CABOT — Despite opposition from environmental advocates and some nearby residents, Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources plans to renew a permit allowing Cabot Creamery to spray wastewater containing cleaning fluids onto surrounding fields.
The agency took public comments Monday night from several dozen residents and advocates who gathered in Cabot, many of whom spoke against the permit’s renewal.
Given the volume of water and chemical compounds present in the fluid, the practices Cabot uses to dispose of wastewater aren’t suitable, opponents said.
“Historically, using whey that’s left over from dairy processing to fertilize the farm fields that in turn feed the milking herd has been a sensible and beneficial farming practice – it allows for nutrients to cycle through the local environment on a very natural and proportional scale,” Tunbridge dairy farmer Lindsay Harris said.
“It’s this tradition that seems to be the root of Cabot’s wastewater treatment program,” she said. “Unfortunately, the volume and the contents of the waste getting spread now has bloomed into anything but a local or natural cycling of nutrients.”
Cabot should instead build a wastewater treatment plant to clean the water instead of dispersing it, untreated, over the landscape, opponents of the permit said.
Such a plant would overwhelm the Winooski River, state representatives said.
“The Agency [of Natural Resources] did look into that in detail in the late ’80s, but based on the low summertime flows of the Winooski River and the amount of water that would have to be treated and discharged to that stream, the water quality standards would likely not be met in the stream,” said Bryan Harrington, an environmental analyst with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation’s Drinking Water and Groundwater Protection Division.
Since even treated water contains nitrogen, phosphate and other compounds, such a high volume of discharge from a water treatment plant would deplete the river’s oxygen and cause “detrimental effects on fish and aquatic life,” Harrington said.
A lot has changed since the ANR last reviewed the feasibility of such a plant, said Mike Rapacz, who attended Monday’s meeting to address ANR representatives.
“That was 35 years ago – treatment technology has changed dramatically, and I’m certain we could meet water quality standards if the company were willing to build a treatment plant,” he said.
The creamery continues to search for viable treatment options, but none appear to have become available, said Doug DiMento, spokesman for Agrimark, the company that does business under the Cabot Creamery name.
“We continue to explore different options” that may offer alternatives to spreading wastewater untreated onto fields, DiMento said.
Because the town of Cabot’s hydrological features don’t lend themselves to wastewater treatment, DiMento said, Agrimark has focused recent expansion efforts in other towns that have a treatment plant, such as Waterbury.
“We’re trying to be a good corporate citizen, and we always have been,” DiMento said. “Sometimes things may change over time in terms of science … We’ll see where that takes us.”
The permit would authorize Cabot Creamery to spray nearly 200,000 gallons of water per day onto more than 500 fields in the creamery’s vicinity. That water contains residue from more than 20 cleaning compounds identified in the permit application.
Opponents say the practice spreads harmful chemicals into hundreds of streams in the area.
Harrington said farmers voluntarily sign up to receive the wastewater, because it contains nitrogen and phosphates that fertilize their crops.
Harrington said that wastewater from Cabot Creamery has not been implicated as a contributor to pollution levels in Lake Champlain that led the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new limits on phosphorus effluence.
Harrington said that Cabot Creamery is likely to see its permit renewed, as it has been every five years since 1990.
“We feel that Cabot is meeting groundwater and surface water standards to justify us issuing a renewal of their indirect discharge permit,” he said.
