This commentary is by Henry Coe of Danville, a member of DUMP (Don’t Undermine Memphremagog’s Purity), a Vermont-Canadian all-volunteer environmental organization.
Do you know where your garbage goes? You pay a fee and your black plastic bag disappears. Trucks haul it away, out of sight, out of mind.
In Vermont, solid waste collection and disposal is left entirely to for-profit industry. One company, Casella, has a near-monopoly in Vermont, from trash collection to transfer stations to long-distance haulage to its own private landfill in Coventry. It is the only remaining operating landfill in Vermont, permitted to accept 600,000 tons of waste each year.
At 129 acres, it has grown to be a huge garbage mountain, changing the natural landscape adjacent to the South Bay of Lake Memphremagog. The remote and beautiful Northeast Kingdom has become the dumping ground for nearly all of Vermont’s waste, including Chittenden County. Did Northeast Kingdom residents ever have a say in where Vermont’s garbage is dumped? Not to my knowledge.
The actual landfill site where your garbage ends up lies about a mile south of northern-flowing Lake Memphremagog, an international lake that serves as the drinking water reservoir for the cities of Sherbrooke and Magog, and a total population of 175,000 Canadians.
As the state’s only operating landfill, it accepts, without inspection, not only a large majority of Vermont’s waste, but an increasing proportion from out of state. The landfill is surrounded on three sides (in places, adjacent to) by extensive wetlands, sits uphill within 650 feet of the Black River, largest tributary to the lake, and approximately a mile from the lake itself.
Yet, the state has never insisted on true and objective third-party hydrogeologic evaluations of the site. The EPA has itself said, “Eventually all landfill liners leak.” Under today’s EPA rules, the Coventry landfill site, adjacent to wetlands, would never be permitted.
Would Burlingtonians be complacent if conditions were reversed, if Champlain’s and Richelieu’s waters flowed south, and a ginormous Canadian landfill was poised close to the international border, accepting all of Montreal’s 600,000 tons of waste per year? We have a responsibility for our neighbors’ drinking water.
Responsible societies are responsible for the waste they create in their own backyard. Vermont’s Solid Waste Plan has not been effectively revised since it was written over 35 years ago. It originally did call for establishment of responsibly sited, smaller regional landfills,closer to areas of greatest population.
Instead, through unfettered privatization, we now witness the agglomeration of nearly 80% of Vermont’s garbage exported to a single privately owned site in Orleans County, dependent on carbon-spewing long-distance diesel trucking.
In an era of global warming, and findings of dangers to public health from a growing class of persistent and mobile toxic chemicals, found highly concentrated in landfills and landfill garbage juice or leachate, it is past time for legislators to demand a new Vermont Comprehensive Solid Waste Plan. We must require Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources to modernize out-of-date rules and standards for solid waste to protect the public health, our drinking water, and to require environmental justice.
Regrettably, the state Agency of Natural Resources permits this toxic mountain to expand, and defends the owner against citizen calls for more stringent pollution standards and control. The Coventry landfill — placed above a drinking water reservoir, with its daily production of thousands of gallons of leachate or garbage juice, laden with toxic PFAS known as “forever chemicals” among others — is an unanticipated, yet inevitable environmental and public health crisis to happen. Strict public oversight and control are needed..
Casella has applied for a permit to build an “experimental” leachate treatment facility on-site in Coventry. A Casella engineer stated in a public meeting that leachate treatment effluent from its experimental pilot project would go (end of pipe) into the Black River.
This would be in violation of the Clean Water Act that prohibits pollution into surface waters. The permit application hands nearly total responsibility for design, ownership, operation and monitoring of this unproven and highly complex technology — a technology not yet perfected on a large landfill scale elsewhere — to a for-profit, private corporation.
Filtration or destruction of these landfill toxins is too important a societal responsibility to be left to the company that profits from collecting, storing and now owning your waste.
The permits for Casella to design and operate an experimental PFAS pollution discharge filtration and monitoring “pilot project” should be rejected by Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources for the public good of citizens and the environment throughout the Memphremagog watershed in Vermont and Canada.
