A busy industrial street in Long Island City will get a little busier once a new asphalt plant begins operation.

The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has already issued the necessary permits for a new asphalt plant to open at 37-98 Railroad Avenue on Newtown Creek. The plant will be operated by Green Asphalt, Inc.

Community Board 2 chairman Joseph Conley said the board was surprised to hear that the plant would be opening. He said he contacted DEC, which in turn said that a notice was sent to the board seeking comments on the application, as well as the borough president. Conley said the notice was never received.

“The sad part is that the air quality in that area is already so problematic that we feel they could have gone an extra step and picked up the phone,” said Conley.

Thomas Panzone, a spokesperson for DEC, contends that the public notice seeking comments on the project was sent, as well as printed in the Daily News and the state’s Environmental Notices Bulletin.

“As is customary with these types of permit applications, the community board was sent a public notice by mail,” he wrote in an email. “No returned mailing was received by DEC to indicate that the notice had not been received.”

On top of the additional trucks causing congestion and pollution while entering and exiting the facility, Conley noted that the plant would be operating two large diesel engines, which he fears will release harmful particulate matter into the air.

“I’m not really sure what is ‘green’ about that,” he said.

The plant will be located between Railroad Avenue and Newtown Creek. Just this month, the creek was officially added to the federal Superfund list, designating it an environmental disaster and qualifying it for a federally mandated cleanup.

Panzone said that the asphalt plant will have no negative impact on the creek.

“There will be no discharge of process water to Newton Creek, and DEC determined that the information provided…met the requirements for issuance of the air permit and tidal wetland permit,” added Panzone.

The plant will also neighbor a site operated by Waste Management, a trash disposal firm. The Waste Management facility will play an integral role in the city’s 20-year Solid Waste Management Plan, which aims to shift trash removal from large trucks to barge and rail.

Waste Management’s role in that plan has come under fire from local leaders and civic groups after it was learned that trash from the processing site would be shipped by truck on public streets to the Blissville Railyard, where it would be shipped by rail out of the city to landfills.

Waste Management eventually bowed to public pressure and scrapped that plan, opting instead to truck waste along a private road that runs next to the rail line. However, while trash won’t be shipped out of the facility to the rail transfer, garbage trucks will still enter the facility to unload their daily collections.

It was unclear as of press time how many trucks would be entering and exiting the asphalt plant on a given day, or how that might complicate Waste Management’s operations. DEC has not been given an exact date for start of operations at Green Asphalt.