The operators of one of North Carolina’s largest landfills have for decades been shipping forever chemical-laden sludge to a majority Black community in Sampson County, a community group has alleged in a formal notice of intent to sue.

The Environmental Justice Community Action Network alleges that Sampson County Landfill operator GFL Enterprises and its predecessors accepted waste containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and then failed to control both groundwater and gases carrying the compounds. The Southern Environmental Law Center is representing the Sampson County-based nonprofit.

The notice alleges that the operators of the Sampson County Landfill have long accepted sludge packed with dangerous chemicals from companies like Chemours and then failed to control it, both in groundwater and in air emissions. That failure, the notice alleges, is a violation of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act and is resulting in dangerous PFAS concentrations in groundwater that the low-income community around the landfill depends on.

N.C. Department of Environmental Quality samples of the landfill’s leachate found PFAS levels many times higher than the typical concentration of PFAS in landfills, the notice said. Municipal solid waste landfills average about 12,600 parts per trillion in their leachate, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.

In Sampson County, September 2023 samples found PFAS levels as high as 727,368 in a closed municipal landfill and 1,422,796 in the still-operating municipal landfill.

“For too long, those in charge of the landfill have shirked responsibility for the health and safety of Snow Hill residents,” Sherri White-Williamson, the executive director of EJCAN, said in a statement.

The News & Observer emailed GFL Environmental seeking comment on the notice of intent to sue but did not immediately receive a response.

Snow Hill and Roseboro are the two communities closest to the massive facility, which actually includes four different landfill sites. In addition to the still-operating municipal landfill, there’s a still-operating construction and demolition landfill that is unlined, as well as a closed municipal solid waste and closed construction landfill.

About 590 people live within a one-mile radius of the landfill, according to the complaint. About 71% of those people are Black, Hispanic or American Indian, a proportion that’s higher than the combined proportion of those groups in both Sampson County and North Carolina.

PFAS have been linked to a host of health concerns, and the EPA has proposed drinking water standards for six PFAS. Those include PFOA and PFOS, for which the standard would be four parts per trillion.

From July 2022 to June 2023, the municipal solid waste landfill accepted 2.04 million tons of solid waste from 37 North Carolina counties. That included 332 tons from Durham County and 155.3 tons from Wake County, according to an annual report filed by the landfill’s operators.

Taking waste from Chemours

The landfill has a history of accepting waste that other places won’t. That includes soil from the Kerr-McGee Superfund site in Navassa and ash from burned wood, coal and tires at power plants.

The landfill for years accepted sludge from the Fayetteville Works facility, both when it was operated by DuPont and after that company spun off Chemours. The Fayetteville Works facility has been central to many of North Carolina’s forever chemical concerns, after scientists discovered that its operators had for decades been dumping a shorter compound marketed as GenX into the Cape Fear River.

The Sampson County Landfill started accepting sludge from Fayetteville Works in 2011, with about 23,000 pounds coming in each week. By 2015, Chemours had taken over Fayetteville Works and the amount of sludge sent to the Sampson County landfill had risen to about 35,000 pounds per week.

Chemicals like Nafion Byproduct 4, Nafion Byproduct 5 and GenX that were specifically linked with Chemours were found at levels ranging from 64,300 to 852,000 ppt.

“Just as the PFAS from Chemours have tainted drinking water, groundwater and air across Southeastern North Carolina, PFAS from the Landfill are polluting air and water and endangering human health in Snow Hill and Roseboro,” SELC attorneys wrote in the notice of intent to sue.

Sources of contamination

The complaint points to several key sources for the contamination, including the way that the landfill’s operators managed leachate — the collected rainwater and garbage juice that accumulates over time. For years, the notice says, the Sampson County landfill used a leachate collection system that partly relied on a gas-fired evaporator to evaporate 34,000 gallons of water each day, resulting in tons of air pollutant emissions annually.

The landfill has also been home to two different landfill gas-to-energy operations since 2006. According to SELC, those operations used flares to burn off non-methane compounds, but at too low a temperature to destroy durable PFAS.

Seeps in the landfill’s walls could also be a cause of contamination, the notice said, with contaminated water working through the liner of some cells and into surface waters.

“With PFAS concentrations at the Landfill so extraordinarily high, even a relatively small leak poses a significant threat to groundwater,” the notice states.

Attorneys pointed to a 2023 peer-reviewed study that sampled creeks around the Sampson County landfill and found high levels of PFAS in Bearskin Swamp Creek, which runs near the eastern edge of the landfill sites. Forever chemicals in the creek were many times higher than those found in sites upstream of the landfill, according to the researchers from UNC Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Public Health.

Calls for remediation

The notice of intent to sue asks GFL to take a number of steps to prevent future contamination and clean up places where high levels of PFAS have been found.

Those include:

• Handling PFAS-contaminated waste in a way that prevents it from entering the environment.

• Stopping PFAS from leaving the landfill and entering surface waters, as well as remediating places like Bearskin Swamp Creek where PFAS have found their way to surface waters.

• Investigating where PFAS from the landfill could be contaminating groundwater and remediating it.

• Investigating where PFAS from the landfill are contaminating residential drinking wells and remediate them.

• Preventing additional PFAS emissions from landfill gas energy projects.

This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and Green South Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. If you would like to help support local journalism, please consider signing up for a digital subscription, which you can do here.