The Moretown Landfill has been pushing for recertification amid environmental violations and local outcry. The Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) has said it intends to shut the landfill down, but the new owners, who took over on Sept. 1 last year, want another chance. They blamed the previous operator, Interstate Waste Services, for most of the problems.
“They weren’t meeting Highstar’s standards and they certainly weren’t meeting our standards,” said Mary O’Brien, chief marketing officer for Advanced Disposal.
Both companies are owned by the same investment firm, Highstar Capital, but are managed separately. According to O’Brien, Highstar Capital asked Advanced Disposal to take over all of Interstate Waste Services’ holdings and fix the problems Interstate Waste had created.
Michael Stubbs, a professional engineer contracted by Advanced Disposal, said he was shocked at conditions when he arrived at the landfill.
“All I can tell you is when we got there what was in the ground was not even close to what was needed,” he said.
Mike DiMaggio, the interim general manager of the landfill, said, “That thing is in such disarray it’s unbelievable.”
The state lodged environmental violations against Moretown Landfill for the last 13 years, but things came to a head in the last year as neighbor complaints mounted and the state prepared to decide whether to recertify the landfill. The most consistent violation, off-site odors, resulted in well over 100 complaints from neighbors in 2012.
Advanced Disposal has already begun overhauling the landfill gas collection system, which they say will reduce the rotten egg smell. They’ve started installing a temporary cap on cell 3, which is designed to prevent odors from escaping. But work on the temporary cap was halted earlier this month when state regulators questioned whether it was allowed by the landfill’s current permits. This left exposed trenches in the trash and the landfill vulnerable to erosion, until the state decided on Wednesday to allow the landfill to finish the portion of the cap they’d started.
Advanced Disposal has spent $450,000 on improvements since it took over operations in September. It plans on spending at least another $700,000 to address odors.
Resident Max Fortune, who lives less than a mile from the landfill, said he had to leave his home this month because of the odors caused by the installation of the temporary cap. Because the process involves excavating trenches in the trash, odors got worse during the construction. But several other residents, who said they didn’t live near the landfill, spoke up in favor of giving Advanced Disposal time to fix the problems.
“It seems to me that we’re better off getting the money,” said one resident. The Moretown Landfill pays the town over $500,000 a year as a host fee.
Shortly after that, the meeting devolved into a brief shouting match between Moretown residents.
O’Brien admits that the landfill hasn’t done enough to develop good relations with neighbors. Mostly, she blames that on Interstate Waste Services. No one, as far as she knows, contacted the neighbors to tell them that installing the temporary cap would increase odors in the short term but wipe them out in the long term. She came in after that decision was made. O’Brien’s first contact with neighbors was when she phoned them on Jan. 16 to tell them about the selectboard meeting.
“Our concern is to make it better for them,” she said.
O’Brien said Advanced Disposal wants the Moretown community to be able to say that Advanced Disposal has done what they said they would do. Even if the landfill is shut down, Advanced Disposal wants to improve infrastructure at the landfill so there are no more violations.
“How we handle this issue reflects in all our other locations,” said O’Brien. “We know we have to fix the problem.” She says the fix is not “hugely technical,” but it is expensive. Advanced Disposal plans to replace 10 to 15 gas wells, at a cost of $40,000 per well.
The landfill’s actions are regulated on the state level by ANR, which oversees technical aspects of landfill operations, and the Act 250 District 5 environmental commission, which decides whether the landfill has undue, adverse impacts on the environment.
In November, ANR asked the landfill to deliver a stellar proposal for wiping out off-site odors, the most consistent violation over the years. The landfill produced a proposal on Dec. 7. On Dec. 11, ANR said it intended to deny the landfill’s recertification, which would effectively shut the landfill down. The landfill’s response to ANR’s “Intent to Deny” announcement is due Jan. 21. ANR expects to make a final decision about closing the landfill in early March.
Meanwhile, ANR accused the landfill of 12 environmental violations on Nov. 20. The landfill is required to fix those violations, and so it submitted a plan for addressing them, which included the temporary cap, to ANR on Dec. 4. ANR approved the plan, though it did say it was concerned that landfill staff didn’t have the expertise to fix the gas collection system and that installing the temporary cap would increase odors in the short term.
After consulting with the Act 250 District 5 environmental commission, which gave it the green light, the landfill began constructing a temporary cap, laying horizontal gas-collection pipes in two acres of cell 3. They planned on installing a cap on 5.7 acres total.
Attorney Jim Dumont, who represents neighbors Lisa Ransom and Scott Baughman, filed a motion to stop the work, arguing the work didn’t fall under the landfill’s Act 250 permit. The environmental commission reconsidered and issued a new decision, ordering the landfill to stop and reverse all the work it had done so far on the temporary cap. O’Brien called the stop order “extremely frustrating.”
The landfill countered by requesting the commission reverse that decision. ANR wrote a letter supporting the landfill’s work on the cap on Jan. 16, stating that even Ransom and Baughman wrote an email saying they wouldn’t oppose the landfill finishing the cap. On Jan. 17, the commission once again reversed its decision, saying the landfill could finish work on those two acres, provided they finish by Jan. 25. DiMaggio said they can get the work done in three days. The commission also required the landfill to submit a new permit application for the rest of the cap by the end of the month.
Moretown Landfill’s new management team promised big changes last week. The officials from Advanced Disposal told Moretown selectboard members at a meeting Thursday night that given enough time, they can virtually wipe out the odor problem at the landfill.
O’Brien said because Advanced Disposal was ordered to take over the landfill and therefore didn’t do any due diligence, the company spent much of the fall assessing the problems and figuring out how to fix them. It took a while for new personnel to move in and old personnel to move out. As a result, the company didn’t start to take concerted action until the end of Dec. last year. It’s not clear which company was responsible for which actions last fall. Advanced Disposal takes credit for most of the good things and almost none of the bad.
The first thing Advanced Disposal says they did after acquiring the landfill was to stop taking in sewage sludge in October. Then they started pumping water out of the landfill gas collection system, something they say Interstate Waste Services hadn’t done.
When trash decomposes, it produces a mixture of gases, some of which are smelly and others that are flammable and dangerous to breathe. To stop the gas from leaking all over the neighborhood through the surface of the landfill, landfills build a system of perforated horizontal and vertical pipes into the piles of trash. They clap a vacuum on the pipes and suck the gas out. The problem is that this also sucks water into the pipes, which lowers the amount of gas sucked out. That water needs to be pumped out so landfill gas doesn’t leak into the neighborhood.
DiMaggio said dewatering the gas wells is basic landfill maintenance and he was shocked Interstate Waste Services didn’t do it. Not pumping wells? “That does not work at all,” he said.
In addition to dewatering wells, Advanced Disposal hired a contractor to feed video cameras into the wells to assess their condition. They also hired a full-time gas well and odor consultant who started work this week and whose job is to monitor odor and gas well problems and make recommendations for how to address them.
As for what other changes they plan to make, Advanced Disposal hopes to be allowed to finish the temporary cap. The temporary cap will consist of a layer of sand over the trash and then a 20 millimeter thick layer of plastic that will lower how much gas escapes into the air. DiMaggio estimated that they’ll finish the cap on all 5.7 acres in four weeks. That will control odors temporarily, and then, when construction season begins, they’ll be able to install a permanent cap on cell 3 and the small portion of cell 2 that is not yet capped. The permanent cap will have a thicker layer of plastic covered with dirt and grass.
O’Brien said Advanced Disposal will promise ANR that they will not take in any out-of-state sewage sludge for the life of the landfill. That leaves in-state sludge, which they say they will monitor closely and turn away highly odorous loads. They also propose to conduct odor patrols of the landfill three times a day so they can identify the sources of odors and eliminate them.
They plan to hire an emissions testing consultant, whose job will be to reduce air pollution from the landfill. They’ll continue to use the odor complaint hotline that has apparently logged over 300 complaints since August 2011. They also plan on shrinking the size of the working face, or the area where trash is dumped, to reduce the surface area that can produce odors.
Interstate Waste Services submitted applications to the state to expand into a fourth cell and to add waste on top of cell 2, but Advanced Disposal says they are withdrawing those bids. They plan to focus only on complying with ANR’s regulations.
The landfill is still taking in trash, though only about a third of what it was taking in over the summer (200 tons per day as opposed to 550). Even at this rate, O’Brien says the life of the landfill is measured in months.
At one point during the meeting, neighbors asked O’Brien whether the landfill will help them if they are forced out of their homes by powerful odors. O’Brien said yes, though no one specified what kind of help that might be.
Advanced Disposal now owns 46 landfills in all, nine of which are in the Northeast. Some of the landfills Advanced Disposal acquired from Interstate Waste Services are, as O’Brien put it, “not performing to Advanced Disposal’s standards.” As for the landfills Advanced Disposal has owned for longer than a few months, Stubbs said there are “no outstanding environmental violations on those.” Advanced Disposal has violated environmental regulations in other states in the past, including issues with off-site odors, but Stubbs said these problems were fixed.
If the landfill is shut down, Advanced Disposal officials said they would use a multi-million dollar bond to close the landfill and monitor it for 30 years. O’Brien was adamant that even if the landfill closes, Advanced Disposal will make sure neighbors are happy.
“Can I guarantee that you’re never going to smell another odor from the landfill? I can’t guarantee you that,” said DiMaggio at the meeting. “Garbage stinks.” He cautioned that if he has to replace a gas well, neighbors might smell it. But DiMaggio is certain he can wipe out nearly all odors, particularly gas and sewage.
Martha Douglass, neighbor of the landfill and spokesperson for Citizens for Landfill Environmental Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR), spoke up frequently at the selectboard meeting. CLEAR recently papered Moretown and surrounding communities with a mailer exhorting residents to “STOP the violations!” Douglass said CLEAR got deals from a graphic designer and printer, which allowed them to pay for the mailer themselves.
“We’ve been told time and time again things would happen,” Douglass said to O’Brien at the meeting. “Vermonters don’t like that. If you’re going to be here with us, you’ve got to start talking straighter.”
“It’s hard for us to believe you,” added neighbor Max Fortune.
Another resident piped in, “We need you folks to do the best that you can. … We cannot afford to lose that income.”
Tom Martin, the selectboard chair, ended the meeting by saying that the selectboard agreed the host-town agreement, which dictates what benefits the town gets from the landfill, should be re-negotiated with more teeth.
