Resource Conservation and Recovery Act

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On August 8, 2024, the Coosa River Basin Initiative (CRBI), an environmental organization based in Georgia,  and the City of Calhoun, Georgia (the City), announced that they had reached a proposed settlement in a citizen suit case involving alleged violations of the Clean Water Act (CWA) and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) focused solely on the City’s land application of PFAS-containing biosolids.

CRBI, through its counsel at Southern Environmental Law Center, filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on March 7, 2024, against the City and the owner of property used for land application of the City’s biosolids. The Complaint included the following alleged CWA violations:

  • The City’s land application of PFAS-contaminated biosolids onto land that was hydrologically connected to navigable waters through groundwater was the “functional equivalent” of discharging PFAS directly into navigable waters without an NPDES permit;
  • That PFAS are a toxic pollutant and that the City, therefore, violated its existing NPDES permit by failing to “take all reasonable steps to minimize or prevent any discharge or sludge disposal which might adversely affect human health or the environment,” provide notice to downstream users and take reasonable steps to prevent injury when a toxic substance has been discharged, and enforce noncompliance with any applicable pretreatment standard or requirement.

On November 17, the EPA paused its prior approval of up to 100 shipments of wastes containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the Chemours Netherlands B.V. facility in Dordrecht to the Chemours Fayetteville Works plant in North Carolina. The North Carolina Chemours plant has been the source of previous pollution.

This news comes on the heels of a new analysis of EPA data showing that over the last five years at least 60 million pounds of PFAS waste has been disposed of in the US. According to the author of the new analysis, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer), the 60m pounds estimate is likely to be a “dramatic” undercount because PFAS waste is mostly “unregulated” in the US and companies are typically not required to record its disposal. As part of its analysis, Peer identified over 10,300 PFAS waste shipments between June 2018 and June 2023.