File photo by Riley Robinson/VTDigger
COVENTRY — State officials arrived in Coventry Monday night ready to present a proposal that could eventually remove PFAS, a toxic class of chemicals, from the leachate of the state’s only active landfill.
What some might have seen as a positive development for the health of Vermonters — a pilot project aimed at removing harmful chemicals from public waterways — was met with resounding opposition from locals.
Residents of the Northeast Kingdom, who contribute only a small percentage of the landfill’s trash, countered that the project would mark yet another development in a string of landfill expansions they never agreed to and which many have opposed since 2018, when owner Casella Waste Systems most recently began planning to expand the landfill.
At Monday night’s meeting, state officials presented a proposed plan for Casella to construct a building that would later house a pilot project designed to remove PFAS from leachate, liquid waste from landfills that comes from rainfall and decomposing trash.
Commenters weren’t concerned about the prospect of removing PFAS from leachate. Rather, many who spoke at the meeting said they were concerned that the new building would allow Casella to eventually discharge treated leachate from the property into Lake Memphremagog.
The leachate is currently trucked to Montpelier’s wastewater facility, and state officials say it will continue to be trucked to a wastewater facility during the pilot.
However, Kasey Kathan, who works in the Agency of Natural Resources’ solid waste management program, said the agency has considered a plan to construct a larger chemical treatment facility onsite at the landfill and release the effluent into the Black River, which leads to the lake. The option is one of several that Casella and state officials have researched.
“We are actively trying to determine, long-term, the best solution,” Kathan said. “I am not in any way saying that that would not be something that is proposed and considered in the future.”
Such a project would require a separate permitting process with a separate public comment period, she said.
Lake Memphremagog, which straddles Vermont’s northern border, serves as a drinking water source for 175,000 Canadians.
In the permit amendment at hand, Casella is asking the state for approval to construct a building on site, near tanks in which Casella currently stores its leachate.
In around a year, Casella must also submit a plan to develop the pilot project that would remove PFAS from the leachate, but it hasn’t yet determined how to do so. For that project, the state would monitor levels of PFAS in the treated leachate, and Casella would determine, with the state’s approval, how and whether to adopt a permanent system.
The forthcoming pilot project would be among the first of its kind in the country. It will be the topic of a different permit and another public comment period.
Increasingly, scientists have come to understand that exposure to PFAS is linked to a range of harmful health impacts, such as reproductive issues, cancers and a diminished immune system.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are often called “forever chemicals” because they take thousands of years to break down. In June, the Biden administration issued health advisories stating that consuming even the smallest amount of PFAS puts humans at risk.
Leachate is stored in two tanks at the landfill before it’s trucked to Montpelier’s wastewater treatment facility. There, it’s treated for other contaminants and discharged into the Winooski River, which eventually leads to Lake Champlain. Currently, none of Vermont’s wastewater facilities, including Montpelier’s, have the ability to remove PFAS before it enters the state’s waterways.
That’s why the state recently required Casella to develop a plan to remove the chemical class from its leachate. The company has since embarked on a design process to fulfill that requirement.
Without knowing the details of the forthcoming project, attendees voiced their discomfort about the permanence of a structure built to house a treatment system that hasn’t yet been described to the public.
“You say this is just for testing, but once that building is there, we all know that we’re gonna do a long-term PFAS facility. You guys can say, ‘Oh, that’s not what we’re talking about today.’ Other people have said this — it’s clear as day that that’s the intent,” said Teresa Gerade, a member of the advocacy organization Don’t Undermine Memphremagog’s Purity, also known as DUMP.
During the nearly three-hour meeting, residents railed against state officials and Casella. Some criticized what they characterized as a lack of sufficient information in the permit and expressed a distrust of state officials who have allowed Casella to incrementally expand against the wishes of locals.
“I never voted for it. Nobody here did it. None of the people in Canada ever voted on it. We had no say on it,” said one resident of Newport, who said he lives a mile from the landfill. “We still don’t.”
While state officials asked attendees to focus their comments on the permit at hand, the commenters said the 129-acre facility has continued to expand, permit by permit, with a snowballing impact on nearby communities.
“I think it did come to a point with this permit because we’ve had so many of them recently,” Kathan, of the Agency of Natural Resources, told VTDigger on Tuesday.
Though Kathan answered questions at the meeting’s start, by the end she was listening to commenters and nodding solemnly, assuring attendees that their comments would be considered by the agency.
“You’re already trucking the leachate to different places,” one resident said. “Truck it someplace else, where you’re not in a precious watershed of an international lake. Do it somewhere else. Do the testing somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be here. There’s no reason.”
Attendees also called out Vermont’s EB-5 investor visa scandal — which promised nearby Newport a biomedical facility that would contribute to the local economy, but left it with a gaping hole in the center of town — as a reason they were distrustful of state officials.
“All the state people were all for it, all the city people were all for it,” one resident told Kathan.
Kathan told VTDigger on Tuesday that, while she wasn’t surprised by the comments at the meeting, she came away with a desire to improve the agency’s communication in and outside of the permitting process.
“There’s that distrust of public process, and that public process makes a difference in that area, in particular,” Kathan told VTDigger on Tuesday. “That area’s particularly sensitive to it.”
During his comments Monday night, Robert Benoit, a resident of Quebec, who has spoken out against the landfill, handed Kathan a Quebec flag.
“Whenever you make a decision about Lake Memphremagog, please put that in your office and think that that water ends up in Quebec,” he said.
Kathan quietly folded the flag while the next commenter rose to speak.
