Just when you think that landfills are a thing to remove from your worry list — Ulster County's years-long debate about them having ended with a defacto moratorium on their construction here — it turns out the fell consequences of burying tons of trash in Mother Earth are not so readily dodged.

One of those consequences is a thing called leachate, a nasty soup cooked up as rainwater percolates down through landfills and absorbs carcinogenic and otherwise toxic compounds like heavy metals, ammonia and PFAS (“forever chemicals”).

How big an issue is the toxic swill? According to a new, deeply researched, highly detailed report from New York River Watch (NYRW) it’s huge, statewide, poorly monitored and woefully under-regulated. New York's Department of Environmental Conservation has new rules on leachates under review and open to public comment until September 9 but NYRW finds them inadequate and is calling on the public to speak out for more rigor.

In its first report on what they call the “Leachate Loophole,” Kingston-based NYRW (then the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers Leachate Collaborative) in December 2024 focused on sections of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers that are used as drinking water supplies and found that “multiple environmental laws, including those that cover solid waste, surface water, and drinking water” allowed 89 million gallons of leachate from 24 landfills to be discharged into the two rivers each year from 2019-2023...enough to fill about 12,400 average size tanker trucks.”

Ulster County has a share of the problem, according to NYRW Co-founder and Executive Director Rebecca Martin, with nearly 4 million gallons of leachates passing through the City of Kingston's sewage treatment plant and into the Rondout Creek, passed along from closed landfills in the Town of Hurley, Jockey Hill, the Town of Ulster, and the Town of New Paltz.

NYRW's new report (“compiled from compliance reports submitted to DEC by landfills and from information obtained through FOIL requests addressed to 79 municipalities,” per its methodology section) considers the situation statewide and includes these key findings:

Landfills sent more than half a billion gallons of leachate to New York State municipal sewage treatment plants each year from 2019-2023.
At least seventy-five active (30) and inactive (45) landfills disposed of leachate at New York State municipal sewage treatment plants.
Approximately 167 million gallons of leachate — one-third of the total — ended up in rivers and lakes officially designated as drinking water sources. These waters supply drinking water to nearly 2 million New Yorkers.
There were serious discrepancies between leachate disposal data reported by landfills and that reported by sewage treatment plants, including over 100 million gallons of leachate that landfills reported and were not accounted for by any municipal sewage treatment plant in our study.

“This practice has been happening legally, largely out of public view, ever since landfills were first required to control leachate,” Jen Epstein, NYRW Co-founder and Director of Science said in a press release accompanying the new report. “People often assume sewage treatment plants remove these contaminants because the term ‘wastewater treatment plant’ suggests the waste is fully treated. But these facilities were designed to handle domestic sewage — not the complex chemical mixtures found in landfill leachate.”

“This report shows that the garbage we bury does not disappear,” Martin said in the press release. “We need to fundamentally change how we approach this problem, and include all landfills that collect leachate. Any rule that fails to address all sources of leachate fails to address the full scope of the threat. This is a statewide drinking water issue, a public health issue, and an environmental justice issue.”

Regarding DECs proposed new leachate rule, NYRW finds the agency fails to hit the mark by, among other things, exempting some landfills, lack of required scientific updates to treatment systems and PSA knowledge and a failure “to clarify how the state will evaluate environmental justice and cumulative impacts.”

NYRW has made it easy for concerned citizens to reach out to DEC with this form letter.

Beyond the specifics of the leachate dilemma, NYRW's report offers this take on the problem's deeper, systemic roots: “Trash contains toxic chemicals because our regulatory system allows them to be used in industrial processes and consumer products. Our regulations fail because they are post-market: they enable companies to manipulate science and promote ignorance of chemical harms.”

Accordingly, NYRW advocates that “chemical companies must pay for the harm they have caused, cover the full costs of proper treatment and disposal, and be prohibited from producing harmful chemicals.”