The future of the Keystone Sanitary Landfill is about to be in the hands of the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board.
Nearly three years after the state Department of Environmental Protection approved the Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill’s controversial Phase III expansion, Friends of Lackawanna, joined by the Sierra Club, will go before the state Environmental Hearing Board this week in hopes of halting the landfill’s expansion before it can triple its volume in Dunmore and Throop.
On the other side of the hearing room, the DEP will defend its June 3, 2021, decision to approve a major permit modification allowing the landfill to continue hauling in garbage until at least the 2060s. Keystone will contend it is a “well-designed, tightly-regulated and well-run regional solid waste disposal facility that has been under constant and continual oversight and inspection by the (DEP) for decades,” according to the landfill’s pre-hearing memorandum filed April 1.
Grassroots group Friends of Lackawanna, which formed in 2014 in opposition to the landfill and its expansion, appealed the 42.4-year expansion on July 5, 2021.
“The approval of the Phase III major modification of the KSL landfill is inconsistent with, and unreasonably infringes on the community’s constitutional right to clean air, pure water, and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment,” attorney Mark L. Freed of Curtin & Heefner LLP in Doylestown wrote in the appeal.
The Sierra Club, a California-based nonprofit organization with a local and statewide presence, received approval from the Environmental Hearing Board on Jan. 19, 2022, to intervene on Friends of Lackawanna’s behalf after successfully arguing it has local members affected by the landfill. The organization describes itself online as “the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States.”
DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said in an email the department does not comment on pending litigation.
The expansion
The site of the 714-acre landfill has been consistently used for waste disposal since the 1950s, and the Keystone Sanitary Landfill has been permitted and operating there for more than 50 years, according to Keystone’s hearing board filings.
The original Keystone/Dunmore Landfill operated from the early 1970s by filling old strip mine pits through the late 1980s and predated existing landfill regulations enacted in 1980, according to Keystone’s pre-hearing memorandum.
Phase I of the landfill, broken down into two sites known as Tabor and Logan, received approval in 1988, with waste disposal beginning in 1990. The Tabor portion of Phase I closed by 2003, and the Logan portion closed by 2007, according to the filing. The DEP approved Keystone’s Phase II expansion in 1997; the landfill began disposing waste under Phase II in 2005.
Nine years later, the landfill sought its massive Phase III expansion in 2014.
The expansion allows Keystone to haul in just over 94 million tons of waste, or about 188 billion pounds. The Phase III disposal area spans approximately 444 acres, and Keystone is permitted to accept up to 7,500 tons of garbage in a day, according to the memorandum.
Prior to Phase III, the landfill was permitted to dispose of 61.9 million cubic yards of waste. The 126.5 million cubic yard expansion tripled the landfill’s total capacity to 188.4 million cubic yards. Spread out evenly across Dunmore’s 8.92 square miles, the Phase III expansion would bury every inch of the borough under nearly 13 ¾ feet of garbage. The landfill’s entire 188.4 million cubic yard capacity from Phases I to III would cover Dunmore in about 20 ½ feet of waste.
With its solid waste permit set to expire April 6, 2025, Keystone filed an application with the DEP this month to renew its permit. The landfill is required to renew its solid waste permit every 10 years.
According to its application, the landfill began disposing waste in its Phase III expansion area in January, projecting to continue through February 2061.
However, a breakdown of the landfill’s capacity included in the renewal estimates that, as of March 20, Keystone has 47.34 years of remaining life, meaning it would not exhaust its capacity until July 2071.
Keystone had space for close to 104.7 million tons of garbage as of March 20.
Landfill attorneys Jeffrey Belardi of Belardi Law Offices in Jessup and David R. Overstreet of Overstreet & Nestor LLC in Pittsburgh did not respond to emailed questions by deadline Friday regarding the hearing and permit renewal. Landfill consultant Al Magnotta declined to comment.
The appeal
Monday will mark Friends of Lackawanna’s second time going before the Environmental Hearing Board after unsuccessfully appealing Keystone’s operating permit nearly a decade ago.
The Environmental Hearing Board is a five-member independent, quasi-judicial agency. The five judges, who serve six-year terms that can be renewed, are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state senate. Judge Bernard A. Labuskes Jr. presided over Friends of Lackawanna’s first appeal and will again preside over their new appeal.
Friends of Lackawanna filed its first appeal May 7, 2015, citing underground fires, groundwater contamination and damage to liner systems. On Nov. 8, 2017, the board ruled it would not rescind the landfill’s operating permit, though it did require Keystone to prepare a groundwater assessment plan because of leachate contamination that a monitoring well had detected since 2002.
That same well, called MW-15, will once again play a key role as Friends of Lackawanna argues the landfill’s groundwater monitoring network detected groundwater degradation from leachate in the area of the well.
The Environmental Hearing Board’s 2017 decision also criticized the DEP, with Labuskes writing, “The (DEP) relies upon formal, memorialized violations in conducting its review of Keystone’s compliance history, but the department, with rare exceptions, never memorializes any of Keystone’s violations.”
The DEP subsequently cited the landfill with nine odor-related violations on Jan. 25, 2023, one odor violation Dec. 13 and four more odor violations Jan. 8.
The DEP also suspended the landfill’s settlement accommodation plan operations, or SAP, in November, which had allowed Keystone to remove the cover on top of waste piles that had naturally settled below their original height and then deposit additional waste to “reclaim air space.” The SAP accounted for less than 10 acres of the landfill.
Most recently, the DEP received nearly 1,000 odor complaints from Sept. 1 through early April, and department staff have detected offsite odors in at least 70 instances, the department said earlier this month. In its pre-hearing memorandum, the DEP largely attributed the odor violations between fall 2023 and spring 2024 to the SAP, inadequate covering of the garbage and other operational issues at the landfill.
The landfill questioned the credibility of the complaints in its pre-hearing memorandum, asserting many of the complaints are baseless, “if not falsely reported by anti-landfill activists,” and that there are other sources of odors.
On March 29, the landfill and DEP reached a settlement that required Keystone to undergo 26 corrective actions with set timelines to mitigate odors, as well as paying out a total of $575,000 in fines to Dunmore, Throop and the DEP. Both boroughs are required to use the $180,000 each they will receive for community environmental projects.
Topics during the hearing will include odors, groundwater, leachate management and other harms and nuisances, such as birds congregating at the landfill, according to Friends of Lackawanna’s March 11 pre-hearing memorandum.
The outcomes
Pat Clark, a leader of Friends of Lackawanna, hopes the Environmental Hearing Board will shut down the landfill and give it a reasonable time to safely wind down operations. The DEP erred in granting the expansion, he said.
“All it feels to me like we’re doing is concentrating the risks on the citizens of Northeastern Pennsylvania for the next 47 years now,” he said. “All we’re doing is letting a megadump become the megadump, and at some point, like our argument has been the whole time … when is the burden that a community that needs to bear too much?”
Noting the Environmental Hearing Board’s comments on a lack of memorialized violations at the landfill, Clark said, “Take the EHB at face value. They couldn’t really do anything, they couldn’t change anything, because there were no recorded violations. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth now.”
In its April 1 pre-hearing memorandum, Keystone lashed out at Friends of Lackawanna and its demands to close the landfill.
“That would cause jobs to disappear, revenues to local governments to be slashed, the cost of waste disposal to skyrocket, and millions of dollars in investments to be rendered worthless,” landfill attorneys Belardi, Overstreet and Christopher R. Nestor wrote, calling Friends of Lackawanna an echo chamber. “FOL, chanting ‘enough is enough,’ purports to speak on behalf of the communities surrounding KSL. But, the fact is that FOL does not speak on behalf of any of those communities.”
When the DEP approved the Phase III expansion, it said it had received more than 1,500 public comments. Of those, more than 1,400 opposed the landfill, in addition to Friends of Lackawanna submitting a letter with handwritten comments from more than 125 people and a log of more than 700 people who petitioned against it online.
By comparison, the department received over 125 comments in favor of the expansion. The DEP also received a petition with more than 1,000 signatures supporting the landfill.
Keystone does not contend it is perfect, but no modern landfill is perfect, its attorneys wrote.
“But the standard is not perfection, as FOL and Sierra Club suggest it must be. That is because, when it comes to operating a regional solid waste disposal facility, perfection is not possible,” Nestor, Belardi and Overstreet wrote, adding, “Keystone strives, daily, to achieve full and complete compliance at KSL. No expense is spared. No request for action by the (DEP) is refused. Keystone is diligent, responsive, and responsible.”
Clark said he is very confident heading into the hearing. Friends of Lackawanna considers the 2017 ruling to be an unfortunate setback but an enlightening roadmap, he said.
“How long is the state going to stand by and just watch this disaster unwrap itself in slow motion?” Clark said.
The hearing will begin at 10 a.m. Monday in Harrisburg with a scheduled end date of May 1.