The birth of Solite (the company and the eponymous material) coincided with the greatest construction boom in American history. More than forty million homes and forty-one thousand miles of highways were built between 1945 and 1975. The benefits of Solite relative to heavier, more expensive concrete production were received as a breakthrough on the scale of Romans learning how to make mortar out of volcanic ash and seawater. At the height of operations, there were plants in New York, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, and Florida. Thirty-two in total. Roberts’s product was everywhere—in highways, high rises, bridges, stadiums, and residences; in landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, Lincoln Center, Yankee Stadium, the UN Plaza, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, the House and Senate chambers of the U.S. Capitol, and D.C.’s Union Station, among countless others. By the time he died in 2016, John Watts Roberts—whose sole remaining plant is still in business today under the banner of Northeast Solite—had transformed the American skyline. The National Ready Mix Concrete Association named its lifetime achievement award after him.
Yet there was another innovation for which Solite became better known, at least for those unlucky souls who shared a property line. The cement aggregate industry depended on fossil fuels for power, but beginning in the late 1960s, price hikes, embargoes, a Gulf War, and a doubling of world oil consumption precipitated a global energy crisis, leaving Solite without an affordable fuel source. At the same time, the U.S. government was flummoxed by the novel problem of hazardous waste management. Pollution began capturing public attention; the Cuyahoga River Fire in Ohio in 1969 was a clarion call for the nascent environmental movement. Richard Nixon federalized the issue, establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, which was tasked with crafting and enforcing regulations to meet Congress’s intent for pollution control.
“When Solite first built that place and started mining clay, the EPA didn’t exist, and there were almost no environmental regulations,” Bruce Reynolds told me at a strip-mall coffee shop near his home in Green Cove Springs. He’d worked as an environmental protection specialist with the U.S. Navy, but has since retired, and now he volunteers his time to the Solite Task Force. “Over the years the regulators did, quite frankly, a piss-poor job of going back and retroactively trying to figure out whether or not Solite met their requirements.” Enforcement of new regulations—such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, which gave the EPA oversight on hazardous waste from the “cradle to grave”—led to steep fines and processing fees for America’s largest hazardous waste generators and relatively poor planning for the lifespan of the waste. In its early years, the EPA permitted Shell Chemical Co., DuPont, Ethyl Corp., and GAF Corp. to dump more than 2.5 million tons of hazardous industrial waste (in blue barrels) into the Gulf of Mexico. This was considered responsible management at the time.