DEP cites Keystone Sanitary Landfill for exceeding leachate storage limits

The Keystone Sanitary Landfill violated state regulations by regularly storing too much leachate since October, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a notice of violation Tuesday to the 714-acre landfill in Dunmore and Throop, citing Keystone for violating the Solid Waste Management Act and Municipal Waste Management Rules and Regulations by exceeding its storage capacity for leachate, or the liquid that percolates through garbage piles.

The DEP determined the landfill stored leachate in excess of 25% of its capacity on a regular basis from October to the present after reviewing leachate storage amounts in the landfill’s lagoons, and more recently a “former Dunmore fuel oil tank,” according to the notice of violation.

The 750,000-gallon former fuel tank has been used for emergency leachate storage since August 2018 after it was determined to be adequate to store the liquid, DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly said in an email Wednesday.

The landfill stores untreated leachate in two lagoons totaling more than 9.7 million gallons, according to Keystone’s recent application to renew its operating permit, which the DEP accepted for technical review on April 11. It then pretreats the leachate onsite before piping it to Pennsylvania American Water’s Scranton wastewater treatment plant.

According to state regulations governing landfills, “No more than 25% of the total leachate storage capacity may be used for flow equalization on a regular basis.”

The DEP previously cited the landfill on Sept. 20, 2018, for violating the same leachate storage regulation.

Landfill consultant Al Magnotta said in a text the excessive leachate storage was related to prior incidents and has been eliminated.

“All landfill sites in NEPA had similar issues during this timeframe,” he said Wednesday.

It is the Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill’s 15th violation from the DEP since January 2023, with the previous 14 violations all pertaining to odors, including from leachate storage. The landfill and DEP reached a settlement for the violations on March 29, with Keystone having to pay $575,000 in civil penalties divided among Dunmore, Throop and DEP. The DEP also ordered Keystone to undergo 26 corrective actions to mitigate odors. The settlement stemmed from hundreds of odor complaints and at least 70 instances of DEP staff detecting onsite landfill odors.

In total, the DEP received about 1,000 odor complaints since September, with 21 complaints since May 1 — fewer than previous months, Connolly said. DEP investigations into the recent complaints have not resulted in any odor observations in the communities, though the department has periodically encountered slight odors along Marshwood Road and the Casey Highway during the landfill’s operating hours, Connolly said.

Keystone is currently underway with its decades-long Phase III expansion that projects to triple its total volume of waste, hauling in just over 94 million tons of additional garbage, or about 188 billion pounds, over the next 40-plus years.

Friends of Lackawanna, a grassroots group that formed in 2014 to oppose the landfill and its expansion, appealed DEP’s June 3, 2021, approval of the expansion, taking it before the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board in April. The California-based nonprofit Sierra Club, which has a local chapter, joined Friends of Lackawanna in the appeal. The environmental hearing board has yet to render a decision.

During testimony at the hearing in Harrisburg, DEP Waste Management Program Manager Roger Bellas said that since 2015, there has been “excessive leachate” above predictions and models at the landfill.

Part of the landfill response to deal with leachate has been “tarping and trucking,” or using tarps to direct rainwater away from trash and “aggressively trucking” leachate to facilities in Altoona and Passaic, New Jersey, as well as using banks of large tanks for temporary emergency storage of leachate on site, Bellas testified.

Pat Clark, a leader of Friends of Lackawanna, said the violation is essentially nine consecutive months of leachate storage violations, coming on the heels of 1,000-plus odor complaints and the landfill's settlement agreement "where the landfill admits that it has problems with both leachate and odors."

"This doesn't come to as a surprise for us because it's never actually been fixed, and it really gets down to, where is the line in the sand that DEP says, 'You're over this line. No more'?" Clark said. "From our perspective, they keep erasing that line and moving it further and further away, almost like the moving goalpost analogy."

The DEP gave the landfill 15 days to submit a proposed plan and schedule to correct and prevent the violation.