INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A Muncie businessman has been sentenced to a year of community detention for abandoning two semitrailers loaded with drums of hazardous waste on someone else’s property.

Richard D. Reece, 68, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty to three federal counts of unlawful transportation, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste.

“The defendant simply abandoned dangerous chemicals and walked away, rather than disposing of them safely and legally,” said Acting Special Agent in Charge Randall Ashe of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal enforcement office in Chicago.

In 2004, emergency crews discovered two abandoned semitrailers loaded with about 120 drums and other containers after Muncie residents complained of chemical odors in an industrial area.

The EPA, the FBI and other agencies investigated the abandoned waste and eventually traced it to Reece, whose proposed electroplating business, Synco Technology, Inc., never got off the ground at an industrial site in Farmland.

Federal prosecutors said Reece placed equipment, drums and containers of electroplating chemicals from his failed business into the semitrailers in 2002. They were parked in a vacant lot next to a Muncie convenience store before he moved them in 2003 to the industrial park.

Reece was sentenced to six months in a community confinement facility and six months of home confinement, and ordered to pay about $56,000 in restitution to the government for their emergency response costs.