The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has cancelled an upcoming hearing in Saratoga County on a controversial PFAS processing permit at the applicant's request.
ESMI/Clean Earth operates a soil processing plant in Fort Edward that has been remediating primarily petroleum and PCB contaminated soils for the past 30 years.
Last year, the company applied for a research permit with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to process 5,000 tons of PFAS contaminated soils over a two-week period – as is the plant processes around 800 pounds of soil a day.
And in case some of our listeners didn’t know PFAS chemicals, dubbed forever-chemicals, have been linked to several ill-health effects such as cancer.
That’s right, and this is a part of the state that’s already dealt with its fair share of corporate pollution linked to General Electric dumping PCBs into the Hudson River.
Local activists have been fighting that permit application since it was submitted last summer. And this week I got a tip that the approval process had been put on hold at the request of the company.
Jessica Donnelly is with The Fort Stops PFAS, she told me she got a call from DEC out of the blue notifying her that next week’s public comment session on the permit had been cancelled.
“My reaction was, first, complete shock and I was not expecting that at all. ESMI had requested this to occur in that they wanted to retract their application. Not really cancelling the permit application, but putting it on pause. So, this was spurred by ESMI themselves,” said Donnelly.
And I did reach out to ESMI who told me the pause on the public hearings, which effectively puts the whole application process on ice, was spurred by the fact that ESMI/Clean Earth was purchased by Veolia an international wastewater treatment company.
A company spokesperson said they requested the pause to “give Veolia the opportunity to learn more about the facility and review the proposed pilot study.”
How are local activists reacting to the news?
Well, cautious optimism seems to be the best way to describe their reaction. Donnelly tells me they’re counting this as a tiny win, but they expect Veolia to pick the application back up in some form down the line.
“This isn’t the end of our battle with this PFAS processing permit. We’re feeling optimistic about this pause and it gives us some time to regroup and think about our strategy moving forward. We really like to strategize. We can think and predict what is ESMI’s next move going to be, where are they going with this. It gives us some time,” said Donnelly.
Now there’s a parallel issue running here with the plant at the village’s Zoning Board of Appeals right?
Exactly. In December the village’s code enforcement office cited the plant for violating its use permit for allegedly processing material it wasn’t permitted to process. Since then, ESMI has been fighting to overturn that citation. The company is arguing they were given broad, sweeping approval to process all sorts of contaminants in the 1990s, though that actual approval cannot be located. DEC doesn’t have a copy, the village doesn’t have a copy, the company cannot produce a copy. All anyone has to go off of is the minutes from a 1992 meeting that essentially describe the approval.
So, that’s still ongoing, and is technically separate from the PFAS processing permit, and the ZBA is scheduled to next meet July 21st.
