When considering how pollution gets into water, picture a pipe with something awful pouring out, and if not that then a boat that’s leaking fuel through a fractured hull.
But in fact water contamination can happen by other means. For example, rain runoff in urban settings or chemical fertilizer and herbicides washing in from farms.
And, as we learned with acid rain, contaminants can also travel through the air, starting with power-plant emissions in one place and ending up with deadened lakes downwind.
There are still other ways that pollution can get into waterways, one being over the road, which is the subject of this blog post.
In 1980 the city of Lowell, Massachusetts began running a wastewater treatment plant in a spot called Duck Island, and at various times during the last 10 years it expanded its operations by taking in sludge and leachate from out-of-town customers that included towns, factories and landfills in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
Less than one percent of what gets processed at Duck Island comes from these external sources, but the addition has made a fiscal difference. A recent memo by the Lowell Wastewater Utility explains that, due to the strength of these imported wastes, disposal fees are “significant.” Hauled waste income from the Turnkey Landfill in Rochester, NH. alone this year amounted to $520,000.
But some of that is ending.
Recently the Duck Island facility stopped taking in leachate — a watery residue — from three landfills following a news report that the stuff that was being hauled in from one of them contained chemicals that are tied to human health problems.
The Duck Island facility isn’t equipped to filter out the chemicals, which are known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs, for short). That meant that the plant’s discharges into the Merrimack River contained PFAs – alarming information since hundreds of thousands of people downstream of the plant get their drinking water from the Merrimack.
Some drinking water treatment facilities can filter out PFAs, but not all, and in any case there are worries in some quarters that treating for PFAs can in fact harden the offending chemical compounds, which are known in some quarters as “forever chemicals” for how long it can take them to degrade.
The leachate that set off the recent alarms originated in the largest landfill in New England, located in Rochester, NH. It’s the 1,260-acre Waste Management Turnkey landfill, which annually takes in more than 1.4 million tons of trash. For the last several years, trucks hauled the leachate six days a week over the roughly 60 miles from the city of Rochester to the Duck Island treatment plant.
Following a recent Boston Globe article about the PFAs in the waste stream, Lowell stopped accepting landfill leachate. Waste Management now disposes of the stuff on its own vast property, where most of its leachate was already being deposited.
This episode reminded me of an incident that I described in “Water Connections” – the book that spawned this blog — that also involved water, pollution and a landfill. The setting was Charleston, the capital of West Virginia. In 2014 leaking storage tanks sent a coal-washing solvent into a river upstream of Charleston’s water treatment plant, which wasn’t equipped to screen out the contaminant. A frightful mess resulted.
In the clean-up that followed, disposal companies mixed the leaked solvent with sawdust and then trucked the stuff to a nearby community’s landfill, after which neighbors began complaining about smells.
In the controversy that followed, the companies were fined $600,000 and ordered to monitor for leaks for the next five years.
The point here is that contamination can get from one place to another by more than a few means, trucks included. An important consideration is that contamination’s actual starting place isn’t always clear. For example, the Turnkey landfill takes in garbage from all over; in fact, 60 percent of the trash comes from outside New Hampshire.
From which of those sources might have the suspect PFAs come?
A reasonable question, with no clear answer.