A Sampson County landfill project would capture methane. Would it protect neighbors?

Bernice Cooper’s questions about how the Sampson County Landfill is affecting her Snow Hill community have lingered for nearly 50 years.

Without answers to those questions, Cooper told N.C. Department of Environmental Quality officials this week, the state should deny a permit for the landfill’s owner to start operating a renewable natural gas facility at the site that captures fumes from the trash and sells the methane it produces.

“It is unimaginable to me that you would think that it’s OK to allow something else to go in the landfill without telling us what it will do for our health, our children’s health, our great grandchildren,” Cooper said.

Cooper and other Sampson County residents are worried the proposed facility will bring more garbage to a predominately Black and Hispanic community. Sapphire Renewable Natural Gas, a partnership between landfill owners GFL Industries and OPAL Fuels, says the facility will curb methane emissions at the state’s single largest source of the potent greenhouse gas.

An environmental attorney has also raised concerns about whether the landfill is accurately portraying what is contained in the non-methane gas it plans to burn off at the site.

Wake County and the City of Raleigh both send their residents’ trash to Sampson County, as does Durham. As organic matter like food and paper decompose, they release methane.

The Sampson County Landfill is easily the state’s largest methane emitter, with more than 824,568 tons leaking into the air in 2021, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That also makes it the second largest methane polluting landfill in the United States. The proposed Sapphire Renewable Natural Gas project would seek to capture that methane and remove other contaminants and impurities before sending it to a pipeline.

A spokesman for GFL Environmental and OPAL Fuels touted the project’s environmental benefits in an email. The processed renewable natural gas, for example, could be used to displace diesel fuel in trucks and buses. And capturing landfill gas for processing, according to the spokesman, will cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from the site.

“Developing RNG projects like this is a key component of GFL’s overall sustainability strategy of converting landfill gas to renewable energy,” the spokesman wrote.

Garbage and environmental justice

The facility is seeking a construction and operation permit that would allow it to operate for a year under the landfill’s existing air permit before seeking its own.

During a public hearing Wednesday in Clinton regarding the first permit, residents and environmental advocates told the N.C. Department of Environmental they are suspicious of the landfill and worried that a new project there would exacerbate long-standing health and odor concerns.

“There really isn’t any sincere monitoring that’s supposed to be happening in this permit and there’s never been a health impact assessment that’s happened out there in the community,” Sherri White-Williamson, the founder of the Clinton-based Environmental Justice Community Action Network, told The News & Observer.

An environmental justice analysis DEQ conducted of the community around the plant found that nearby census tracts had a significantly higher proportion of Black residents than both Sampson County and North Carolina. A one-mile radius around the proposed project also had a higher proportion of American Indian and Hispanic residents than the state and county.

All three census tracts near the facility had higher levels of impoverished people than the state, while one had a 32.5% poverty rate that was higher than both the state and county. DEQ also found 19 active permits within a mile radius of the Sapphire facility.

“There was no substantive response to the fact that every single environmental justice indicator they looked at told him this is going to harm people who are already bearing the disproportionate impact of pollution in this area,” Maia Hutt, a Southern Environmental Law Center attorney, told The News & Observer.

Sapphire estimates that it will emit about 7.1 tons of hazardous air pollutants, including 6.3 tons of hydrogen chloride. The gas facility’s owners also say it will release about 4.2 tons of volatile organic compounds and 1.47 tons of particulate matter.

What would be in flared landfill gas?

Hutt argues the facility is likely severely underestimating its emissions of air pollution by relying on an EPA landfill gas formula rather than specific information about what is contained in gas from the Sampson County facility.

Hutt said the project’s consultants relied on an EPA formula for landfill gas constituents to determine its pollution despite the federal agency warning that site-specific landfill gas information is more accurate.

“The most important base piece of data is what is in the landfill gas before you start doing things to it,” Hutt said.

The EPA formula Sapphire’s consultants used is based on a landfill that only accepts residential garbage when the Sampson County landfill has been shown repeatedly in recent years to accept almost anything, including creosote-laden soil from a Navassa Superfund site. Studies have also found elevated levels of forever chemicals in streams near the landfill.

The EPA specifically recommends that landfills measure their own gas and use those constituents when seeking air quality permits, but, Hutt said, that’s not what happened with Sapphire.

“It’s very, very clear that this is not purely a household waste landfill so that assumption that they’re putting in there doesn’t make any sense and it severely underestimates the hazardous air pollutants,” Hutt said.

The project’s spokesman did not answer a specific question about the method they used to determine what chemicals are in the landfill’s gas and, thus, what would be burned in the proposed open flare.

Gas from the Sampson County landfill is about half methane, according to the company’s application. It expects to be able to capture about 97.4% of that methane.

As the company processed the landfill gas, it would flare off extra gas when activated carbon media that captured hydrogen sulfide needed to be replaced. Any methane that didn’t meet renewable natural gas standards would also be sent through the flare at the end of the process, according to DEQ’s permit review.

“There could be pollutants going into the air because they’re burning off the pollutants to purify the gas,” White-Williamson said.

GFL and Opal recently finished building a similar project in Michigan, at the Arbor Hills Landfill. Unlike the Sampson County landfill, Arbor Hills has real-time and publicly available air monitoring that reveals hydrogen sulfide and methane concentrations in the air along the facility’s perimeter.

That monitoring was implemented as part of a 2022 consent decree between the landfill and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Sampson County residents want to know why it isn’t possible to have it installed as a condition of the new gas facility’s air permit.

“That’s something that I think could go a long way in ensuring community accountability,” Hutt said.

The project’s spokesman did not answer a specific question about whether the companies believe such monitoring is appropriate in Sampson County.

Transporting compressed gas

Residents are also worried about how the processed gas will actually get to the pipeline.

Initially, Sapphire’s application said, the gas will be compressed and taken via “specially designed mobile trailers” to a site where it will be sent into the pipeline. But the permit doesn’t include any information about how many extra trucks will be on the roads each day, where they are going or whether local emergency professionals would be capable of dealing with a potential accident.

“The roads are not highways. Some of them aren’t paved very well, so it’s already a stress point for the community. Adding some unknown number of trucks going who knows where is just a really big concern,” Hutt said.

The company plans to pursue a pipeline to the landfill’s gas facility, but that is not yet in place.

“All appropriate safety precautions will be taken to ensure the utmost safe and efficient transport of the RNG, including meeting all state and federal regulations for gas transport. We will also continue to work with the local pipeline owner on the viability of obtaining access to a pipeline connection closer to the site,” the project’s spokesman wrote in a statement.

A public comment period on the proposed facility was to remain open until 5 p.m. Friday. Comments can be left via voicemail by calling 919-707-8714 or by emailing daq.publiccomments@ncdenr.gov with the subject line “Sapphire.22A.”

This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.