Don't Like Wal-Mart? Fine, Here's a Metal-Shredding Plant

This one is way too funny. All across the country you have these anti-capitalist types trying to block Wal-Mart from providing their neighbors with low-priced goods. They're typically strongly pro-union Democrat types.

Well, in one Pennsylvania town they succeeded in blocking a Wal-Mart from opening up.

But now residents are upset because the business that instead opened is a recycling plant, and the poor things just can't handle the noise.

D'oh!

Walt Neidlinger spent years trying to keep a Wal-Mart-anchored shopping complex from being built near his Wind Gap home.

The traffic would have been suffocating for their little community, neighbors argued, so when the massive retailer and its partners packed up their plans and left Plainfield Township last year, Neidlinger was ecstatic. He figured he'd wait for the next plan to come along and remembers thinking, ''What could be worse than Wal-Mart?''

Over the past year, Neidlinger says, he's gotten an answer: RPM Recycling -- the metal-shredding plant on the same land -- causes daily noise that sounds like a freight train rumbling down the street, and frequent explosions that shake his walls.

Last week, a fire at the recycling plant inflamed growing tensions between residents, who say the plant has ruined their neighborhood, and RPM co-owner Nolan A. Perin, who says he's spent $200,000 to help calm the noise and wonders why he's being criticized for bringing industry to an industrial park.

Oh, so Wal-mart doesn't sound so bad now, huh Walt?

You idiot.

''The noise is a constant nuisance and the explosions make our windows shake,'' Neidlinger said. ''I just feel Mr. Perin put this there out of spite after the shopping center development fell through.''

Perin, who owns the 200 acres near the Wind Gap border, denies that.

''That's about as childish a thought as a person can have,'' Perin said. ''We proposed that recycling plant long before the [Wal-Mart] retail development fell through. I want to be a good neighbor, but I wish people would bring their complaints to me, rather than the media.''

Well, now Walt Neidlinger is getting more attention than he ever could hope for.

H/T Rush.

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