Bullseye Glass is back to making enough stained glass to meet customer demand for the first time in months, the company said Thursday, thanks to a filter that controls emissions of toxic metals.

Jim Jones, Bullseye's vice president, said Bullseye installed a device known as a baghouse at its Southeast Portland facility on Aug. 21.

Officials with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality said they inspected and approved the new baghouse on Aug. 29. Production of glass colored with heavy metals resumed in some of Bullseye's newly filtered furnaces that same day, Jones said.

The company since February has limited its use of cadmium and other metals following the discovery of elevated levels of carcinogenic heavy metals in the air near the plant.

Mary Peveto, of Neighbors for Clean Air, said her organization is cautiously optimistic about the progress, saying that the Department of Environmental Quality's oversight of the plant demonstrated increased vigilance. Peveto's group has been a vocal critic of the state's role in overseeing industrial pollution.

Bullseye won't have to test the air coming out of the baghouse for pollutants until early next year. Still, state officials are confident the baghouse works.

"It's a pretty substantial piece of equipment. It's not something you just sort of throw in there," said Keith Johnson, air quality director.

The filters work by passing exhaust through multiple layers of cloth. The ones currently in place can filter smoke from 11 of Bullseye's 20 furnaces, Johnson said. Another baghouse in the works would cover an additional seven.

While Bullseye appears to be out of the woods with state regulators, Jones lamented the path the company had to take to get to this point.

"I don't think that any business or neighborhood should have to go through what we've gone through," Jones said.

Bullseye's use of toxic heavy metals in unfiltered furnaces was not illegal when the heavy metal hotspots were discovered. The company has been the focus of ire and lawsuits from neighbors, while also piling up a backlog of orders and facing cancellations from customers.

At least two other Portland-area glass manufacturers have given notice they will be installing the same kind of filter that Bullseye has, Johnson said: Northstar and Glass Alchemy, in Northeast and North Portland, respectively.

Separately, state officials said Thursday that Bullseye has met a Sept. 1 deadline to clean or replace its smokestacks, which regulators believe could be the source of elevated levels of hexavalent chromium in Southeast Portland air.

A Department of Environmental Quality air monitor at Southeast 22nd Avenue and Gladstone Street has repeatedly found the cancer-causing metal at levels exceeding what's considered normal in Portland.

The agency used air-monitor and wind-pattern data to identify two possible sources: Bullseye and Lehigh Cement, a cement transportation company. Samples that the agency took from Bullseye's smokestacks tested positive for hexavalent chromium, as did samples of cement from Lehigh.

The agency was concerned hexavalent chromium that had accumulated in Bullseye's vents over the years could re-vaporize as Bullseye made other kinds of glass. Bullseye replace or cleaned the contaminated stacks.

Johnson said the state environmental agency still doesn't know for sure if Bullseye caused the elevated levels of airborne hexavalent chromium, but continued air monitoring analyses should show by the end of the month if Bullseye's cleaning reduces levels in the air.

As for Lehigh, company representative Jeff Sieg said he's confident the plant is not the source of the metal in the air. The plant is "a very dust-free operation," he said, because it has been taking measures over the 54 years of its existence to reduce dust emissions.

Nonetheless, Lehigh has taken additional steps to prevent the release of dust, Johnson said. These include hanging tarps on the sides of train cars that carry cement.

-- Fedor Zarkhin

503-294-7674; @fedorzarkhin