Northland Refuse, the operation that currently has contracts for picking up household waste and recyclables in the City of Meadville as well as recyclables collected at Crawford County Solid Waste Authority’s recycling centers.

Tim Stoke, founder of Northland Refuse, sold the company to World Resource in July 2004. In March 2007, he returned to active duty in response to a personnel crisis that resulted in sometimes-spotty service during the winter of 2006-07. He currently serves as vice president of operations for Northland Refuse.

Since January 2007, when Crawford County Solid Waste Authority closed its Crawford County Recycling Center, Northland has been hauling both city and county residential recyclables to the Erie County facility operated by its parent company.

It was not reported how many Crawford County customers Northland serves. Neither Lasky nor Stoke responded to requests from the Tribune for comment Wednesday.

According to DEP’s northwest regional director, Kelly Burch, World Resource and its president “failed to follow its waste processing permit, resulting in a rat infestation that threatens the public’s health” at the company’s 1631 East Ave. facility in the City of Erie.

When the facility was inspected by DEP on June 12, rats were observed moving throughout the transfer facility and the recycling site “in such numbers that the piles of source-separated recyclable materials and municipal waste appeared to be moving.”

According to Burch, “In violation of its permit, the company leaves garbage on the transfer station floor overnight rather than removing it to a landfill and then cleaning the floor. ... In addition, there are large holes in the roof of the building, walls are missing, the floor is cracked, and floor drains do not function properly — leaving pools of water in the work area.”

Clean up the act ... or else

On June 16, DEP gave the company a list of corrections to be made either immediately or by July 1. During the most recent of several follow-up visits, inspectors “found some improvement, but not of a magnitude that addressed the major issues.”

According to DEP, this isn’t a new problem. In fact, since December 1991, when World Resource began operation in the facility, the department has issued a long list of documents including 12 notices of violation and two field compliance orders.