Editor’s Note: This article is based on investigative reporting by City Weekly. Read the original investigation here.
When Your Neighbor’s “Recycling Business” Fills the Air with Toxic Fumes: A Utah Horror Story
The orange smoke started appearing after 6 PM. Thick plumes rising from a gray metal building in Murray, Utah, carrying the unmistakable stench of rotten eggs.
Paul Manwaring stepped outside his concrete shop to get the address of the building belching toxic fumes into the freezing January air. He wanted to file a complaint.
The smell knocked him back into his shop before he could finish writing.
“The air was absolutely, completely, unbreathable,” Manwaring told City Weekly in their investigation of what became known as the Accurate Recycling incident.
This is the story of what happens when someone decides to bathe scrap metal in nitric acid in a residential industrial area—and discovers that “technically legal” doesn’t mean “safe” or “acceptable.”
The Smell That Made People Sick
Larry Mick runs a cabinet shop near Accurate Recycling. He describes the fumes as a “pretty nasty sulfur-type smell that made you feel pretty shitty, basically.”
His son got sick.
Other neighbors reported headaches, nausea, and respiratory distress. The fumes were so potent that workers in nearby businesses couldn’t step outside without being driven back indoors.
And yet, when authorities finally showed up—Murray City Police, fire marshals, health department officers, air quality inspectors, hazardous waste officials—they found something disturbing:
Technically, Accurate Recycling hadn’t violated state environmental regulations.
No citations were issued by the state.
Let that sink in. A business was pumping fumes so toxic that neighbors couldn’t breathe, children were getting sick, and the state said, “Eh, looks fine to us.”
How Did This Happen?
Christopher Leo, Accurate Recycling’s owner, had a permit to run a shredding and recycling facility. What he didn’t have—and didn’t bother to get—was permission to start a chemical operation dissolving silver from scrap metal using nitric acid.
This process, Leo explained, usually happens in China or Belgium, “someplace where you can put whatever you want in the air, you can put whatever you want in the water and nobody cares.”
Leo thought if he installed an emissions scrubber, captured waste products, and didn’t dump anything down the drain, he’d be good to go.
So he bought nitric acid, hired a consultant, set up steel vats to bathe metal in acid, and invested $2 million into the operation.
Then his scientist quit.
Undeterred, Leo decided to just “start running it” himself. On day four, police and fire marshals showed up because it smelled like chemicals.
You know, because it was chemicals. Toxic ones. Being vaporized into the air people breathe.
The System That Failed
Here’s the bureaucratic nightmare that allowed this to happen:
State air quality rules: As long as Accurate didn’t emit more than 500 pounds of individual hazardous pollutants, 2,000 pounds of combined hazardous pollutants, or 5 tons of “less serious” pollutants, Leo didn’t need a permit.
So you can pump just under those thresholds into the air your neighbors breathe, and the state won’t stop you.
Hazardous waste management: The Division of Solid & Hazardous Waste issued a warning letter about labeling, storage, disposal, and employee training. But inspector Tom Parry admitted Leo “could have operated his business in compliance with our rules.”
Translation: The rules allow you to run a toxic chemical operation in a community as long as you label your waste properly.
City zoning: This was the only thing that stopped Leo. Murray’s zoning laws don’t allow chemical operations of this type anywhere in the city. The city forced Accurate to cease the chemical side of the business and remove all chemicals from the site.
But even here, Leo believes his conditional-use permit covered “recycling that uses chemicals” and that the city was discriminating against him because it’s a family business and cops think he’s in the mafia.
“The police department thinks that we’re some kind of mafia because it’s a family business,” Leo said.
City officials denied this, but Leo pulled out of Utah anyway, heading back to New Jersey to find a “more welcoming community.”
The Neighbors’ Nightmare
Paul Manwaring isn’t mad at Leo. He’s mad at the system.
“I’m stunned that there’s been no citations,” he said. “I’m absolutely stunned.”
Think about what happened here:
- A company set up shop
- Bought toxic chemicals
- Started a process that made neighbors sick
- Got caught
- Was told to stop by the city (not the state)
- Received zero environmental citations
Manwaring’s frustration is understandable. What good are environmental regulations if someone can pump toxic fumes into your air, make your kids sick, and walk away with a warning about proper labeling?
Why Only After Hours?
Leo says he ran the chemical operations “after hours” out of courtesy to his neighbors—he didn’t like the smell either.
Manwaring has a different theory: Leo only ran it after 6 PM and on weekends to cover it up.
Leo insists it’s simpler than that. “It’s not that I was concerned I was doing anything wrong. It’s not the most pleasant smelling thing in the world, but it’s not illegal. It’s part of the process.”
Technically correct. The best kind of correct when you’re defending why you made a neighborhood unbreathable.
What Utah’s Laws Actually Protect
This case exposes a troubling gap in environmental protection:
What’s regulated: Emission thresholds, waste labeling, disposal procedures, paperwork.
What’s not regulated: Whether your legal emissions make people sick, whether your “compliant” operation renders a neighborhood uninhabitable, whether you traumatize a community before you even bother asking if it’s allowed.
The state’s position: As long as you’re under the threshold, pump away.
The city’s position: This violates zoning, stop immediately.
The neighbors’ position: We can’t breathe and our kids are sick.
Only one of those positions resulted in action.
The Larger Problem
The Accurate Recycling case isn’t an outlier. It’s a preview.
Regulations are designed around thresholds, permits, and procedural compliance. They’re not designed around the question: “Should someone be allowed to do this in a neighborhood where people live and work?”
Leo genuinely believed he was operating legally. And from a state environmental standpoint, he mostly was. He had the scrubber. He captured waste. He didn’t dump chemicals. He checked the regulatory boxes.
What he didn’t have was common sense, community input, or any mechanism forcing him to ask, “Is this a good idea?”
The system assumes that if something isn’t explicitly illegal, it’s acceptable.
But “not illegal” and “acceptable” are very different standards when your neighbors are getting knocked back into their shops by toxic fumes.
The Aftermath
As of March 2015, the chemicals were removed. Leo packed up and left Utah. No charges were filed. No environmental citations issued.
The neighbors were left with headaches, sick kids, and the knowledge that the system designed to protect them… didn’t.
Paul Manwaring, Larry Mick, and everyone else who works in that industrial area learned a hard lesson:
Your right to breathe clean air is less important than a business owner’s right to operate under environmental thresholds.
You can be poisoned legally.
And when you complain, the state will show up, measure the emissions, check the paperwork, and say, “Looks fine to us.”
Welcome to environmental protection in America, where the regulations protect the polluters more than the people being polluted.
The orange smoke is gone now. But the precedent remains: If you want to run a toxic operation, just stay under the threshold, fill out the right forms, and pump away.
Your neighbors will just have to hold their breath.