PFAS complicates the problem of handling ‘garbage juice’ from state’s only landfill
Vermont’s only trash landfill has a big problem: How to get rid of leachate — the liquid waste from landfills that’s sometimes called “garbage juice.”
The leachate must be handled carefully because it contains toxic residue from trash that was buried at a large landfill in Coventry called the New England Waste Services of Vermont, operated by Casella.
Leachate is most often disposed of at municipal sewage-treatment plants — but those plants have no way of treating PFAS and other “forever chemicals” that are in products that wind up in the landfill.
The state Agency of Natural Resources is proposing changes in the way the state handles leachate, and a key part of the plan is to send most of the state’s leachate to Montpelier’s wastewater treatment plant, which discharges effluent into the Winooski River, which flows into Lake Champlain.
Provisions in the permit have prompted concern among some residents and environmental advocacy groups in both Montpelier and Newport, which is near the landfill.
Leachate forms when rain, snow and decomposing substances seep through garbage. It’s collected in lined cells at the bottom of the Coventry landfill before it flows into a sequence of storage tanks, where it’s finally pumped into trucks and hauled to sewage treatment plants.
The current permit authorizes Casella to send 23,000 gallons of leachate per day to the Montpelier treatment plant, but the waste company can exceed that amount as long as the biochemical oxygen demand — a metric used to measure the concentration of the liquid — remains below 1,200 pounds per day.
A draft of a new permit, open for public comment until Nov. 8, would authorize Casella to send leachate to the Montpelier plant, and would maintain the current maximum concentration at 1,200 pounds per day of biochemical oxygen demand. However, it would authorize an increase in volume from 23,000 gallons to 60,000 gallons per day.
Over the last five years, Montpelier’s plant accepted an average of 19,000 gallons per day, with 65,388 gallons the biggest one-day delivery, according to a state-issued fact sheet on the draft permit.
If Casella breached its daily limits for leachate, it could take overflow to Plattsburgh, New York, said Amy Polaczyk, a program manager with the state’s wastewater management division.
The cap is new, and because the concentration limits will remain the same, state officials said the draft permit is more restrictive than the standing permit, even though it allows greater volume.
More research is needed to determine whether more leachate means more PFAS, even when metrics that measure the concentration of the leachate indicate that it’s diluted, Polaczyk said.
The sewer plants in Burlington, Essex Junction, Barre and Newport would be removed from the list of facilities authorized to take leachate if the permit is approved. State officials say that, aside from Newport, those plants haven’t accepted a significant amount of leachate, if any, in the last five years. Montpelier has accepted most of the state’s leachate in that timeframe.
The PFAS question
Leachate is no longer going to the Newport treatment plant because, according to Mayor Paul Monette, Act 250 permit restrictions on Casella stopped the city from accepting and treating the material.
Residents were already frustrated by the presence of the landfill near their community, which expanded in 2018, adding 51.2 acres onto the existing 78.2-acre facility, and they were also concerned about PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Exposure to PFAS, an emerging chemical class, is known to cause a range of harmful health impacts such as reproductive issues, cancers, a diminished immune system and more.
In 2020, officials found that effluent from both Montpelier and Newport — the two wastewater plants processing leachate — contained a disproportionately high amount of PFAS.
The amount of leachate headed to the Montpelier has increased in recent years because of Newport’s rejection of the substance, and because of the 50-acre landfill expansion, Polaczyk said.
One of the biggest changes in the permit, she said, is increased monitoring for PFAS and other substances “to both characterize the leachate as it comes into the plant, as it leaves the Montpelier wastewater plant, and then as part of supporting the pilot study that is required by the permit.”
The permit also outlines a plan for Casella to develop a pilot project in which it would filter the toxic chemical group PFAS from leachate before it entered the waterways.
Handing it off
The Montpelier City Council discussed the issue when it met Wednesday night, and environmental groups and residents spoke out against the permit because of concerns about PFAS in local waterways.
Montpelier is not obligated to take leachate, and because it’s the only municipality in the state currently accepting the substance, some conversation centered on the city’s unusual power to apply pressure to Casella and the state to find solutions to the problem.
“Sometimes by forcing the issue by saying ‘no’ to this proposal, which is significantly flawed, I think it helps to drive better answers and better solutions,” Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said at the meeting.
Shaina Kasper, Vermont and New Hampshire water program director for Community Action Works, an organization that helps communities fight pollution, said she’s seen the impacts of PFAS exposure firsthand through her work in a nationwide coalition fighting PFAS contamination.
Along with 37 other residents, she signed a letter asking the council not to accept the draft permit because it authorizes an increased volume of leachate. She said she hopes all municipalities that accept leachate from the Coventry landfill reject the substance until Casella can fully remove PFAS from it.
Many speakers acknowledged the complexity of the issue. While Vermont recently banned certain products that contain PFAS — used to make materials resistant to heat and water — many household items contain the chemicals. Even if Vermonters stopped disposing of PFAS-containing products immediately, the landfill would contain decades’ worth of the stuff.
The Montpelier plant accepts millions of gallons of leachate per year, and storing it until an effective treatment can remove PFAS is not likely feasible.
Lauren Hierl, a Montpelier City Council member and executive director of Vermont Conservation Voters, brought the issue to the council’s attention and was one of many speakers expressing concern about passing the problem to another community.
“We’ve seen, time and again, environmental justice issues where it goes to low-income communities, communities of color, and for us to make a decision that just results in that, without getting at any bigger, longer-term solutions, concerns me,” she said. “I’m really wrestling with that.”
Hierl said she doesn’t blame the Montpelier facility, Vermonters who use the products, or, in this case, Casella for the problem.
“I blame the chemical industry who knew for decades that these chemicals were toxic and persistent — who hid it, who lied about it, and continue to manufacture them and continue, to this day, to manufacture them, and reap billions upon billions of dollars in profits as they poison us,” she said.
Jennifer Morton, a council member, said that, especially as a member of the Ojibwe tribe, she’s concerned about protecting water.
“I don’t feel OK just handing it off to another community to handle, because that’s always what happens, and then somebody else is dealing with everybody else’s mess,” Morton said.
Hierl proposed that councilors write a letter to the state, outlining conditions for accepting the leachate, such as an expectation that Casella and the state work effectively to treat leachate for PFAS as soon as possible, and that the state expand its role in overseeing that project.
Not feeling patient
In 2019, Casella conducted a study to find possible methods for removing PFAS from leachate before it enters sewer plants, which are not equipped to remove the chemicals.
Along with changing the restrictions for Montpelier, the draft permit requires Casella to implement such a technology within one year after the permit is approved, and to monitor the effectiveness of the treatment.
While treatment options have emerged recently, they “create a concentrated waste residual that also must be disposed of or destroyed, and the science and technologies available for managing the waste residuals and potential air emissions from these treatment options are still developing,” the permit’s fact sheet says.
In Newport, residents and environmental groups objected to the specifics of the pilot project Tuesday night at a public hearing on the permit, held by the Agency of Natural Resources.
Like people at the Montpelier City Council meeting, many said the agency, whose job is to protect the public, should exert more control over the leachate treatment pilot project than Casella, a for-profit company.
Polaczyk told VTDigger that the state maintains full oversight over the process.
“We are not PFAS removal engineering experts,” she said. “Our intention is that the engineers are designing the project to be appropriate. That’s an approach we take in most of our permits, because we want the best technology to be proposed.”
In four months, after Casella chooses its treatment option, the public will have more opportunities to provide comments, said Pete LaFlamme, director of the watershed management division.
“We’ll review it, we’ll eventually go back and forth and approve it,” LaFlamme said. “We’ll then go back out to the public with meetings like we had last night and say ‘this is what we’re proposing as the treatment standard and the treatment works. What do you think, public?’”
Once the parties decided on a treatment option, it would be put into operation for two years with intense data collection, informing a comprehensive report before a permanent option was chosen, LaFlamme said.
Peter Blair, a staff attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, said at Tuesday’s meeting that the agency should take an even more active role in the project.
“Specifically, the permit would allow Casella, not ANR, to identify specific operation, performance, economic, water quality, residuals and air quality parameters that will be analyzed throughout the pilot project,” he said. “We understand the need to be flexible at the beginning of this process, but ANR, not the permittee, should be responsible for setting these goals and boundaries.”
Some also expressed concerns that the leachate treatment project could be sited in Coventry or Newport. Neither Casella nor state officials have yet indicated where the project would be centered.
Some at the Newport meeting said they think the process is rushed, but Montpelier councilors said they hope to expedite the process. State officials said the short timeline comes from their feeling of urgency on the matter — the longer it takes to treat leachate, the more PFAS will accumulate in the water, they said.
Jay Ericson, a Montpelier council member, said at Wednesday’s meeting that the council should take a proactive stance.
“I’m not feeling patient about this, because it’s a really significant issue,” he said. “So I do think that we need to have that more accelerated timeline in mind as a city.”