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A warning sign is shown near the entrance of Chemical Waste Management’s hazardous waste landfill in Emelle, Ala., on July 25, 2023. The landfill, one of the largest of its kind in the country, sparked opposition from its birth, but officials have welcomed the jobs and revenue it brings. Five-gallon plastic pails holding a toxic chemical linked to cancer sat for years on the shelves of a fire department in south-central Wisconsin.
Jefferson Fire Chief Ron Wegner is photographed at the Jefferson Fire Department on Aug. 28, 2023, in Jefferson, Wis. The fire department is participating in a statewide project to collect PFAS-laden firefighting foam and send it more than 700 miles to Emelle, Ala., home of one of the country’s largest hazardous waste landfills.
A woman served the day’s lunch special, country-fried steak. The two companions reminisced about graduating from Sumter County High in 1973. Talk turned to rumors about the next batch of waste destined for the landfill. A North Shore Environmental Construction truck containing buckets of PFAS-laden firefighting foam is shown outside the Jefferson Fire Department on June 22, 2023, in Jefferson, Wis. In a statewide cleanup, Wisconsin is trucking more than 38,500 gallons of PFAS-containing firefighting foam to a hazardous waste landfill in Emelle, Ala. The landfill has a contentious history.
In a 2020 survey of Wisconsin fire departments, about 76% of respondents said they possessed or previously used fluorinated foam, some dating to the 1980s. Many wanted to learn about their liability and how to get rid of the stuff. Mimi Johnson, director of the Office of Emerging Contaminants at the Wisconsin Department of Natural ResourcesDave Johnson, the company’s executive vice president, said North Shore has long worked with Chemical Waste Management.
“You obviously don’t want to go into an area that’s going to be a disadvantage to somebody,” Johnson said. A historical marker in Emelle, Ala., shown on July 25, 2023, touts the town while acknowledging residents’ unsuccessful bid in the 1980s to shutter Chemical Waste Management’s hazardous waste landfill, one of the biggest in the country. Multiple protesters chained themselves to a fence in protest of Emelle becoming what they called the nation’s “pay toilet.” It was November 1987, and they aimed to block waste trucks from entering the landfill.
“And I thought, ‘No way. That’s just not possible.’ So I started doing some research,” she told reporters this summer. “There was nothing that had to be done about the waste or the way it was dumped or the linings or anything.” Oliver worked in Chemical Waste Management’s records department for three decades, and she thinks the company was well run — and that it properly handles waste.“I don’t think it’s fair for you to take your waste and ship it to an almost all-Black county,” Oliver said.“Wisconsin would have said, because they’re majority white, they would have said, ‘We ain’t going to have it.’”The Emelle landfill’s approximately 130 employees pass by farms, pastures and woodlands on their way to work.
“A lot of people don’t know what to do because there hasn’t been any direction given yet. So the best thing to do is send it to a facility like ours, and we manage it correctly.”Mike Davis, the landfill’s senior district manager, said the facility expects more PFAS to come. “There was a train running all the way to Mobile,” he said. “There were so many people out. It was amazing.”
, driving up disposal costs. Prices could climb after the Federal Aviation Administration lifts mandates that airports use fluorinated foam, as more of it will need a resting place. Yet the EPA acknowledges that all landfills represent a potential contamination source after closure. “Even the best landfills at this stage,” Lohmann said, “they will start failing.”Chemical Waste Management calls the 600 feet of “Selma Chalk” limestone atop which the Emelle landfill sits virtually “impermeable,” allowing water to penetrate at a rate of approximately 1.2 inches per year.
As early as the 1980s, monitoring wells detected toxic chemicals within the vicinity of the facility’s first six trenches, which stored 160 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of corrosive waste, toxic metals, ignitable materials, herbicides and pesticides, wastewater sludge and PCBs. More than two dozen containers of hazardous waste were found rusting or damaged, and 16 more were leaking, according to an April report. Inspectors observed an uncleaned spill, approximately two years old, from a leachate storage tank. A concrete floor on which mercury containers were stored was cracked, the report added.
As the hearing began, Sumter County Commission Chairman Marcus Campbell stepped up to a lectern and sang the landfill’s praises.
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