Due Diligence and Environmental Compliance Services at Manufacturing and Maintenance Facilities
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Project Objective

Geosyntec’s client is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of diesel engines, diesel and natural gas generators, and diesel-powered refrigeration units. To provide life-cycle services to its customers, our client operates multiple manufacturing plants supported by a regionally-owned distributor network of approximately 200 sales and service shops throughout North America; these regional distributorships are the backbone of our client’s engine business, providing sales, support, and maintenance.

During the periodic ownership transfers of the distributorships, our client voluntarily audits facility infrastructure, including environmental compliance and physical plant conditions, to identify areas opportunities to prevent pollution. Our client’s environmental commitment is a core company value that extends to its approach to current and potential sources of contamination at its properties. During each transaction, an facility evaluation is conducted that includes a traditional ASTM Phase I ESA and a high-level environmental compliance evaluation. This evaluation process also helps our client establish the CERCLA “innocent landowner defense” while establishing the baseline environmental status of the property from both compliance and existing-contamination-conditions perspectives.

Geosyntec’s Scope of Services

Since 2000, Geosyntec has supported this client during several major transactions, covering nearly 150 facilities in 28 U.S. states and eight Canadian provinces. To conduct the Phase I and II ESA site investigations, we use a core group of Geosyntec staff and subcontractors who understand our client’s issues and the nuances of performing environmental assessment work at active facilities. An outgrowth of our experience with distributorships, we collaborated with our client to develop a paradigm for investigating its typical distributor locations; this new method streamlined our approach, allowing us to focus on the issues of highest concern to our client: wastewater collection and treatment systems and storage tanks. For a recently completed transaction, Geosyntec screened eight distributor facilities and developed a list of key concerns for each site, even before the Phase I ESA reports were finalized. These concerns were compiled into a database for our client’s review. We then deployed the framework across this group of sites to provide a streamlined and consistent scope of work for sites requiring a Phase II ESA. After synthesizing analytical data, Geosyntec helped our client’s environmental and legal staff to develop environmental escrows associated with each transaction to cover site investigation and remediation, with the ultimate goal of obtaining regulatory closure at each site. Using our historical database on distributorship environmental conditions and compliance characteristics, we not only identify potential areas of current contamination, we also examine ongoing operational compliance issues and we assess equipment or structures that require upgrades to reduce potential future impacts to the environment.

Notable Accomplishments

Geosyntec helped the client manage its current and potential environmental liabilities, contributing to its good corporate citizenship goal. Or work helped the client earn a spot among the 100 Best Corporate Citizens in the annual 2010 Corporate Responsibility Magazine competition, a listing that honors attributes including environmental stewardship, climate impact, and human rights impacts.