NYC recycling center crop dusting neighborhood with choking stink that has state fuming: Literally gag

A Long Island City asphalt recycling plant is spraying a “choking” stink along the Newtown Creek — leaving state regulators fuming and residents plugging their noses.State regulators first raised a stink about the noxious fumes from Green Asphalt back in January 2024, when the company was accused of spewing emissions that “unreasonably interfered with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property” in violation of the New York State Air Pollution Control Law.But locals said take a whiff of the air along the Newtown Creek and the chemical odor has only gotten worse since then.“At first it was a choking smell – I’m talking about how you would literally gag when you go outside,” said Tom Mituzas, a longtime resident of the Blissville section of the neighborhood and member of the Blissville Civic Organization.

“Your eyes would tear because the smokestacks are so low,” Mituzas said of the plant, which opened in 2011.“The smoke would stay at street level, and you’d go out of your house and you’d breathe [fumes] in, and you’d just choke.” The resident told The Post he moved his 95-year-old aunt from her childhood home last summer because he was afraid “she was going to die in the house” due to the fumes that seep indoors.The state Department of Environmental Conservation has continued to receive “numerous” complaints about the odor — and its potential health effects, officials wrote in a letter to the plant Wednesday.“The department has continued to regularly receive numerous community complaints and inquiries regarding both the odor emanating from the facility and potential human health implications associated with emissions from the facility,” the DEC wrote in a letter issued to the plant Wednesday.Regulators are now demanding the plant increase the height of its smokestacks from 45 feet to 90 feet by Dec.

11, its letter showed.The company will also have to test for air contaminants and an elemental analysis of the recycled...