EDGEWATER -- New developments sprout like mushrooms in Edgewater, so the fenced-off patch of green in between the Homewood Suites and CVS on River Road is a strange sight.

The verdant stretch hides a toxic history. More than a century of tar manufacturing and oil recycling left arsenic, coal tar and waste oil in the soil and groundwater.

Officials from Honeywell, whose corporate ancestors first polluted the land, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency presented a plan Tuesday to clean the ground and prepare it for future development.

Among the major components of the plan is called soil solidification. Rather than shipping the contaminated soil away or capping it, CH2M, Honeywell's contractor for the cleanup, plans to lock it in place by mixing cement into the soil.

The process will leave impermeable concrete monoliths underground, with the contaminants trapped in place, said Steve

Coladonato

, remediation manager for the site for Honeywell. It's a technique borrowed from civil engineers who developed it to strengthen weak soil.

"Besides being a protective remedy, it solidifies the material in place," said John Morris, global remediation director for Honeywell.

Morris said the practice would prove more sustainable than trucking the soil away. In Jersey City, where Honeywell is excavating chromium from a former chemical site, trucks were leaving the site every seven minutes for four years straight.

Other cleanup components might be more familiar.

Honeywell plans to deploy four deep collection wells to catch contaminants in the ground water and build a groundwater barrier to keep them from reaching the Hudson River.

Honeywell and the EPA are still working out a plan to clean the polluted sediments in the Hudson.

Also unresolved is how to clean an area of high-concentration arsenic under the site. The ground cleanup is scheduled to begin in September and last until the end of 2018. Morris said he hopes the arsenic can be cleaned under the same two-year schedule.

The Barrett Company began manufacturing roof tar at the site in the 1860s. The company eventually became part of Allied Chemical, which became Allied Signal, which merged with Honeywell in 1999.

Barrett sold the property in the 1970s, and it eventually fell into the hands of the Quanta Resources Corporation, which recycled oil at the property until 1981, when the state Department of Environmental Protection found carcinogenic chemicals in the oil storage tanks.

Morris said air quality would be closely monitored during the project. Many apartments and businesses are directly adjacent to the Quanta site.

The work will eventually close lanes of River Road.

Coladonato

said the cleanup personnel would coordinate with engineers from Bergen County, which hopes to repair a sunken section of the road that passes over the site at the same time.

Edgewater residents who attended the public information session said they were cautiously optimistic about the cleanup. Carolyn R. Stefani, who lives at Waterford Towers, just across the street from Quanta, said she still had concerns about noise and air pollution.

"I think I'm just going to wait and see what arises," she said.

The cleanup aims to bring the site to a commercial and residential standard.

Fred Daibes, who has developed many other properties in Edgewater, owns the site.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.