As Casella aims to treat PFAS in leachate, what happens next with Vermont’s forever chemicals?
Feb 26, 2023 | By Logan Soloman | Capital News Service
The Winooski River downstream from Montpelier is a popular place for recreation in Waterbury. Photo by Gordon Miller
James Ehlers can’t help but say something any time he passes the Winooski River’s Salmon Hole and sees kids splashing around or anglers eyeing fish.
“Do you know what’s in that river?” Ehlers, a steadfast water activist who founded the nonprofit Lake Champlain International, sometimes yells to those he sees.
Forty miles upstream, on a daily basis, two tanker trucks that together contain 10,000 gallons of garbage juice from Vermont’s only landfill arrive at Montpelier’s wastewater treatment plant. There, workers empty the tankers into a system designed to filter as many contaminants as possible. Some substances are removed from the liquids, or leachate, but one group of harmful chemicals is not.
Instead they’re discharged into the Winooski River, flowing by the famed fishing spot before spewing out into Lake Champlain.
The chemicals of concern are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — often known as PFAS — and they’ve garnered increasing public attention in recent years. Even at low exposure levels, PFAS in drinking water put human health at risk. The chemicals are associated with infertility, reproductive cancers, hormone issues, vaccine immunity problems and kidney cancer. After the landfill in Coventry, run by Casella Waste Systems, started sending leachate to Montpelier in 2020, the fluid coming out of the capital city’s treatment plant contained “significantly higher” concentrations of PFAS than all but one facility tested in Vermont, the state said that year. No nearby treatment plant has had the technology to remove the chemicals.
Montpelier might have a solution with a new venture by Casella. The state issued the company a permit last December to develop a framework for a pilot system at the landfill that could reduce the amount of PFAS in leachate. By the end of this year, the company is required to have the new technology running and begin studying its effectiveness. The company has been working on the pilot system but is waiting on two additional permits before all the work needed can happen, including one crucial permit approving Casella’s design for the system.
If both permits are approved, company leaders expect to start studying their system later this year, a process slated to end in 2024, said Samuel Nicolai, the company’s vice president of compliance and engineering, who oversees much of the project.
The project would be one of the first on-site PFAS treatment systems at a landfill in the country. If it is a success, the build could be a model for other landfills that, as public alarm surrounding the chemicals intensifies, look to limit PFAS in leachate.
But water quality activists are trying to stop the project in Coventry, where things are so contentious that the nearby treatment plant in Newport stopped accepting the landfill’s leachate in late 2019. In Montpelier — one of two primary places now taking the leachate — city councilors say the plant will stop accepting the waste by July 1 this year unless it is treated ahead of time for PFAS. And the latest battle in Vermont’s wastewater world has raised new questions about officials’ tolerance of an emerging class of contaminants — and what can be done about them.
‘Us downstream get the problem’
The liquid arriving in Montpelier is what you get when rainwater passes through landfill materials and draws out toxic substances such as PFAS. Casella’s landfill has a history of producing leachate with high concentrations of the toxic chemicals, according to consultants from the Waterbury engineering firm Weston and Sampson, which studied the landfill in 2018 and 2019. That’s likely not surprising to company leaders — or to the waste industry as a whole — who have emphasized the ubiquity of PFAS in trash sent to the landfill. The chemicals are found in countless products, and nobody knows exactly what levels of PFAS are contained in the individual leachate loads ferried from Coventry to Montpelier.
Casella is evaluating a few methods for its new system to find a technology that removes as much as possible of the five compounds of PFAS that Vermont currently regulates, said Nicolai
One method would use air bubbles to remove PFAS, while another would employ chemical processes to break down the pollutants into carbon dioxide, according to a January article from Waste Dive, a digital news outlet covering the waste and recycling industry. Casella will likely use more than one method in the end, Waste Dive reported.
The project has found a familiar foe: The activist group Don’t Undermine Memphremagog’s Purity, a collective of Vermont and Canadian citizens dedicated to protecting the waters of Lake Memphremagog, has appealed Casella’s permit to the Vermont Judiciary’s Environmental Division.
“It’s irresponsibly located at the edge of extensive wetlands,” one of the group’s leaders, Henry Coe, said in a press release announcing the appeal.
Nicolai disputed Coe’s claim, saying that the wetlands are a “good distance” from where the leachate treatment system would be — the wetlands are downhill from the site.
“We are not proposing anything different than how the leachate is already being handled,” he said. “It's just an opportunity to provide treatment.”
Casella used to transport the liquids to the Newport City water treatment facility, less than four miles away from the landfill, where it was discharged into Lake Memphremagog, the drinking water source for 175,000 Canadians. But the practice was halted in November 2019 as part of the resolution of an Act 250 dispute. The Lake Memphremagog activist group, more commonly known as DUMP, had sought to stop a planned landfill expansion via the courts, before withdrawing its appeal after the company agreed to stop sending leachate to Newport until 2024. The group, along with the entire Quebec National Assembly, called for making the moratorium permanent in 2021, after Canadian officials found traces of PFAS in a drinking water intake area connected to the lake. Casella denied a connection between its landfill and the findings, and state testing found no link between the landfill and the small amounts of PFAS found. That summer the state extended the moratorium to 2026.
Since the moratorium in 2019, Casella has sent most of its leachate to Montpelier and Plattsburgh, New York, two places where from 2020 to 2022 nearly 37 million gallons — almost 95% of the liquids that left the landfill — has arrived at wastewater treatment plants that discharge into rivers that flow into Lake Champlain, according to monthly permit reports from Casella. The Montpelier plant’s share represents nearly 3 out of every 5 of these gallons.
In May 2022, officials at the Montpelier plant stopped taking leachate for eight months after a bacterial contamination disabled a disinfection system at the plant, according to Montpelier Public Works Director Kurt Motyka.
Montpelier began accepting the liquids again this year at a smaller volume — to ensure there are no other issues with the disinfection system. That led to the plant only taking in about $8,500 of revenue for January 2023, Motyka said, a far lower total than before the pause.
But if the system has no issues, the plant will return to full capacity, which Motyka estimates would lead to a roughly fourfold increase in monthly revenue — about $300,000 for the year.
That could have notable implications for city officials. Montpelier is in the midst of addressing challenges in revenue, something noted in the city’s 2023 budget. While this year’s budget is balanced, the city still projects to have 6.5% less revenue than in 2021, due to no longer having an influx of federal pandemic funds.
Ehlers feels Montpelier officials have been prioritizing money by accepting leachate that the city’s plant can’t treat for PFAS. The criticism mirrored past critiques of officials in Coventry — where the town’s budget is supported almost entirely by payments from Casella.
“Montpelier really should be saying, ‘We don’t want it at all,’” he said. “But Montpelier doesn't suffer the consequences. They get the money, and those of us downstream get the problem.”
He’s right that the leachate goes downstream. But it’s raising concerns in the capital too. In October 2021, a half-dozen Montpelier residents showed up to a public hearing in Newport — more than an hour north — to speak against the leachate being treated in their city, records show.
A few weeks later, in a public comment on Casella’s permit, the Montpelier City Council described resident opposition and said the municipal plant will no longer accept leachate by July 1 this year if it contains PFAS at levels that exceed the state’s PFAS drinking water standard. In effect: If Casella doesn’t start treating leachate for PFAS before that date, the city will stop accepting the waste.
Nicolai, the Casella engineer, said he plans to meet with councilors before July and is “cautiously optimistic” they will be pleased with Casella’s progress, even if the company can’t meet the deadline. But he isn’t sure what will happen.
“Ultimately, it is their choice whether or not they would like to continue to receive leachate,” he said.
Regulatory whack-a-mole
There are more than 9,000 identified types of PFAS, but Vermont regulates only five.
Several types of PFAS have been found in several spots in the Winooski River, according to state testing in 2021. The five types regulated by Vermont were found at lower concentrations than the state’s limits for drinking water.
But some unregulated PFAS have been found at alarming levels, said Marguerite Adelman, coordinator of the Vermont PFAS/Military Poisons Coalition, a project of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Adelman, a Winooski resident like Ehlers, points to Vermont’s selective regulatory system as one reason that the state should ban all PFAS. She compared the current system of regulating each individual substance to a game of whack-a-mole.
“Every time you outlaw one or one gets criticized, (the manufacturer) just switches the molecules around a little bit and they are good to go,” Adelman said.
At minimum, she said legislators should amend Act 21, the law regulating PFAS in drinking and surface waters, to allow for no PFOA or PFOS, the most widely used and studied types of PFAS.
Adelman's rationale is based on an update made last June to a federal Environmental Protection Agency lifetime drinking water health advisory. The advisory set a limit that is 3,000 times more stringent than the previous one. The concentrations involved are so small that certified lab technology cannot measure them, Adelman said.
This means that even if current PFAS drinking water testing technology registers no amount of the two compounds, there is still a chance concentrations may be above the level at which federal officials have deemed people would experience adverse health effects after a lifetime of exposure, which is considered 70 years of drinking the water.
The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation website currently cites the older federal health advisory from 2016. The state’s regulatory standards will remain in place while officials work to understand how the updated advisory could change Vermont’s policies, said Stephanie Brackin, a spokesperson for the Agency of Natural Resources, which oversees the department.
The federal government last December also came out with a suite of recommended best practices for states dealing with PFAS discharges, as well as recommendations for more precise monitoring.
In recent interviews, activists said they hadn’t heard anything about the state adopting those December 2022 guidelines. They said they assumed the state hadn’t adopted them.
“Vermont DEC has not taken the actions recommended by the EPA, and Vermont Natural Resource Council recommends they do so,” said Jon Groveman, water policy program director for that nonprofit.
It seems Groveman and others might be right, but that may be changing soon. Brackin said the Agency of Natural Resources “will work closely with the EPA and covered entities to implement these guidelines.”
However, Brackin said, the state is already addressing PFAS contamination by monitoring public water systems, investigating how PFAS enters Vermont’s environment, banning the sale of certain PFAS-containing products and bringing lawsuits against PFAS manufacturers.
Adelman wants Vermont’s PFAS monitoring to go further, calling for more frequent tests of both public water systems and private wells.
“Until Vermont really starts testing its waters for PFAS and testing its fish (more frequently), we don't really have a realistic sense about how much PFAS there is,” she said.
Montpelier residents are waiting to hear about the status of Casella’s first-in-the-country project once the city council meets with Nicolai and his team. The meeting is expected to answer lingering questions surrounding the July deadline for treatment, how much PFAS is expected to be removed with the new technology and where the permits stand.
“We are focused on the five PFAS compounds that Vermont regulates,” Nicolai said. “Our goal is to remove as much as we can. And how much, depends on how successful the technology is.”
Back at the Salmon Hole, PFAS is in the water that kids play in and from which people catch fish to eat. Adelman’s activist coalition is sure of it, having tested the Salmon Hole’s water themselves, according to a November 2021 publication by the group. The group said its testing found 10 of the chemicals, including PFOA at levels hundreds of times above the June 2022 health advisory and PFOS at levels thousands of times higher.
For every chemical found in the river, Ehlers finds a further social and economic injustice done to Winooski’s public waterway and its recreation potential for residents.
“The root of the problem,” he said, “is using our river as sewer pipes and Lake Champlain as a cesspool.
Capital News Service is part of Community News Service, a collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Reporting and Documentary Storytelling program