DEP temporarily extends expiring Keystone Sanitary Landfill permit

The state Department of Environmental Protection issued a six-month extension to the Keystone Sanitary Landfill's expiring operating permit on Friday to give the department time to evaluate Keystone's odor control and leachate management after a panel of environmental judges sent the landfill's Phase III expansion approval back to the DEP on Tuesday over odor and excessive leachate issues.
The Louis and Dominick DeNaples-owned landfill in Dunmore and Throop is required to renew its operating permit every 10 years, and its current permit was set to expire Sunday. In light of the looming expiration, the DEP said in a statement Friday that it had issued a temporary six-month extension, extending the landfill's operating permit to Oct. 6. The extension is not a renewal, and no other operation or construction changes have been approved, DEP spokeswoman Colleen Connolly wrote in the email.
The extension will give the department time to evaluate Keystone's renewal application, which it accepted for review in April 2024, considering a Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board decision on Tuesday, Connolly said. According to a permit extension letter Friday to the landfill, the DEP said it will also use the extension to evaluate the effectiveness of Keystone's odor control and leachate management measures that were required under a March 2024 consent order and agreement.
The consent order was the culmination of 14 odor-related violations since January 2023 following nearly 1,000 odor complaints in seven months, as well as DEP staff detecting offsite landfill gas and leachate odors attributed to Keystone at least 70 times. The landfill had to pay a $575,000 fine and was required to undergo 26 corrective actions to manage its odors and address its leachate. Those corrective actions would eventually expire if not added to Keystone's permitting.
On Tuesday, the state Environmental Hearing Board ruled the DEP erred in approving the landfill's Phase III expansion on June 3, 2021, by issuing a permit that does not sufficiently control or mitigate issues with odors and excessive leachate generation, which the DEP was aware of prior to approving the expansion. The 42.4-year expansion allows the landfill to triple its volume of waste into the 2060s by adding just over 94 million tons of garbage, or about 188 billion pounds.
'The Department must assess on remand whether additional measures to control odors and leachate, some of which have been required by a recent Consent Order and Agreement, warrant inclusion in the landfill's permit or changes to the landfill's operating plans,' the five-member panel of environmental judges wrote.
Grassroots group Friends of Lackawanna, which formed in 2014 to oppose the landfill and its expansion, appealed the expansion approval in July 2021, taking it to the hearing board.
Pat Clark, a leader of Friends of Lackawanna, said the DEP finally seems to be 'realizing the real harms and the real problems that are a result of this landfill.'
'Unfortunately, it took the courts to help them realize that, but either way, they have to acknowledge it at this point, and all of the harms that we've seen are growing by the day,' Clark said. 'It's only logical to conclude that they are only going to continue if this landfill is allowed to continue operation and expanding.'
Friends of Lackawanna previously appealed the landfill's 2015 operating permit approval, citing underground fires, groundwater contamination and damage to liner systems. On Nov. 8, 2017, the Environmental Hearing Board ruled it would not rescind the landfill's operating permit, though it did require Keystone to prepare a groundwater assessment plan because of leachate contamination that a monitoring well had detected since 2002. The board's 2017 decision also criticized the DEP, determining, 'The (DEP) relies upon formal, memorialized violations in conducting its review of Keystone's compliance history, but the department, with rare exceptions, never memorializes any of Keystone's violations.'
Since then, the DEP has accumulated a decade of violations against the landfill, Clark said.
Clark now wants the DEP to reject Keystone's operating permit.
'If the DEP wants to do its job and protect people, it's a pretty logical conclusion to say, 'Hey, at some point everything must end. The risks are too great. We're going to wind this down,' ' Clark said.

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