A new report released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act claims toxic landfill pollution threatens drinking water in 19 New York communities.
Environmentalists say the report entitled "The Threat of Landfill Leachate to Drinking Water in the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers" is based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
And they claim the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is failing to address the problem. Rebecca Martin is project manager of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers Leachate Collective.
“We focus on a shared concern: landfill leachate, or liquid waste, or garbage water, being processed by municipal wastewater treatment plants that discharged into the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. These rivers are drinking water sources for approximately 368,000 people, including communities that disproportionately bear the brunt of environmental harm,” said Martin.
Local communities affected include Cohoes, Waterford, Colonie, Green Island, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck, Schenectady and several surrounding towns.
The advocates say polluted leachate passes through the wastewater treatment plants into the rivers in the same areas that are used as drinking water sources.
Geographic Information Systems analyst Jen Epstein says each year 89 million gallons of toxic leachate that would not be allowed to be released directly from landfills is allowed to pass through wastewater treatment plants into the two rivers.
"So how does this loophole work? As water percolates through the material in a landfill, it picks up a mixture of substances from the decomposing waste, including polluting chemicals such as PFAs," Epsteinsaid. "Modern landfills are required to take extensive measures to contain this liquid leachate, because it's known to be toxic. That's been required since the 1970s under the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act. However, once the leachate is collected, the standard practice is to send it, either by pipe or by truck, to a municipal wastewater treatment plant for disposal, and that standard practice also begins also began about 40 years ago. Municipal wastewater treatment plants are regulated under the Clean Water Act. Municipal wastewater treatment plants are designed and equipped to treat human waste. They're not equipped to remove or break down the types of synthetic chemicals that are found in landfill leachate. Nor are they required to do so.”
Collective technical advisor Captain John Lipscomb says the DEC is considering new regulations to address landfill leachate pollution.
“In my 24 years working for Riverkeeper, we have gone after every kind of polluter we could find, large and small, from Exxon down to private properties along the waterways. And a trend, a change, that I perceive is that we've happily gone away, moved beyond the days of individual bad guy polluters like, GE and Exxon, etc. And now, in fact, the polluter is our society. So in New York City and in the Capital District, vast amounts of sewage are overflowed into the rivers and now we're looking at this leachate question. So society is the polluter now, and so it's society's job to fix the problem,” said Lipscomb.
DEC responded to a request for comment via email, saying in part: “DEC is in receipt of this report and it is under review. DEC takes seriously our responsibility to oversee solid waste management facilities in the state and works transparently with communities every step of our review processes.”
Yvonne Taylor cofounded Seneca Lake Guardian. She says border communities across New York, New Jersey and beyond are being poisoned by landfill leachate.
“In 2023 the city of Amsterdam began accepting leachate from Seneca Meadows. In one month, the city's Wastewater Treatment Plant discharged 414,000 gallons of leachate from the Seneca Meadows landfill into the Mohawk river, upstream of the Great Flats Aquifer and surface water intakes. The solutions are clear, the DEC must act now to ensure new regulations for on-site treatment of landfill leachate at landfills, and prevent contamination from spreading rather than trucking it to unsuspecting communities,” Taylor said.
