Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question submitted by our audience. Today, a question from Sylvia Dodge, in Lyndon:
“New Hampshire has six landfills. Why does Vermont only have one?”
Until about fifty years ago, Vermont had hundreds of dumps all over the state. Trips to the dump were a weekly tradition for many Vermont families.
In some ways, they still are — though now, people bring their trash bags to “transfer stations.” Most of that trash ultimately ends up in one place: the Coventry landfill.
As the garbage piles up, Sylvia’s question is more timely than ever.
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
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Josh Crane: You ready?
Mikaela Lefrak: I’m ready. Let’s do it.
Josh Crane: Alright. From Vermont Public, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
Mikaela Lefrak: Are you supposed to say the NPR network too? Or just—
Josh Crane: Yup, yup. (Laughter) From Vermont Public and the NPR network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Josh Crane.
Mikaela Lefrak: And I’m Mikaela Lefrak. And Josh, I have a question for you.
Josh Crane: Hit me.
Mikaela Lefrak: So, let me preface this by saying that I think — this is my grand theory — I think there are two kinds of people in this world.
Josh Crane: Alright.
Mikaela Lefrak: Or at least in Vermont.
Josh Crane: Alright.
Mikaela Lefrak: There are those who drive their own trash to a dump or a transfer station, and there are those who have it picked up for them. So, my question is, which type are you?
Josh Crane: I’ve been both of these people.
Mikaela Lefrak: OK.
Josh Crane: Currently I have my trash picked up by truly some of the most wonderful people in the world. Shoutout Mike and Beth Ann.
Mikaela Lefrak: But you used to drive it in yourself?
Josh Crane: Yeah, and then I just couldn’t find the time. But I love the dump too, in Norwich. Love Paul, love going to the dump.
Mikaela Lefrak: So many shout outs!
Josh Crane: Why are you asking me this? (Laughter)
Mikaela Lefrak: Because I have been thinking about trash literally for months, thanks to this show that you produce. And thanks to a woman named Sylvia Dodge.
Mikaela Lefrak: Sylvia, can you hear me?
Mikaela Lefrak: She and I chatted on Zoom.
Sylvia Dodge: I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Mikaela Lefrak: I can, yes.
Sylvia Dodge: So what do you need to know?
Mikaela Lefrak: Sylvia submitted this episode’s winning question.
Sylvia Dodge: You want me to do it now?
Mikaela Lefrak: Yes please.
Sylvia Dodge: My question is: New Hampshire has six landfills. Why does Vermont only have one?
Mikaela Lefrak: Uh, how does that, how does that number hit you, Josh?
Josh Crane: One is a very small number, and I just feel like we have a lot of trash.
Mikaela Lefrak: Well, there is only one, (laughter), and about 80% of Vermont’s trash goes there. It’s a landfill in Coventry, about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border. The other 20% of our trash goes to landfills in New Hampshire or New York State.
Sylvia Dodge: I mean, I think for a lot of people, it’s sort of out of sight, out of mind.
Mikaela Lefrak: But not for Sylvia. She lives in Lyndon, which is about 40 minutes away from the landfill, but she drives by it pretty frequently. She goes up to Newport a lot to play golf.
Sylvia Dodge: Every time I go to Newport, I think that that landfill is just gross. It strikes me as just being a really unfair thing, that there is that one single landfill. And I played golf in Newport this summer, and not only could you see it from the golf course, but you could smell it. And I may be simplistic, but there's just something that seems really unfair about it to me. But I know I'm an adult, and I know things aren't always fair.
Mikaela Lefrak: And there’s this group of activists concerned that the landfill could pollute the nearby lake, Lake Memphremagog, which is a drinking water source for Canadians and Vermonters. I see you drinking your water right now, Josh.
Josh Crane: It’s true.
Mikaela Lefrak: I hope you’re thinking about that. And after the summer 2023 flooding, the Coventry landfill failed to meet the air quality standards set by the state, because all the building debris that was brought there emitted sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory issues like asthma. And if you drive by the landfill, you’ll see a number of abandoned houses. I mean, you can imagine what happens to property values if you see a mountain of trash out your window.
Josh Crane: Not ideal.
Mikaela Lefrak: No. Plus, there is the truck traffic. Dump trucks drive through the hills of Coventry every single day. It can be frustrating if you live there. Northeast Kingdom legislators regularly introduce bills to rethink the state’s waste system.
Sylvia Dodge: You know, so, how did it come to be? What planning made it come to be? Is it best practice to have a single landfill or not? I mean, I don't know.
But then I also wonder what the planning is for the future, those type of things. If I were a reporter — that's a lot to look into, though. I would be too lazy to look into all of that.
Mikaela Lefrak: No, that’s my job, that’s what I’m excited to do.
_
Mikaela Lefrak: Sylvia actually did work as a reporter for a couple different Vermont papers, and she wrote stories here and there about the landfill. But she’s retired now, and so the baton has been passed to us.
Josh Crane: How are you feeling about that?
Mikaela Lefrak: I’m very excited. How are you feeling?
Josh Crane: Good. I’m ready to learn about trash.
Mikaela Lefrak: Alright, let’s get trashy.
Josh Crane: Right after these messages.
‘You have to be able to make it pay.’
Mikaela Lefrak: Travel back in time with me, to a world in which Vermont had more than 200 dumps — that is, an unregulated place to dump your trash, rather than a carefully regulated and lined landfill. They were also different from the transfer stations of today, where trucks come and bring everything that you’ve dropped at the transfer station to a landfill. Dumps were the end of the line for people’s garbage.
You can still find evidence of these old town dumps — they usually look like little grassy hills. Todd Dutil works at the Essex transfer station, right next to the former town dump.
Todd Dutil: Which actually out in the back there, yup.
Mikaela Lefrak: OK. Oh that big mound?
Todd Dutil: Yup, that big mound is the Essex landfill. Yup.
Mikaela Lefrak: He remembers it as kind of a trash free-for-all.
Todd Dutil: They would just back right up there and just everything got thrown. Everything would get thrown. I mean, they buried appliances, they just buried everything out there. Probably bodies too, who knows! (Laughter)
Mikaela Lefrak: Lots of Vermonters remember their town dumps fondly. In the 1960s, the radio station WDEV started a Saturday morning radio program called “Music to Go to the Dump By.” It still airs today.
Announcer one: Ah, “Music to Go to the Dump By,” the best 55 minutes in radio! (Laughter)
Announcer two: Well, yeah, OK. Good morning Farmer Dave!
Announcer one: Yes, yes it’s good to be here.
Mikaela Lefrak: When our question-asker, Sylvia, was a kid, her family would drive their trash to the dump every Saturday — it was a tradition. Over at the Salisbury dump, staff were known there for baking cupcakes and brownies for customers at the holidays. And people would just hang around to chat with their neighbors.
This culture of taking your trash to the dump has now morphed slightly into taking your trash to the transfer station, where it’s picked up and likely carted to Coventry. So, why did we add this extra step? Why did the local dumps close?
Well, people caught on that burying trash in the ground or burning it outright was bad — for the environment and for people. In 1970, the federal government established the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. And it started putting all these federal rules into place.
EPA video clip: You mentioned a whole litany of things that led to the creation of the EPA in the first place. I mean, we really had gross pollution problems in those days.
Mikaela Lefrak: Now, this is from a video that the EPA put together about its own history.
EPA video clip: Where we have found real, sustained success is where there are strong citizen organizations.
Mikaela Lefrak: Strong citizen organizations willing to further an environmental mission? That’s like Vermont’s bread and butter.
Remember, all these town dumps were unlined, so the toxic liquid that leaked out of the garbage would seep right on into the groundwater. That’s what happened at Lyndon’s old dump. In the 1980s, a sheep farmer who lived nearby had to euthanize his entire herd of more than 500 sheep. And when the sheep were autopsied, their internal organs were full of tumors, likely caused by the contaminated water they drank for their entire sheepy lives.
By the 1980s, Vermont was like, “OK, we’ve really got to stop it with the unlined dumps and the trash burning.” Legislators started passing lots of laws about how we manage our trash, like that landfills have to be lined to prevent trash juice from leaching into the earth. Anyways, all these rules meant that the state government needed to hire people whose job it is to regulate waste disposal, grant permits and more.
Josh Kelly: You have to be kind of weird to do waste. And I am the weirdest of the weird.
Mikaela Lefrak: This is Josh Kelly. He’s the Solid Waste Program Manager in Vermont’s Agency of Natural Resources.
Josh Kelly: I'm always pulling things out of the trash, and on vacation taking pictures of compost bins and recycling things. And, you know, doing — geeking out.
Mikaela Lefrak: His kids don’t really love this behavior, but it is one of the reasons he’s good at his job. Josh wasn’t working in state government in 1987 when the solid waste law passed, but he views that year with a certain reverence. It’s like the trash-world equivalent of going from B.C. to A.D.
Josh Kelly: This is ushering in of the sanitary landfill era, where you require anyone who's going to operate a landfill to have a double liner, a cap on top of each cell, as they call it, liquid leachate collection systems.
Mikaela Lefrak: You get the idea. Most small town dumps didn’t have enough money to follow all the regulations. One by one, they started to close.
The state had prepared for some of that, but they didn’t know it was going to go as far as it did. Josh says the plan was actually to develop this system of regional landfills for Vermont. But —
Josh Kelly: Um, not a lot of that came to pass. A lot of money was spent, literally millions of dollars on planning, and in the end, the economies of scale to stand up a landfill, you have to be able to make it pay.
Mikaela Lefrak: By the early 1990s, there were only about a half-dozen dumps left in Vermont. The Essex dump closed in 1993. Now it’s a transfer station. Todd Dutil and his buddy Dave, they work there. And, they’ve actually managed to maintain the community vibe of the old dump days.
Todd Dutil: I think a lot of it is the social interaction and my coworkers. It makes it a lot, you know? ‘Course Dave and I have been together for, what, 15 years now? It’s pretty much he knows what I’m thinking and I know what he’s thinking, so we don’t even need to — you know, we don’t have to second guess each other.
Dave Kolok: And there’s a relationship that forms between Todd and me and the customers. And that’s the precious thing about this job. This guy is, he’s like a brother to me.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah?
Todd Dutil: Yeah, we’ve worked well together.
Dave Kolok: Very well.
Mikaela Lefrak: In the early 2000s, Vermont had a couple remaining town dumps, a bunch of transfer stations, and two — yes two — lined landfills: one in Moretown and another in Coventry — it was owned by a quickly-expanding, Rutland-based company called Casella. The Moretown landfill closed in 2013 — lots of environmental issues there — and that left us with just Coventry. I figure I should go check it out.
‘If we didn’t exist, where would the trash go?’
Mikaela Lefrak: Alright, I’m bringing a bag of trash from Burlington, Vermont to the landfill in Coventry. Is it smelly Mara?
Mara Lefrak: Ew.
Mikaela Lefrak: It’s a little smelly.
Charlie Lefrak: Alright, good luck, mom.
Mikaela Lefrak: Bye! (Car sounds) Alright, here I go, off to the dump. (Music plays). This is perfect dump music.
Alright so I just drove about two hours. And I brought a bag of trash, so I’m going to toss it now.
Mikaela Lefrak: So clearly I don’t take this journey every week. My family pays a hauler to pick up our trash. But it does end up at this very landfill, which is owned by Casella — you might see their navy blue trash bins and dumpsters around your town. The company was founded in Rutland in the mid-1970s. Now, it’s a publicly traded company with a market cap of around $7 billion. They haul waste and operate landfills in 10 northeastern states, and they have more than 5,000 employees. And it’s still based in Rutland.
Jeremy Labbe is an engineer, and the Coventry landfill’s general manager. He’s offered to give me a tour. And we’re accompanied by a PR rep, too. One of their jobs on a tour like this is to highlight all the reasons why operating a landfill is so complex.
Jeremy Labbe: You guys ready to go?
Mikaela Lefrak: Let’s do it. Let’s go see some trash.
Jeremy Labbe: You’re gonna see a whole lot more than that.
Mikaela Lefrak: The landfill is enormous. It’s made up of hills, about 15 stories tall. When one section, or hill, reaches capacity, it gets capped off, and covered in a sort of thick plastic, then soil. They only keep one section open at a time — “the working face.”
Mikaela Lefrak: I’m starting to smell a smell.
Jeremy Labbe: A little bit. But you’re right on the working face.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah.
Jeremy Labbe: So you’re right where the trash goes.
Mikaela Lefrak: This place would be a fantasy land for a truck-obsessed toddler. There are dump trucks, loaders and excavators vrooming past each other as if controlled by an invisible, all-seeing three year old.
Jeremy Labbe: And you can see our big compactor. He's placing the trash, and he's compacting the trash right now. And you got a bulldozer here, waiting for the next load to come from the tipper. You got a little bulldozer there. It's working with the little local haulers. But the goal of that compactor is, its whole goal is to smash the trash as much as you can.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah, those wheels are amazing. They're like Bowser!
Mikaela Lefrak: Snow is falling, and if you squint, you can kind of pretend you’re on a series of bunny hills at a ski resort. But when you look closely, it’s obvious, “the hills are alive” — with trash.
Jeremy Labbe: And you see all the plastic is the first thing you see, right? Plastic in everything.
Mikaela Lefrak: Yeah.
Jeremy Labbe: There's a carpet pad right there, right? You can see a carpet pad. There’s a, looks like a flying saucer right there from someone.
Mikaela Lefrak: Is it a sled?
Jeremy Labbe: A sled of some sort, yup.
Mikaela Lefrak: It goes on and on and on. And as we stand there, more trucks drive up, loaded with trash.
As for why all of this is happening here, in Coventry, and not somewhere else, I’ve heard a few reasons. There was already a landfill here before Casella bought and expanded it in the ‘90s. Also, it’s in a remote part of the state — fewer people, more space. My tour guide, Jeremy Labbe, points to another reason: the ground. Literally.
Jeremy Labbe: Geologically, this is a good site. The soil here has very dense glacial till.You know, you can’t put this stuff on really soft clay, you don’t want to put this stuff on sand, really, really loose sand or—
There are a bunch of buildings all around the landfill. They’re filled with complex machinery that keep this place going by cleaning leachate or creating power. By the end of the tour, I am really picking up what they’re laying down. It takes a lot of capital and expertise to open and run a landfill. To make it financially worth your while, you’d need a lot of people or businesses or municipalities paying you to take their trash.
Vermont produces about 400,000 tons of trash a year. That’s about 57,000 adult African elephants worth of trash, or more than 866 Boeing 757 airplanes fully loaded with passengers.
But in the grand scheme of the United States of America, 400,000 tons is not a whole heck of a lot.
And there are a lot of steps — and capital — that go into building a landfill. Take it from a guy who's done it: John Casella, CEO of Casella Waste Systems. He says, to open a landfill, you need millions of dollars to get through Vermont’s permitting process. Then, you need to construct the landfill. He estimates that costs about $700,000 per acre. Then you have to build the leachate treatment system, and you better be sure it doesn’t leak.
In other words:
John Casella: It doesn't make sense to have small facilities, from an economic standpoint.
Mikaela Lefrak: All this means: There aren’t really other companies clamoring to open another landfill here. But couldn’t the state use taxpayer dollars to open one?
John Casella: They could, but the cost to provide that service to, you know, all of the residents of Vermont would be significantly higher, because there is economies of scale in a larger facility.
Mikaela Lefrak: In short, John Casella is making the capitalist argument — that it’s simply cheaper for a private company like his to run a landfill than a municipality or state government. And while you would expect him to make the argument that benefits his business, this is also what the state figured out for itself in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when it transitioned from the town dump model to the sanitary landfill model.
But Vermont lawmakers are still paying close attention. Especially when it comes to one very controversial issue.
Mike Wimsatt: A lot of folks, including our Legislature, are very uncomfortable with that.
Mikaela Lefrak: That’s after the break.
‘Those states aren’t taking care of their own waste.’
Mikaela Lefrak: To recap, our question-asker, Sylvia, wants to know why Vermont has one landfill and New Hampshire has six.
Let’s compare the total amount of trash these two frenemies produce. Vermont disposes of less than 400,000 tons of municipal solid waste a year. Remember, that’s about 57,000 adult elephants worth of trash. New Hampshire disposes of 1.9 million tons. That’s about 271,000 elephants. Imagine all those trash elephants!
Now this disparity kind of makes sense. New Hampshire has more than double Vermont’s population. It also has less strict composting laws, so more stuff is ending up in the trash. But the big difference is that New Hampshire accepts a lot of out-of-state waste. Out of that 1.9 million tons of trash that ends up in New Hampshire landfills every year, half of it — a million tons — comes from other states. This is a really thorny issue for some granite staters. They feel like they’ve become the region’s dumping ground.
You know Josh Kelly, our Vermont state waste management guy, and self-described “weirdest of the weird”? Here’s his New Hampshire counterpart, Mike Wimsatt. He is the Waste Management Division Director at the New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services.
Mike Wimsatt: A lot of folks, including our Legislature, are very uncomfortable with that. They don't like the idea that the state is accepting waste from out of state, and they see it as those states aren't taking care of their own waste. They're sending it to us.
_
Mikaela Lefrak: Vermont does this too, but at a much, much smaller scale. The Coventry landfill accepts what are called special wastes from a couple nearby states — things like wastewater treatment sludge, asbestos and ash. But it doesn’t take any regular household waste from other states. One reason is how far north Coventry is. There’s no rail line there. If you’re Rhode Island, for instance, it’s going to be cheaper to ship your trash by rail to Ohio, or truck it to southern New Hampshire.
But say a state did want to send their trash to Coventry. Massachusetts has actually inquired about this a few times. Vermont can’t outright bar a company from accepting waste from another state. That would violate the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which actually came up surprisingly often in my interviews. Lots of constitutional scholars in the world of trash.
But there are some levers that legislators can pull. Vermont has really strict rules about how waste needs to be sorted, for example. And Massachusetts is like, “No, we can’t follow that.”
The out-of-state waste battle is raging in New Hampshire right now. Casella is currently trying to build a new landfill in the town of Dalton. But many people, even the new Gov. Kelly Ayotte, are against it. She even brought it up in her inaugural address.
Kelly Ayotte: We will not allow that beautiful part of our state, and that beautiful area, to become a dumping ground for out-of-state trash. It’s just not gonna happen.
Mikaela Lefrak: As we often say in the news business, we’ll have to wait and see.
‘Each one of us has to do our part.’
Mikaela Lefrak: We’ve done past, we’ve done present, and now, it’s to the future. There comes a time, kids, when every landfill reaches its capacity. You can only pile trash so high. In Coventry’s case, that time is coming pretty soon. 20 years to be exact. Then what? Is that when we’ll get another landfill? I ask John Casella.
Mikaela Lefrak: What do you think the chances are that Vermont will see another landfill established in the next 20 years? How likely is that?
John Casella: I think it's very likely. I don’t think there’s any question about that, at least at this point.
Mikaela Lefrak: The next question is, where will it be? No town wants to be the next Coventry. John said his company has identified a couple places that could work, but he’s not naming names right now.
There are other options, like expanding Coventry. Or, we could start shipping more of our trash out of state (hi, New Hampshire).
Or, we could burn it. Josh Kelly with the Vermont government says that’s what a lot of southern New England states do.
Josh Kelly: They actually have, in southern New England, have embraced waste-to-energy much more so than northern New England. Waste-to-energy being burning trash. For example, Massachusetts has five waste-to-energy facilities. Connecticut has four.
Mikaela Lefrak: Ultimately, it’s up to the state government to decide, which means our elected officials, and folks like Josh.
Josh Kelly: The next question you asked is, what comes next? We are intending to start a stakeholder process looking at the future of disposal capacity in Vermont.
Mikaela Lefrak: Hearing this, I was like, “Oh man, that sounds like a lot of committees, and studies, and well-meaning people arguing back and forth and back and forth for years.”
If you want to feel a sense of agency in the short term, and I know I sure do, here’s what a bunch of trash folks I spoke to suggested: Use less crap. Particularly, plastic. Here’s how Mike Wimsatt over in New Hampshire puts it.
Mike Wimsatt: That's the part nobody really wants to do, right? Everybody hates landfills. Everybody hates everything associated with waste management, but they're not always prepared to say, “Well, I'm going to do without this or that” and, or “I'm going to make a, you know, a decision about what I buy” and, you know, packaging and things like that.
Mikaela Lefrak: I talked to our question-asker, Sylvia Dodge, about this.
Mikaela Lefrak: I feel like there's a lot of people in Vermont who are really focused on reducing and reusing and recycling, and I'm curious if you would, like, consider yourself one of those, or where you fall on that spectrum.
Sylvia Dodge: Absolutely. For sure. I mean, I compost, and Lyndon has a great solid waste management place where I bring aluminum and tin cans and cardboard and junk mail and — so I think it’s important.
Mikaela Lefrak: Our purchasing decisions do make a difference to the people who live near the Coventry landfill. Don’t take it from me, take it from Michael Marcotte. He runs a convenience store in Newport, and he lives in Coventry. He’s also a state representative, a Republican. He says when the state banned single-use plastic bags about five years ago, he started seeing fewer of them floating out of the landfill.
Michael Marcotte: I think that's hopefully been a big success. We used to see a lot of that blowing on the road. I don't see so much of it anymore. Each one of us has to do our part in reducing the amount of trash that goes into the landfill.
Jeremy Labbe: So let me open the door for you.
Mikaela Lefrak: Back at the Coventry landfill, Jeremy Labbe, the general manager, tells me that he and his employees take a fair amount of guff from environmental activists for working there. It weighs on him. But, as long as we keep making mountains of trash, he sees this as necessary work.
Jeremy Labbe: Six months in, I said, I'm not sure how long I'm gonna last in this business, because I'm a people pleaser by nature, right? So, being in an industry that people are always, like, “Oh, I can't believe you do that. How dare you?” It was hard, right? Just it's like, man. Like, the same people that I have to pick their trash up and deal with the crud that they leave, they don't want anymore, they’re the same people yelling at you.
But one of the engineers who works for the company, Toni, who I worked under for a while, she had the best quote. She says, “Everybody wants you to pick their trash up, but nobody wants you to put it down.”
Mikaela Lefrak: Josh, that line from Jeremy Labbe has stuck with me since I first met him. I can’t seem to get it out of my head.
Josh Crane: What is it about that line?
Mikaela Lefrak: It just felt really, really true! And it made me rethink how I deal with my family's trash. Since reporting this episode, we actually cancelled the hauler that picks up our trash and now me or my husband, we drive our trash into our local transfer station ourselves.
Josh Crane: OK, Mikaela, this is interesting — because at the beginning you were like, “There’s two types of people in this world: people who get their trash picked up and people who go to the dump or the transfer station.” And so you’ve become, like, a whole new person.
Mikaela Lefrak: Are you using my words against me? Yes, I have. I’ve transformed. It's the power of Brave Little State.
Josh Crane: Why did you make that shift?
Mikaela Lefrak: Honestly, it's because of the people that I met in this episode. I think a lot about the guys working at the Essex transfer station, yucking it up with their regular customers. And I just really wanted to build more of those interactions into my day. And also, being the person that takes my trash bags to the transfer station myself has helped me think more about what I'm buying, what my family is putting in the trash.
Josh Crane: It's sort of like, bringing me back to what our winning question-asker, Sylvia, was talking about how, for so many people, trash is very out of sight, out of mind.
Mikaela Lefrak: And it can actually be really interesting to take a very close look at your trash.
We got trashy, Josh.
Josh Crane: We did get trashy. Thank you for that.
Mikaela Lefrak: Roll credits.
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Credits
This episode was reported by Mikaela Lefrak. It was produced by Josh Crane, with additional editing from Burgess Brown and Sabine Poux. Angela Evancie is Brave Little State’s Executive Producer. Our intern is Catherine Morrissey. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Kari Anderson, David Littlefield, Chris Bray and Jeff Weld.
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Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network.
