[Legal appeal update] The Sierra Club is seeking to join our appeal of the Landfill's expansion currently working its way through the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board (EHB).
As a local organization run 100% by volunteers, we are thrilled to have them join us and hope the EHB allows them to do so.
"For a grassroots group like ours to have the support of one of the best known environmental advocates in the country reinforces our belief that we’re on the right side of history here,” FOL core member Pat Clark said. “It’s great to have their knowledge, expertise and support on our side.”
https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/.../article_bd9cda20...
Sierra Club wants to join local civic group's fight to revoke state approval of 40-year expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill
BY JIM LOCKWOOD STAFF WRITER Dec 20, 2021
DUNMORE — The Sierra Club environmental organization wants to join a local civic group’s fight against the state’s approval of a massive 40-year expansion of Keystone Sanitary Landfill.
The state Department of Environmental Protection in June approved an additional 94 million tons, or 188 billion pounds, of mostly out-of-state garbage over the next four decades at the landfill straddling Dunmore and Throop and owned by brothers Louis and Dominick DeNaples.
The landfill has been in operation for over 42 years.
Days after the DEP decision, the civic group Friends of Lackawanna filed an appeal with the state Environmental Hearing Board to get the expansion approval revoked.
The appeal remains pending in early stages before the hearing board, which is an independent, quasi-judicial agency made up of five full-time, governor-appointed judges with jurisdiction to hold hearings and rule on DEP orders, permits, licenses and decisions.
On Nov. 30, the Sierra Club filed a legal petition with the board for approval to intervene in the case supporting FOL. The nonprofit Sierra Club was incorporated in California and has over 800,000 members nationwide, including 32,255 members in a Pennsylvania chapter, according to the petition.
The Sierra Club would offer evidence, expert testimony and legal arguments on the following: leachate management and impacts on groundwater and surface water; whether the DEP’s harms/benefits analysis of the expansion plan was flawed; and whether the landfill met its burden of proving compliance with the public’s right to pure water and clean air under the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Last week, the landfill, DEP and FOL filed separate replies to the petition.
Friends of Lackawanna supports having the Sierra Club enter the case.
“For a grassroots group like ours to have the support of one of the best known environmental advocates in the country reinforces our belief that we’re on the right side of history here,” FOL core member Pat Clark said. “It’s great to have their knowledge, expertise and support on our side.”
In opposing the petition, the landfill argues the Sierra Club lacks legal standing to intervene for several reasons, including the issues the club would raise are already asserted by FOL; the Sierra Club is not an aggrieved party in the matter; and the club missed a 30-day appeal deadline. But if the Environmental Hearing Board allows the Sierra Club to enter the case, the involvement should be narrowly limited to issues raised in the FOL appeal, says the landfill response.
The DEP did not oppose the petition, but also said that if the board allows the Sierra Club to intervene, the scope should be limited, according to the DEP reply.
The appeal will not be decided soon. It will extend at least throughout most of 2022, based on a judge’s scheduling order issued last month that set various deadlines, including for all motions to be filed by Nov. 15, 2022.
Meanwhile, the landfill is changing its plans for an alternative leachate treatment disposal method to discharge into one waterway instead of two.
The landfill currently pretreats the leachate that percolates through the trash piles and pipes the liquid to the sewer system purchased five years ago by Pennsylvania American Water from the Scranton Sewer Authority. The wastewater of the Scranton-Dunmore sewer system flows to the PAW treatment plant in South Scranton, where it is treated and the resulting effluent discharged into the Lackawanna River.
Two years ago, the landfill embarked on a plan to add an alternative method of leachate treatment by reverse osmosis, which the landfill said was a higher level of treatment that would allow for discharging effluent directly into two nearby waterways, Little Roaring Brook and Eddy Creek, as well as for spraying onto landfill dirt roads to keep dust down.
In changing this plan, the landfill issued public notices in The Times-Tribune on Dec. 8 and Dec. 15 indicating the landfill now will seek DEP approval to use only Little Roaring Brook.
The treated wastewater would be conveyed and discharged into Little Roaring Brook next to the landfill’s connection to the water-company’s sewer system, landfill spokesman Al Magnotta said in an email.
“Valves will be installed at this location, thus KSL will have the option to either discharge to the PAWC (Pennsylvania American Water Company) facilities and/or Little Roaring Brook,” Magnotta said.
Direct discharge to Eddy Creek and by spraying on roads were removed as options because Eddy Creek runs intermittently and both methods would require additional environmental impact evaluations that are not complete, he said.
“We are contemplating submission for these options at a later date,” Magnotta said.
The landfill already uses reverse osmosis to process all landfill wastewater and sends it to the PAW sewer system, Magnotta said. With a second reverse osmosis treatment system now online, “discharge volume has been increased from 100,000 gallons per day to 200,000 gallons per day,” he said, saying the effluent is treated to a higher standard than household wastewater.
The doubling in daily volume stems from computer-generated maximum leachate flow associated with the expansion, he said.
For information or to comment on the Little Roaring Brook discharge plan, contact the DEP by mail at PADEP Northeast Regional Office, 2 Public Square, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18701-1915, or by phone at 570-826-2511.