New Hampshire pauses proposed landfill rules

A legislative committee in New Hampshire has asked the state's Department of Environmental Services (DES) to further explain and/or revise proposed rules that would have updated its landfill permitting process.

Members of the committee received hundreds of pages of documents and concerns about future landfill siting under the proposed rules, according to a report by Paula Tracy of InDepthNH.

Earlier this year, the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed bills that would have limited the acceptance of out-of-state waste for landfilling and prohibiting any future landfills in the state from being privately owned. In May, those bills were defeated in the New Hampshire Senate.

Also this year, the New Hampshire DES proposed changes to its solid waste rules pertaining to landfills, which had not been updated for 10 years. Once the proposed new rules were published, they met with opposition from people opposed to specific landfill sitings or the concept of landfilling in general.

According to InDepthNH, opponents feel the rules don’t go far enough to protect the land and people from migrating liquid and potentially toxic leachate, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

This week, the Joint Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules voted unanimously for a preliminary objection to the rule changes.

A committee member who voiced some concern about delaying the new rules said keeping the 10-year-old rules in place too much longer could serve to make siting landfills easier, saying, “It’s possible that the [new] landfills in question might be approved on the 10-year-old rules rather than the new rules that are more protective, and I don’t believe that’s what anybody wants."

Although the legislators are seeking clarification, another local report indicates a DES staff member at the November meeting likewise thinks stalling on the proposed rules could have unintended consequences.

“We think it’s really important that these rules be approved, because if they aren’t then we go to the existing rules,” Michael Wimsatt of the DES says, according to WMUR-TV. “Those systems, which will be in place for decades, will be needlessly less protect[ive] than they could have been.”