The state’s Dept. of Environmental Protection has rescheduled the public hearing on a request from BRADS landfill to make trucking its leachate off-site the facility’s permanent disposal method.
The hearing is Tuesday, Sept. 15, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Saint Clair Area Elementary/Middle School. DEP representatives will be in attendance. The department had scheduled the hearing for Aug. 4 before postponing it on July 31.
Anyone who wants to testify must submit written notice of intent to Maria Tavera Vilchis, Environmental Justice coordinator at DEP, 2 Public Square, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18701-1915, or by email to mtaveravil@pa.gov. DEP will accept requests up to the day of the hearing, and people who show up without pre-registering will still get the chance to speak, though those who pre-register get priority on the agenda.
DEP is asking that testimony be limited to three to five minutes.
Leachate Disposal Permit Modification
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.
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. Now, BRADS wants truck hauling listed as its approved primary leachate disposal 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 “is likely to increase as additional disposal cells are brought on-line.”
Most of the trucked leachate currently goes to the Schuylkill Haven Borough’s treatment plant under a 2024 agreement paying 1.1 cents a gallon, or about $80,300 a year. BRADS pays trucking contractors another 5.7 cents a gallon, about $416,100 a year. Another permit from Capital Region Water sends leachate to Harrisburg.
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.
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.
BRADS finished building a dual-contained pipeline in December 2025, running from its leachate tanks to a connection with SVSA. No agreement was ever reached.
“If an agreement with SVSA comes to fruition, BRADS will convey leachate to SVSA as agreed upon,” BRADS says in its permit application.
Next week’s hearing comes about five 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.
People with a disability who want to testify and need an auxiliary aid, service or other accommodation should email Tavera Vilchis at mtaveravil@pa.gov or contact the Pennsylvania Hamilton Relay Service at 800-654-5984 to discuss how DEP can meet their needs.
Questions about the hearing can be directed to Tavera Vilchis at 717-772-4051 or mtaveravil@pa.gov.
DEP last hosted a public hearing more than two years ago regarding BRADS Landfill when it was considering renewing its operating prermit. Ultimately, it decided to renew that permit – though that decision is being challenged by Saint Clair before the state’s Environmental Hearing Board – and when that decision was handed down earlier this year, DEP published responses to the 2024 public hearing comments … about two years after they were made and after its decision had been made.
Below are all the questions and comments logged at that public hearing as well as the DEP response:
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