Wilmington police technicians bring order to property and evidence warehouse

As one of two technicians working in the Wilmington Police Department's property and evidence warehouse, DellaPia knows the resting place of some of the city's last-surviving remnants of past crimes, in some cases, from decades ago. In many ways, the 6,060-square-foot repository in the belly of police headquarters is like a private museum that testifies to Wilmington's darker side. Police work, after all, is not always pleasant business.

On one area lies the .44 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver that accidentally shot Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son, during the 1993 filming of "The Crow" in Wilmington. In another box sits clothes, track impressions and photographs of the scene in April 1978 when Officer James Nunalee Sr. was shot and killed in an ambush outside a convenience store on Wrightsville Avenue. Fixed along shelf E are 29 containers with evidence from the city's cold case homicides, items detectives occasionally sift through in hopes of solving unanswered cases.

These moments of Wilmington's history, told by the evidence that sits on those shelves, are part of what fascinates DellaPia about her job.

New evidence and recovered property pours into the warehouse daily, all with a story behind it. Most items are placed in heat-sealed plastic bags and handed to DellaPia or her colleague, Casey Ludlum, for storage. They mark each item with a bar code and store it on a shelf or on the warehouse floor, where it will stay until a case has been adjudicated or, in cases of found property, someone claims it.

Cold case evidence, however, must be kept indefinitely if it contains potential DNA.

Seized cash is only briefly kept at the department before it is deposited in a bank account. Once the case is wrapped up in court, the money is typically transferred to the local school board.

Criminal case evidence housed in the department's warehouse runs the gamut from machetes and golf clubs used in assaults to pirated DVDs. Last year alone, technicians processed 11,778 pieces of evidence and property, or about 981 items per month.

One box scheduled for incineration later this year contains about 2,000 clear plastic balls that you can get out of a vending machine at most grocery stores for a quarter. The only difference is that instead of a cheap plastic toy inside, the balls contained marijuana, part of a drug distribution operation police squashed in 2008.

"This was a vice operation," DellaPia said, laying down a clear bag filled halfway with what dark marijuana seeds on the table where officers package their evidence for safekeeping.

TECH TURNS JUNK PLASTICS INTO DIESEL « Scotties Toy Box

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Normally, potato chip bags, beer rings, gooey food wrappers and other plastics that cannot be recycled go directly to the dump. But improvements on an existing technology could divert billions of tons of “end-of-life” plastics from landfills and turn them into gas to run cars and trucks.

Called pyrolysis, the technique is being advanced by more than a dozen U.S. and foreign firms, some of which are producing synthetic crude oil or ready-to-drive diesel. If these plants are successful, junk plastic could replace imported oil as a source of cheap, sustainable fuel for the future.

The EPA says Americans dispose of 48 billion tons of plastics yearly, and only recycle 7 percent of that total. Engineers at  Cynar , a tech firm outside Dublin, Ireland, says they can turn each ton of mixed plastic waste into 175 gallons of diesel, 50 gallons of gasoline and 25 gallons of kerosene – all ready to burn.

“We are after the stuff that would go into a landfill,” said Cynar managing director Michael Murray about his source of so-called “end-of-life” plastics. “We’re not after the good stuff that gets recycled.”

The pyrolysis technology varies slightly from company to company, but is essentially this: big heaps of junky, non-recyclable plastics are sorted out from the garbage stream, baled into giant cubes, shredded into tiny bits, and then fed into an enormous furnace. But unlike most furnaces, these high-temperature burners are fueled by nitrogen instead of oxygen, and burn in a vacuum. The process transforms the plastics into a gas, then condenses them into a liquid, which is then filtered and cleaned of contaminants, including inks and acids.

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