Canadian officials have found traces of the emergent pollutant class PFAS in a drinking water intake area connected to Lake Memphremagog.
The chemicals, found in water meant for the city of Sherbrooke by Quebec’s environmental ministry last fall, have spurred concern from environmentalists on both sides of the border.
The findings add to years-long talks about the border-spanning lake, which flows north and supplies drinking water for more than 175,000 Canadians.
“We had no surprise, and we were requesting that this study be done,” said Robert Benoit, president of Memphremagog Conservation Inc., a Canadian nonprofit founded in the 1960s.
Benoit said his group learned about the findings at a meeting earlier this month between American and Canadian leaders, environmental coalitions and Casella Waste Systems, which runs the landfill in Coventry — the only one left in Vermont.
Jean-Pierre Fortier, a water management official for Sherbrooke, told people at the Feb. 10 meeting that the amounts of PFAS detected were lower than legal limits and toxicity levels, according to the Caledonian Record.
Fortier told Radio-Canada that, in the worst case, 14 nanograms per liter of the chemicals were found in the water — far below the Canadian national health department’s maximum acceptable concentrations of 200 nanograms per liter.
Still, the findings worry Benoit and others.
Henry Coe — a member of regional environmental group Don’t Undermine Memphremagog’s Purity, or DUMP — said the discovery had “absolutely” exacerbated the coalition’s concern about water quality in the lake.
“They’re concerned for the purity of their drinking water,” Coe said, referring to Canadians. “And now it’s come home to roost.”
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have come under increased scrutiny in Vermont after the state discovered in 2016 that a form of the pollutants had contaminated hundreds of drinking water wells in Bennington.
The substances don’t break down in the environment and have been used for decades to make products like stain- and water-resistant fabric. Exposure to certain PFAS chemicals has been linked to increased risk of developing cancers and other health hazards.
Debate on where the chemicals originate
Though there is no proof, Benoit’s and Coe’s groups said they believe the chemicals detected in Sherbrooke may have come from Casella landfill leachate treated by the municipal wastewater plant in Newport.
Karine Godbout, president of Sherbrooke’s city environmental committee, also suggested to Radio-Canada this month that Newport could have been the source but noted that she could not confirm it.
Casella had been sending leachate — contaminated landfill liquid — to the treatment facility, which sits on a tributary of Lake Memphremagog, until a permit agreement in 2019 barred the company from doing so until 2024. But Benoit said it takes about two years for water around Newport to travel to the other end of the lake.
A report from the state Department of Environmental Conservation last February said the wastewater treatment plants in Montpelier and Newport had higher PFAS concentrations in the discharge leaving their facilities than other plants statewide. The two plants were the only ones that regularly processed landfill leachate during the study period.
Joe Fusco, a vice president of Casella, said this week that “sometimes, these (environmental) groups imply that the PFAS problem is a landfill problem.”
However, he said, “it is a broad social and environmental challenge that has been flowing from our modern lifestyle. For decades many of the products and day-to-day items used in our society contain these compounds and end up in our environment through many sources, and this is subsequently passed into the waste stream.”
Fusco said landfills also provide “a critical environmental and human health protection by sequestering more than 90% of the PFAS mass taken in.”
As he has in the past, Fusco said he believes stakeholders have overlooked discharge into the lake on the other side of the border and called for more accountability in Canada, where he said regulations on PFAS are not as stringent.
Benoit, the Canadian environmental activist, said he finds it hard to believe PFAS could be coming from any other operation around the lake.
According to the Caledonian Record, Newport City Manager Laura Dolgin said at the Feb. 10 meeting that the city looks forward to the day that it can handle leachate at its wastewater plant.
Benoit and Coe said their groups oppose an end to the moratorium and resumption of leachate treatment at the city plant.
“It’s the drinking water, and we don’t want the leachate to come back,” said Benoit, adding, “We start again to take leachate in the lake, well, it will just go from bad to worse.”
Dolgin said this week that she “would like the ratepayers in the City of Newport to benefit from the revenue of taking leachate.”
