Editor’s note: This commentary is by Don Peterson, a longtime resident of Lowell.
[N]obody willingly agrees to siting a landfill in their neighborhood, but the Casella landfill in Coventry is a special situation.
Because of historical inclinations to fill wetlands with debris, the site has been in use for 50 years or more. In that time, the toxicity of rubbish has increased from a relatively benign mix of organic wastes to a stew of chemicals and heavy metals. The litigation around the PFAS class of chemicals in the Bennington area only underlines that changes in groundwater detection methods will bring up new pollution problems for landfills in the future that are not on anyone’s radar now.
Think for a moment about lithium ion batteries — the influx of this toxic heavy metal is only just begun, with the era of electric-powered vehicles and machinery upon us. And there are other toxic materials we know about, and many that will only become apparent in the future. Did you dispose of a flashlight battery into your trash lately? The best will in the world cannot guarantee a permanent repository of these toxic chemicals. And in Coventry there is an especially mitigating circumstance.
The complication with the Casella site is the presence of international boundary waters. These are not within the jurisdiction of the state of Vermont. According to Denis Paradis, member of Parliament for Quebec, the Parliament of Canada has taken up a bill to address pollution in international waters such as Lake Memphremagog. To me this means that should a pollution event occur in Coventry, the Canadian government will litigate to ensure their drinking water supply (Memphremagog) is remediated.
Should the landfill be capped and no longer producing revenue when that should happen, Casella would have only their closure bond for legal defense. They would have to consider insolvency. Insolvency would compel the state of Vermont to defend itself in court across the border in Quebec.
So the short-term interests of the state are gambling that no leakage from the site will ever occur. It is a poor bet since everything we know about landfills says that, sooner or later, they always fail. As a repository, even the Great Pyramids have failed. And this landfill is in the worst possible site — the wetlands of an international body of water.
