UPDATE: On Friday (July 31), DEP postponed this hearing but has not scheduled a new date.
The state’s Dept. of Environmental Protection will host a public hearing next week on a request from BRADS landfill to make trucking its leachate off-site the facility’s permanent disposal method.
The hearing is Tuesday, Aug. 4, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Saint Clair Area School District building on S. Mill St. DEP’s Office of Environmental Justice is coordinating it.
At issue is a Major Permit Modification filed by Blythe Recycling and Demolition Site Holdings Inc. – the Waste Connections Inc. subsidiary that owns the construction and demolition landfill along Burma Road in Blythe Township. DEP accepted the application May 29. Comments will be recorded and answered in writing.
Leachate is the liquid that forms when rain and snowmelt filter down through buried waste. At BRADS, it’s collected by piping beneath the landfill liner, pumped into two 500,000-gallon steel tanks, and loaded into tankers.
The landfill has done this since it opened in 2019. What changes is the permit: BRADS wants hauling listed as its approved primary leachate management method for the life of the site, rather than as a stopgap in lieu of a pipeline that was to be connected to a facility owned by Schuylkill Valley Sewer Authority.
In its application to DEP, BRADS says it has trucked more than 51 million gallons in roughly 9,275 tanker loads since 2019 without incident. Production has averaged about 7.3 million gallons a year and, the application notes, “is likely to increase as additional disposal cells are brought on-line.”
Most of the trucked leachate currently goes to the Borough of Schuylkill Haven’s treatment plant under a 2024 agreement paying the borough 1.1 cents a gallon, or roughly $80,300 a year. BRADS pays trucking contractors another 5.7 cents a gallon, about $416,100 a year. A backup permit from Capital Region Water sends leachate to Harrisburg.
The application repeatedly cites Act 45 of 2015, signed into law by then-Gov. Tom Wolf on Oct. 7, 2015.
Act 45 amended the Solid Waste Management Act to say DEP “may not prohibit or penalize the vehicular transportation of leachate discharged from a collection and handling system of a landfill to an offsite facility,” so long as three conditions are met: enclosed tanks under federal motor carrier rules, a new traffic study if leachate tankers exceed a set share of site traffic, and financial assurance recalculated to cover the hauling.
The law also erased the rules that had made trucking temporary. Before 2015, state regulations allowed vehicular transport only “for the first 3 years following initial discharge of leachate,” and only if the operator had an on-site pretreatment system, a leachate recirculation system, and a demonstration that direct discharge to a sewage plant or stream was reachable within three years. A companion rule required on-site treatment running at least three years before closure. Act 45 struck those provisions.
When DEP renewed the BRADS operating permit on April 30, extending it to Jan. 20, 2035, it attached a condition requiring the company to file this application by May 29 unless BRADS first reached a deal to send its leachate through a pipeline to SVSA. It was about two years ago when DEP hosted a public hearing to take comments and questions on the permit renewal application.
BRADS finished building a dual-contained pipeline in December 2025, running from its leachate tanks to a connection with SVSA. No agreement followed. The application gives the pipeline a single sentence: “If an agreement with SVSA comes to fruition, BRADS will convey leachate to SVSA as agreed upon.”
The hearing next week comes three months after DEP executed a consent order with BRADS on April 27 resolving violations for odor, litter, intermediate cover, leachate management and vegetation. DEP’s response to public comments on the renewal says the order “contains a $96,525 penalty for violations cited by the Waste Management Program in Notices of Violation from 2024 to the present.”
The landfill has drawn hundreds of hydrogen sulfide odor complaints since 2024, and Saint Clair has appealed the permit renewal to the state Environmental Hearing Board. A separate 2024 application to double daily intake from 1,500 to 3,000 tons remains under DEP review.
Questions regarding the hearing can be directed to Maria Tavera Vilchis, DEP’s Office of Environmental Justice Northeast regional coordinator, at 717-772-4051 or mtaveravil@pa.gov.
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