Sep 22, 2017 3 min read

Smith Township supervisors will hold a public hearing Thursday on a company’s plans to build a new landfill that would allow it to continue accepting residual waste at its waste-disposal site south of Route 22.

Green Tree-based MAX Environmental Technologies will submit a conditional-use application for local approval to build a new, roughly 21-acre residual-waste landfill at its Bulger facility. The hearing is set for 5:30 p.m. in the township building.

The company plans to begin construction in 2020 or ’21 if it receives the necessary local and state permission, according to materials on the company’s website. The landfill would be operational for about 10 years.

The nearest residence is about 400 feet from the proposed landfill.

The company plans to submit an application package later this fall to the state Department of Environmental Protection for the proposal, which also includes a nonhazardous waste treatment facility at the site where wastes could be solidified by mixing them with drier materials, stabilized to chemically bind them to other metals so they don’t leach, or neutralized by adjusting their pH levels.

Traffic to the new facilities would average about 30 trucks a day – about the same as now.

Most of the residual waste MAX accepts now consists of drill cuttings from the Marcellus Shale industry and soil from former industrial sites that are being redeveloped, which is “not considered clean fill” but also isn’t classified as hazardous, according to company manager Carl Spadaro.

Waste at the site currently goes into an old impoundment the company is reclosing in a cap-and-cover process. The company expects to finish the closure by the time it begins construction on the new landfill.

“Really, it would be a continuation of what we’re currently doing, but in a new landfill,” Spadaro said.

The site also would start accepting oil and gas waste with elevated levels of radiation.

Spadaro stressed he was not talking about “nuclear waste” or material with “high levels of naturally occurring radiation.”

There are no cumulative limits on how much of the TENORM, or technically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material, landfills in Pennsylvania can take in over their lifespans. But landfills that do so are subject to a monthly cap on TENORM based, in part, on the tonnage of all waste they accept.

The state limit on radioactivity for waste entering landfills, 140 microrem per hour above background, is “much lower than the 100,000 microrem (per) hour limit established by state and federal authorities for the general public,” Spadaro said.

With radioactivity up to that limit, “If you’re far enough away from (the load) – and far enough away doesn’t have to be 300 feet, it can be 10 or 20 feet – you’ll never be able to detect it,” he said. He went on to say MAX would be “closing the landfill in sections as we go, so it’s not going to be open for years and years.”

The Bulger facility has been in operation since 1958. MAX also operates the similar Yukon facility in South Huntingdon Township, Westmoreland County. The new landfill would meet requirements that include a double-liner system with leak detection and leachate collection.

“It’s the most stringent standards that DEP has for a residual-waste landfill,” Spadaro said.

A company fact sheet estimates the project would generate more than $1 million in benefit fees for the township and “in excess of $10 million in regional and state fees, taxes, local services and employment” over 10 years. The company expects to hire two to four new permanent workers to manage the operations.