Vermont’s only landfill, located in Coventry, is owned and operated by Casella Waste Systems. File photo: Riley Robinson/VTDigger
Northeast Saudi accounts for less than one-tenth of Vermont’s total waste, but it pays for all of it, according to locals who live near the state’s only landfill in Coventry.
They are asking Congress to protect the lake adjacent to the landfill through bill H.652, which would prohibit the discharge of waste from landfills and other dump sites into Lake Memphremagog, an international body of water that borders both Vermont and the Canadian province of Quebec.
“Landfills are out of sight and out of mind for Vermont municipalities, which produce the most waste,” Peggy Stevens, a member of a grassroots organization that seeks to protect local communities from potential landfill contamination, told Congress in February.
The bill highlights long-standing concerns from local residents that Coventry’s landfill is permanently contaminating waterways with chemicals. PFAS (perpolyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of thousands of man-made chemicals commonly found in waterproofing and fire extinguishing materials. The bill seeks to protect Lake Memphremagog by prohibiting the disposal of leachate, the liquid that flows through waste and collects in the landfill’s liner system, into the watershed.
“We’re not trying to make the watershed higher than the rest of the state, but we want to protect the lake because it’s the only operating landfill in Vermont,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Woodman Page, R-Newport City. “Here in the Northeast Kingdom, we are not in a wealthy area, we are in a very remote and rural area, and we rely primarily on tourism income, and that lake is very important to our economy.”
Protection from PFAS
Leachate from Coventry’s landfill was previously disposed of at Newport’s sewage treatment plant. But the state permit would allow the landfill, which is now nearly 130 acres, to expand, but put its disposal on hold for five years. That grace period is about to expire, according to Page and the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. Larry Labor (R-Morgan).
For years during the outage, that leachate is trucked to wastewater treatment plants in Montpelier and Plattsburgh, New York, and ultimately flows into Lake Champlain. Casella Waste Systems, which operates the Coventry Landfill, does not plan to apply for a new permit to bring leachate back to Newport, Jeff Weld, Casella’s vice president of communications, said in an email.
Instead, Casella has invested more than $6 million since 2023 in a system to pre-treat leachate for PFAS at the landfill. Up to 100 gallons of leachate is aerated nearly every day to concentrate contaminants, Casella representatives said. That foam is then skimmed off the top, leaving behind a clean liquid. The liquid is trucked out of the county. The bill only targets leachate, not PFAS, which is cemented into blocks and returned to landfills.
Samuel Nicolai, Casella’s vice president of engineering and compliance, told the House Environment Committee in February that the landfill receives about 14,000 tons of waste per week. Approximately 1 ton of that waste becomes PFAS blocks. He estimated it would take about four months to fill the committee rooms with these blocks.
Weld said the process removes concentrations of nearly all of the five PFAS compounds regulated as safe drinking water in Vermont and is one of the state’s only proven PFAS removal solutions.
Last week, the landfill received a draft permit from the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Air Quality Division to pilot an improved version of the system, called Surface Activated Foam Fractionation (SAFF), to further remove PFAS concentrations in wastewater.
But advocates worry that the cleanup process alone won’t be enough to protect the area from contamination.
“Members of the (House Environment) Committee do not understand how dangerous PFAS are and how inadequate the experimental leachate treatment techniques currently in use are,” Stephens, a member of the Northeast Kingdom-based grassroots group Don’t Compromise the Purity of Memphremagog DUMP, said in an email. SAFF technology should not be used as a standalone solution, Stevens said.
In his testimony before the House of Commons Environment Committee, Stevens, along with other advocates from Dump and its sister organizations in Quebec, pointed to two key pieces of evidence regarding PFAS contamination in the lake. That’s according to a 2021 state report, in which one of the PFAS chemicals was measured at 2.8 ppt, or about 70% of the state’s safe drinking water level, in the middle of the lake.
Natural Resources Agency Director Julie Moore, who authored the 2021 report, said there was nothing in the data set that the agency deemed alarming and that background concentrations of PFAS are present almost universally at this time.
Supporters also claim there is a link between landfill pollution and a 2020 U.S. Geological Survey report that showed 30% of brown bullhead fish in Lake Memphremagog had malignant melanoma. No tumors have been found in the heads of brown bulls at other Vermont lakes, according to the bill.
Moore said he was unaware of any link between the tumor found in the brown bullhead and PFAS.
“We are very relieved that there will be no PFAS entering the lake from the landfill because there will be no releases into the lake,” Nicolai told the committee. “We see PFAS in our lakes for the same reason that 98 percent of adults in this country have PFAS in their blood. We have PFAS everywhere.”
passive receiver
Over the past five years, the state has passed laws to reduce the amount of PFAS entering the waste stream by restricting or banning the use of products with the chemicals intentionally added, such as ski wax, cookware and cleaning products.
Most of the state’s PFAS contamination remains in the Bennington and Shaftesbury areas of southern Vermont, where a company called ChemFab manufactured PFAS-containing products for about 30 years starting in 1970 by coating them with Teflon containing PFOA.
“Landfills are passive recipients of PFAS chemicals, not producers of PFAS chemicals,” Weld said. “Vermont residents have chosen to purchase these products and use them in their daily lives.”
Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, told the House Environment Committee that the preferred way to address the PFAS problem is to eliminate the use of PFAS in the manufacture of products wherever possible.
“We’re concerned about what areas, what bodies of water, what watersheds are the recipients of leachate from our only remaining operating landfill. The answer is to protect one watershed and not at the expense of others,” Burns said.
He said he ultimately supports the bill, which protects Lake Memphremagog’s drinking water supply, but called it “incomplete” because it prioritizes that protection over the Montpelier watershed, which dumps wastewater from wastewater treatment plants into the Winooski River, which flows into Lake Champlain.
