Today's editorial in the The Scranton Times-Tribune is in lock-step with our conclusions on the recent DEP deficiency letter issued to the landfill. If it wasn't clear from Day 1, at this point is unavoidable - the entire project is deficient. Check out the editorial here.
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Dump expansion inherently deficient
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
State regulators have told the Keystone Sanitary Landfill to correct dozens of deficiencies in its application for a 42-year expansion beginning in 2022. But for Northeast Pennsylvania, the expansion is more broadly deficient and should not be allowed to proceed.
Keystone, in Dunmore and Throop, plans to accept another 92,072,940 tons of garbage at the sprawling landfill through 2064, more than 184 billion pounds, the vast majority of it from other states.
In its 10-page letter citing 60 deficiencies, the state Department of Environmental Protection required additional information, revisions or clarifications regarding major aspects of Keystone’s plan, including groundwater protection, odor control, liquid drainage known as leachate, and its eventual closure plan.
According to the DEP, for example, the landfill projects leachate generation of 13.6 million gallons a year, even though it has produced more than four times that amount in recent years.
The DEP previously had determined, in a required analysis, that the expansion would produce more benefits than harms for the surrounding areas. But the benefits it cited were primarily economic — including, remarkably, legally required host municipality fees that the landfill would pay to Dunmore and Throop to mitigate the burden that it places on them. The analysis acknowledged potential environmental degradation inherent in such a project, but said that the landfill would mitigate them.
Some of that mitigation, however, is supposed to be fleshed out in details of the expansion plan, within which the DEP now finds sweeping deficiencies.
The scope of this expansion plan is such that even if the landfill were to be operated perfectly 100% of the time, without any unforeseen problems, it still would constitute a massive harm to the quality of life in Northeast Pennsylvania.
State regulators should make the deficiency letter the first step in permanently pulling the plug on the expansion.
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