Vermont bill would bar landfill leachate from Lake Memphremagog over PFAS fears

Vermont lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban disposal of leachate from the state’s only operating landfill into the watershed feeding Lake Memphremagog, an international waterbody shared with Quebec, amid concerns about contamination from PFAS — synthetic compounds known as “forever chemicals.” The bill, H.652, was heard by the House Environment Committee in February and is backed by residents of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, a rural region that hosts the Coventry landfill but generates less than one-tenth of the state’s total waste.

The legislation puts pressure on the Vermont Legislature to resolve a longstanding environmental equity dispute: a remote, lower-income region bears the burden of statewide waste disposal while the international lake at its doorstep — a source of tourism revenue and cross-border drinking water — has no statutory protection from landfill runoff.

A lake shared across a border

Lake Memphremagog straddles Vermont and the Canadian province of Quebec. H.652 would prohibit discharge of leachate — the liquid that percolates through landfill waste and collects in the liner system — into the lake’s watershed.

“The landfill is out of sight and out of mind of the municipalities in Vermont that generate the most waste,” Peggy Stevens, a member of DUMP (Don’t Undermine Memphremagog’s Purity), a grassroots organization based in the Northeast Kingdom, told the legislature in February.

Rep. Woodman Page, R-Newport City, sponsored the bill alongside co-sponsor Rep. Larry Labor, R-Morgan. Page described the region’s economic dependence on the lake. “Up here in the Northeast Kingdom we’re not a wealthy area, we’re very remote and rural and we depend predominantly on tourism dollars and that lake is very important to our economy,” Page said.

The landfill and its leachate

The Coventry landfill covers nearly 130 acres and receives about 14,000 tons of waste per week, according to Samuel Nicolai, Casella Waste Systems’ vice president of engineering and compliance, who testified before the House Environment Committee in February.

Casella Waste Systems, the company that operates the landfill, has invested more than $6 million since 2023 in a system that pre-treats leachate for PFAS on site, according to Jeff Weld, Casella’s vice president of communications. The process — called Surface Active Foam Fractionation, or SAFF — aerates up to 100 gallons of leachate daily into a foam that concentrates PFAS compounds, which are then skimmed off. The remaining liquid is trucked out of the county. The landfill also produces roughly one ton of PFAS-solidified cement blocks per week, which are returned to the landfill.

The week before the committee hearing, the landfill received a draft permit from the state’s air quality division to pilot an expanded version of the SAFF system.

Nicolai told the committee the company is confident no contamination is reaching the lake. “We’re very comfortable that there is no PFAS coming from the landfill into the lake because there are no discharges into the lake,” he said. “We’re seeing PFAS in the lake for the same reason 98% of adults in this country have PFAS in their blood. We have it everywhere.”

What the evidence shows — and disputes

Advocates from DUMP and a sister organization in Quebec pointed to two pieces of evidence before the committee. A 2021 report by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources measured one PFAS compound in the middle of Lake Memphremagog at 2.8 parts per trillion — about 70% of Vermont’s safe drinking water level. A 2020 U.S. Geological Survey report found that 30% of brown bullhead fish in the lake were diseased with malignant melanoma; the bill states the tumors have not been found on brown bullheads in any other Vermont lake.

Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, said there was nothing in her agency’s 2021 data that she found alarming and that background concentrations of PFAS were almost everywhere at this point. She also said she was not aware of a link between the fish tumors and PFAS.

Stevens disputed the committee’s reading of the evidence. “The (House Environment) committee members do not understand how dangerous PFAS are and how insufficient the experimental leachate treatment technology is that’s being used right now,” she said in an email. The SAFF system should not be used as a standalone solution, she said.

A disputed fix for a shared problem

The bill’s scope has drawn criticism from environmental advocates who support its goal but warn it could shift the problem rather than solve it.

Before a state-ordered moratorium restricted leachate disposal at Newport’s treatment plant, that liquid was processed locally and eventually reached Lake Memphremagog. During the moratorium, leachate was trucked to wastewater treatment facilities in Montpelier, Vermont, and Plattsburgh, New York, where it flows into the Winooski River and eventually Lake Champlain.

Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, told the committee he ultimately supported H.652 but called it “imperfect” because it prioritized the Memphremagog watershed over Montpelier’s. “We are concerned about whatever community, whatever water body, whatever watershed is the recipient of leachate from our one remaining operating landfill, and the answer is not to protect one watershed and sacrifice another,” Burns said.

Weld, speaking for Casella, said the landfill bears a burden it does not create. “Landfills are passive receivers of PFAS chemicals, they do not create them,” he said. “Vermonters have chosen to buy these products and use them in their everyday lives.”

Vermont has passed legislation over the past five years restricting or banning PFAS in products such as ski wax, cookware, and cleaning products. Most PFAS contamination in the state remains concentrated in southern Vermont, in the Bennington and Shaftsbury areas, where a company called Chem Fab coated products in Teflon — which contains PFOA — for roughly 30 years beginning in 1970.