Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) entered into a Consent Decree with Republic Services on August 25, 2020. [Click to View Consent Decree Document]
The subject of the Agreement was the pollution of Kreutz Creek as described in the article on the home page of this website titled “Toxic Wastewater Dumped Into Kreutz Creek.”
Paragraphs T through X list the laws that Republic has been violating. Exhibit 1 lists the specific offending discharges since April 2018.
Modern Landfill knew it was in violation of several PA Clean Water laws for well over two years, yet continued to dump toxic wastewater into our streams and rivers and failed to act in a timely way to fix the problem.
After 49 years of this kind of behavior, why would anyone expect the operators of Modern Landfill to suddenly become responsible if allowed to build another new landfill next to the old one?
This is a Fundamental Issue with Landfills
One of the many problems with landfilling municipal solid waste, even if it originally contains no hazardous material by PA DEP’s definition, is that it generates toxic leachate. It is difficult to treat the leachate so that it can be disposed of safely, partly because its composition changes often, and landfill operators struggle to do so economically. That’s not taking into account the fact that the control limits that PA DEP sets for dumping into surface water are often very minimal requirements and compromises to begin with. Untreated leachate also always eventually ends up in the groundwater resources because as the EPA has determined, landfills always eventually leak even if they do not in the first few years [View EPA Testimony in the Federal Register– What EPA Says About Landfills Leaking].
Waste-to-Energy facilities don’t generate leachate and so have none of the above problems. They also are many orders of magnitude less likely to cause serious health issues due to air pollution. They also occupy much less real estate than a landfill and they never have to expand because they’ve run out of space. Those are some of the reasons our own trash ends up in the Local Waste-to-Energy plant.
In today’s world there is no sane reason to build another mountain of trash on top of prime farm land and next to high density housing except to enrich the coffers of a multibillion dollar company. Is that our new vision for Lower Windsor Township? It’s not what our comprehensive plan says, nor what our zoning ordinance was developed for.