All three Schuylkill County Commissioners are asking the state to shut the door on Natural Soil Products.
In a five-page letter dated Aug. 18, the Board of Commissioners formally asked the Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection to deny NSP’s application to renew its Municipal Waste Processing Permit, which allows the Frailey Township company to keep processing sewage sludge into compost.
The Commissioners don’t mince words in the request. The letter’s first substantive sentence says the Board “requests the Department to deny the Application of Natural Soil Products for renewal of its Municipal Waste Processing Permit No. 101628.”
It closes the same way: “For all of the foregoing reasons, we request the Department to deny the NSP Renewal Application.”
The letter went to Roger Bellas, manager of DEP’s Waste Management Program in Wilkes-Barre, and was signed by Chairman Larry Padora and Commissioners Boots Hetherington and Gary Hess.
Attached to the Commissioners’ letter is a petition signed by dozens of residents from Good Spring, Joliett, Keffers, Tremont, Hegins Township, Porter Township, Frailey Township and Tremont Township, who wrote that they have “endured enough.” Since applying for a permit renewal, residents from these communities have renewed their years-long complaints to the Commissioners to act against NSP.
For those years, they’ve said that they can’t open their windows without taking in the putrid, choking odors they say are coming from NSP. Further, they say the foul air has led to health complications and overall, destroyed their quality of life.
NSP filed its renewal application with DEP in July. The company, owned by Tully Environmental of Flushing, N.Y., operates a roughly 100-acre biosolids composting operation off Route 125 between Donaldson and Good Spring. The site straddles two municipalities. NSP owns one parcel in Frailey Township and another in Porter Township.
The Zoning Argument
The Commissioners’ first line of attack in the DEP letter, however, has nothing to do with odors.
Under the current Schuylkill County Zoning Ordinance, the letter notes, the operation is classified as Commercial Composting, a use that is permitted by Special Exception in both zoning districts the property sits in. The County isn’t arguing the use is forbidden. It’s arguing NSP never obtained the approval it needed for it.
County records show the Zoning Officer issued Zoning Permit No. 9125 in 1992 for a “leaf and yard waste composting facility only.” The Commissioners say the operation running there today – composting biosolids – is a material change from what was approved more than three decades ago.
County staff, the letter says, could not find any later zoning permit, zoning amendment, Special Exception approval, or other local land use approval authorizing biosolids composting at the site.
The 1992 file also contains a note the Commissioners flag: the operation had already started before zoning approval was sought, and the Zoning Officer didn’t know about the use until after it was underway. The permit was issued anyway, and according to the letter does not appear to have required review by the Zoning Hearing Board.
The letter also alleges a string of buildings went up without permits. County records show just one other zoning permit for the property (No. 14443, issued in May 2004) for a 46,443-square-foot maintenance building on the Frailey Township parcel.
Against that, the Commissioners identify:
- An approximately 20,000-square-foot building visible in 2015 imagery on Parcel 22-03-0006.001. The letter says this may be the building permitted in 2004, but that its size differs substantially from what was approved and the permit was issued to the Frailey Township parcel
- An approximately 88,000-square-foot building built between 2016 and 2018 in Frailey Township, with no zoning permit
- An approximately 900-square-foot building near the entrance and scales on the Porter Township parcel, built between 2016 and 2018, with no zoning permit
- An approximately 105,000-square-foot building built between 2018 and 2021 in Frailey Township, with no zoning permit
The County says it intends to pursue the zoning noncompliance.
87 Violations
The letter then turns to NSP’s compliance record, using numbers pulled from NSP’s own renewal application.
By that accounting, the company logged 87 DEP violations between 2007 and 2025.
The single largest category is effective vector control and public nuisance, at 36 violations, or roughly 41 percent of the total. Failure to operate in accordance with permit operating requirements accounts for another 25, about 29 percent. Open burning and uncontrolled fugitive emissions account for nine more.
The rest are spread across groundwater monitoring, reporting requirements, solid waste handling, surface water protection, freeboard, biosolids application, equipment availability and special requirements.
Individual violations may have been resolved, the Commissioners acknowledge. But they argue the volume and the repetition point to a pattern rather than a series of one-offs.
Holes in the Nuisance Plan
The County also picks apart Appendix B of the application: NSP’s Nuisance Minimization and Control Plan.
On vectors, the plan appears to work against itself. One section says licensed pest-control contractors will be brought in “if necessary” or “if appropriate,” after in-house steps like windrow turning, rodent trapping and coordination with the County West Nile Virus Program. Another section says those same contractors would be the primary monitors for rodents and mosquitoes.
Set against 36 vector-control violations, the Commissioners say it’s unclear whether bringing in contractors only when NSP deems it necessary offers any real assurance that vector problems will be caught and handled.
On odors, the County zeroes in on how NSP defines a complaint worth acting on. Under the plan, only “verified” complaints would justify permanent operational changes or regulatory action — and a complaint counts as verified only when confirmed by an NSP employee, a DEP representative, or a Township or County official.
The Commissioners want to know how that works in practice. If DEP takes a complaint directly, will the County and Township be told so verification can happen? If NSP takes the complaint, what tells local officials? The letter says DEP should consider setting up a formal notification protocol among the Department, the facility, Frailey Township, Porter Township and the County.
Then comes the letter’s blunt assessment: NSP has historically shown an inability to address these issues under any circumstances, and the County believes the company will be incapable of fixing them to any reasonable level.
The Drying Time Request
Separately, NSP has a Minor Permit Modification pending before DEP.
According to the application, the GORE Force Air System is producing compost with higher moisture content, which means longer drying times before screening.
To handle it, NSP wants authorization to reopen and use Pads 2, 3, 4 and 5, along with Building 2, stretching average drying time from around 30 days to as much as 75 days.
That request lands against a specific history. In December, DEP cited Tully Environmental for storing 33,600 cubic yards of biosolids in its bunkers, nearly double the 18,000-cubic-yard cap tied to the Gore system permit modification. That same notice flagged 10,860 cubic yards of unscreened biosolids sitting on Pads 3, 4 and 5, areas where the permit’s bond calculations allowed no storage at all, plus 4,807 cubic yards inside Building 2, where the limit was 2,000.
In other words, NSP is now asking DEP for permission to use the same pads and building it was cited for using eight months ago.
The Commissioners want DEP to weigh the modification and the renewal together, arguing that more material sitting on site longer bears directly on odors and vector activity.
Years of This
The petition attached to the letter puts the residents’ case in plainer terms: horrific odors that have gutted their quality of life, health concerns, truck traffic, spills on the road from tarps torn or overloaded, and torn-up roadways.
Two additional sheets carry a second statement, signed by residents of Joliett, Porter Township, Tremont Borough and Tremont Township, Hegins Township, Good Spring, Keffers, Lorberry, Lincoln and Molleystown. It reads that after careful consideration of the renewal permit, the harms far outweigh any benefit to their quality of life.
None of it is new.
DEP fined NSP $50,000 in 2023 after investigating complaints from Joliett, Good Spring, Donaldson, Newtown and Tremont, where residents reported sleeplessness and illness. The resulting consent order cut the company’s sludge intake, required weather monitoring, and set an Oct. 15, 2023 deadline to have the Gore Biosolids Composting System running.
NSP missed that deadline, blaming rain delays on concrete work and late equipment. Hetherington told residents at an October 2023 work session that DEP had denied the company’s request for an extension and was fining it $500 a day until the system came online.
Residents said afterward that the system wasn’t working. In September 2024, DEP issued another Notice of Violation after its own representatives detected odors offsite on 12 separate days that August.
DEP accepted NSP’s renewal application in July. The Commissioners have asked that their letter be entered into the Department’s consideration of it.
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Scoob
August 25, 2026 at 9:18 am
It wont get shut down, the local politicians will get paid off. Maybe they can relocate this operation to Forestville area near Big Doamond