Trash War in Vermont: Landfill May Threaten Pristine Battenkill River

The Battenkill River, renowned for its pure water and elusive trout, meanders through hayfields and villages in its 26-mile trip down a southwestern Vermont valley.

It courses beneath covered bridges and past white churches, then turns west and grows deep and wide before emptying into the great Hudson River north of Albany, N.Y.

It also flows by one landfill.

For 140 years, the river has been a magnet for tourism and resort development, mostly around the bustling village of Manchester, eight miles north of Sunderland.

More Questions Than Answers

For the last eight months, the Battenkill has been the local battleground in America’s war on trash--raising more questions than answers about how a nation running out of room should dispose of its solid waste.

The fuss began last fall when folks in Sunderland, a town so small it lacks both a post office and a general store, declared war on plans to dump toxic ash in the local landfill.

For decades, nobody had paid much attention to that former municipal dump, located within 300 feet of the Battenkill, which snakes around the three sides of the property.

Vicon Recovery Systems Inc., a New Jersey-based waste disposal corporation, bought the local landfill in 1985, and received a state permit to dump ash on the site.

Vicon built a $36-million state-of-the-art trash incinerator in Rutland and signed contracts to burn garbage from 57 surrounding communities with one-fourth of Vermont’s population. It planned to truck 51,000 tons of incinerator ash per year to the Sunderland dump at a rate of six to eight tractor-trailers daily.

As the incinerator’s January, 1988, start-up neared, local opposition mounted. The Board of Selectmen denied Vicon a zoning permit. A court order last December halted construction of a plastic liner designed to contain the ash.

Hospitality Exhausted

Vicon, to say the least, was not pleased. The action forced it to temporarily truck its ash, at high cost, to a landfill in Pittsfield, Mass., then to western New York when Pittsfield’s hospitality ran out.

“The town was a party to the permit. Everything was all set, then they changed their mind,” said Vicon project manager Rick Kelley. “We designed a triple liner with hazardous-waste specifications--all approved by the state. Meanwhile, there are other landfills in the state that are leaking, that have caught fire, landfills never certified that are still operating.

“There is no evidence that the landfill has ever contaminated the river--or ever will,” Kelley said.

Opponents disagreed, citing sloppy construction and a bright yellow plume of discharge into the river after one spring storm. They faulted Vicon for incomplete designs and drainage analyses near the landfill before a judge halted the work.

The opposition was stirred by a growing public awareness of the river’s fragile nature. In 1986, the Battenkill Conservancy was formed by local residents to buy 200 acres of farmland fronting 2 1/2 miles of the river and resell it for low-density development. Restrictive deeds allowed a maximum of 17 new residential buildings, compared to an unbridled potential of up to 90 new homes had the conservancy not stepped in.

The group also led the charge against the landfill expansion, mustering support from Trout Unlimited and Vermonters Organized for Cleanup. By winter, the coalition, the Orvis Co. of Manchester and sportsmen in 45 states had raised more than $45,000 to finance the town’s ash battle.

Former Washington, D.C., lawyer Thomas D. Wall moved to Sunderland four years ago and opened an inn that borders the Battenkill. He also opened a small law practice in Manchester. He co-chairs the Battenkill Conservancy.

“We’re dealing with a real economic issue here--people drawn by the pristine environs. That stream is the wellspring from which the economy of this area has prospered,” Wall said. “Vicon wanted to put that at risk. We weren’t about to let that happen.”

Dump Borders Wetlands

Because the dump borders wetlands and the river’s flood plain, the actual separation between the dump and standing water is sometimes only 140 to 160 feet, he said.

“A landfill never should have been put there in the first place,” Wall said. “We shouldn’t compound it by putting ash there with high concentrations of metals.” Those metals include oxidized zinc, lead, mercury and cadmium, which some experts say break down into other chemical compounds after incineration.

“The incinerator is very good in meeting air quality standards,” Wall said. “The opposite side of the coin means that the ash is going to be that much more toxic. The metals either go up the stack or into the ash.”

Through the spring and early summer, Vicon, the coalition of opposition groups and the selectmen conducted quiet negotiations, with the help of a mediator, to solve their stalemate.

“The overriding problem with garbage is its name--something to be thrown out and not worried about,” Vicon’s Kelley said. “What does it say about society? That it can’t handle its solid waste?

“Wherever you locate it, there are going to be objections. People simply want the waste to disappear. These are not easy problems. An easy problem was putting a man on the moon. We’re not willing to do something as a society until we face a crisis. This is classic ‘crisis management.’ ”

Dr. Paul Connett, a chemist at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., who sided with the Battenkill Conservancy, says destruction of trash is not the way to go.

“We can’t run a throwaway society on a finite planet. It is time to spend money on perfecting recovery instead of on destruction--away from a Rambo approach,” says Connett, who is national coordinator of Work On Waste USA, a 30-state citizen group promoting waste reduction and recycling while opposing incinerators and ash landfills.

“Society saw the problem as saying, ‘We can’t put garbage bags in the ground anymore. Where can we put them?’ Along come the machines. For many people, the debate has been, ‘Which machine can we use, and can we do it safely?’

“What we should have done was say, ‘What’s in the bag? What’s giving us so much problems?’ It’s amazing that plastic, paper and glass is such a headache. We should compost the organics and recycle the dry waste. What can’t be converted or recycled ought not to be used in the first place,” Connett said.

Connett says burning trash does not destroy the elements; rather, it concentrates the metals and creates new chemical compounds. He also has no confidence in plastic-liner technology. “Nobody in this country really believes these liners will last for very long,” Connett said.

A mediated compromise in the landfill dispute was approved Aug. 1 by the Sunderland Board of Selectmen. It will allow the incinerator’s bottom ash to be dumped there for up to four years if a mutually acceptable independent engineering firm determines that the site is suitable for a revised, smaller ash cell. Vicon also needs new state permits under Vermont’s rigid Act 250 environmental-protection guidelines.

The town, through the engineering firm, would control the design, construction and operation of the ash cell. The engineers would also develop detailed contingency plans to correct operational mistakes, and to close the facility and reclaim what is now a scar on the landscape.

In exchange for the limited ash dumping, the landfill is barred from accepting any out-of-state trash. It could accept Vermont municipal solid waste in other portions of the dump for no more than 10 years. Under an existing state landfill permit, household trash could have been dumped there for up to 30 more years.

‘Made a Trade-Off’

“As bad as ash is, to continue to put municipal waste into the ground is even worse,” Wall said. “In exchange for being allowed to put ash in for limited time with town controls, they’ve made a trade-off.”

Vicon threw some new uncertainties into the picture four days before the board vote. It disclosed that it is negotiating to sell its Vermont incinerator and landfill and facilities in Pittsfield, Mass., to another firm, KTI of Portland, Me. If the sale goes through, the Sunderland agreement is binding on the new owner.

Patrick Parenteau, Vermont’s environmental-conservation commissioner, calls the landfill compromise a victory for all sides.

“It recognizes that everybody had to give a little in order to create a solution to a very serious problem,” Parenteau said. “My only regret is that it couldn’t have been done before all of the polarization developed. There is no reason reasonable people can’t agree.

“The key is sitting down and working together. Government agencies are not really proxies for people. Maybe this is a model that other communities and private facilities can learn something from.

Making Choices

“You can’t turn off the spigot and say, ‘No more waste,’ ” Parenteau said. “The challenge for government regulators is to somehow bring the public up to a point where they are willing to make choices.”

Parenteau said the state has already started implementing the lessons learned in this case.

“It is hard to get consensus, but we are bound and determined that we are going to win approval for future landfill and resource recovery siting. Some of it is going to have to be with a carrot--compensating people for the burdens of a landfill or an incinerator or some other unwanted technology.”

Wall, of the Battenkill Conservancy, said nobody is completely happy with the agreement, but all participants consider it a positive step in addressing a waste dilemma that had gotten out of hand.

“In many respects, it is a bargain with the devil,” he said. “We’re out beyond the leading edge of technology and what’s known to work. We’ll know in a few years if what we’ve done was the correct thing, as opposed to taking the simple approach of ‘no trash, no way, no how’ at that place. We realize we create the problem, and have to help effect a solution.”