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On April 23rd, Governor Janet Mills vetoed LD 2135, a bill designed to carefully manage Maine’s limited landfill capacity and protect Mainers from ongoing PFAS exposure.  The bill, titled “Resolve, Regarding the Operation and Future Capacity of State-owned Landfills,” would have allowed for a competitive bidding process to select the next manager of the Juniper Ridge Landfill and would have required the landfill operator to pre-treat landfill leachate to remove PFAS before it is discharged into the environment.  The bipartisan bill passed the Maine House and Senate in early April and was set to become law.  The Governor’s veto means that the contract to manage Maine’s only state-owned landfill will be renewed for Casella Waste Systems, a Vermont-based corporation, in a non-competitive process.  The veto also allows Casella to continue releasing high volumes of dangerous “forever chemicals” into the Penobscot River,  a source of culturally important subsistence foodways for the Penobscot Nation.  

“We are incredibly disappointed that the Governor vetoed LD 2135,” said Sarah Woodbury, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at Defend Our Health. “By vetoing this reasonable and health-focused law, the Governor is allowing Casella Waste Systems to continue to hold municipalities hostage by charging exorbitant fees for sludge disposal in an attempt to force the legislature to pass policies that benefit their bottom line. Additionally, there will be no requirements for the landfill manager to treat toxic leachate for PFAS before it is discharged into the Penobscot River. This directly harms communities surrounding the landfill and poisons the culturally significant resources of the Penobscot Nation.  Scientists at the Penobscot Nation’s Department of Natural Resources partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency to test fish in the Penobscot River, and those tests detected dangerously high levels of PFAS in fish caught in the river.  This free pass to pollute is being granted when we already have the technology and know-how to safely pre-treat landfill leachate for PFAS below the point of detection right here in Maine.  Solving this problem is not only an urgent moral imperative; it’s completely feasible.”

Data on mandated, biennial leachate testing from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection indicates that the PFAS problem in Juniper Ridge Landfill’s leachate is worsening steadily.  The total amount of reported PFAS in Casella’s leachate has increased by 614% in the two-year period for which Maine DEP has published data. The latest published results from Juniper Ridge are from 10/3/23 and show 1480 parts per trillion (ppt) PFOA, which is 370 times higher than EPA’s newly announced safe drinking water standard of 4 ppt, and 172 ppt PFOS, which is 43 times higher than the EPA’s new health-protecting limit.  Both of these chemicals have caught the attention of state and federal regulators because of their persistence in the environment, their tendency to bioaccumulate, and their low-dose toxicity, and both chemicals were recently labeled hazardous substances under EPA’s Superfund Law.  According to Casella’s 2023 report to the Maine DEP, the landfill produces almost 19,000,000 gallons of PFAS-laden leachate, which is enough to overflow 38 Olympic-sized swimming pools each year.  Casella trucks the leachate to the wastewater plant at the idle Nine Dragons Papermill in Old Town, which discharges directly into the Penobscot River, a short distance from Indian Island and the reservation of the Penobscot Nation.