Collection dates rotate throughout the state with different counties involved from year to year as needed. Herr said the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture offers the program at no charge, which provides everyone the opportunity to dispose of unwanted hazardous pesticides in an environmentally safe way. They created a wetlands mitigation bank containing 2.6 miles of creek. Plans to build the industrial park fell through because they would destroy a stretch of Fox Creek, the only stream in St. Louis County that has not been channelized, silted in or polluted. The Missouri Conservation Department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers suggested they form a modified version of a mitigation bank.
Federal law requires developers to mitigate any damage that their work causes to aquatic resources.
Where damage is unavoidable, they must replace lost wetland or stream values, either at the site or somewhere else. Mitigation banks are sites where developers to create or enhance aquatic resources to gain credit toward damages that occur elsewhere. The Fox Creek Stream Mitigation Bank is the first stream mitigation bank in the U.S., and perhaps the first in the world. Our job was to decide what the market price of these stream mitigation credits would actually buy in terms of environmental quality. We set high standards for water quality and stream bank stabilization, because streams have tremendous worth beyond the purely aesthetic and recreational values we normally associate with them.