By Kiley Bense | Inside Climate News
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
Read Part 2 of this story The ‘horror story’ of hazardous waste in a small Pennsylvania town
In a rural pocket of western Pennsylvania, along the leafy banks of Sewickley Creek, a small, jagged pipe juts just above the waterline, its cement casing carpeted in moss.
The pipe releases treated wastewater into the creek—a popular spot for kayaking and fishing—from a landfill that handles some of the state’s most toxic industrial waste, including from oil and gas drilling.
Two new signs on the opposite shore correct the impression of a forgotten relic. “Warning! Hazardous Waste Discharge Point,” they read. “Arsenic, lead, cyanide, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, and more are permitted substances for discharge at this site.”
A close-up of a discharge pipe from the Yukon landfill. A sign warns that arsenic, lead, cyanide, cadmium and hexavalent chromium are permitted substances for discharge here. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News
The Max Environmental Technologies landfill has been out of compliance with requirements set under the Clean Water Act for most of the past three years and with the federal hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, known as RCRA for short, since July 2023.
Pollution has taken a toll on the creek: Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University tested Max Environmental’s outfall and found radioactivity in the sediment downstream of the discharge point was 1.4 times higher than upstream. The researchers connected this radioactivity to the landfill’s intake of oil and gas waste, which spiked earlier in Pennsylvania’s fracking boom.
“I wouldn’t eat the fish. I wouldn’t swim in the water,” said John Stolz, a professor of environmental microbiology at Duquesne, who co-authored the study and has researched oil and gas waste in Pennsylvania for 15 years. EPA water quality data for Sewickley Creek shows that much of it is classified as “impaired.”
Problems at Max Environmental
For decades, residents have raised the alarm about the 160-acre landfill’s impact on the town, blaming its operations for serious harms to their health, their children, their animals, their waterways and their land.
They say exposure to pollution from the landfill has led to more cancers, miscarriages, respiratory distress and neurological diseases. Over three generations since the landfill’s opening in 1964, they’ve endured odors, dust, noise and spills. They’ve watched their neighbors fall ill, die or move out, and they live in fear for their own health.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ranks Yukon higher for key health problems like cancer and heart disease than state and national averages.
“I wouldn’t eat the fish. I wouldn’t swim in the water.”— John Stolz, Duquesne University professor
Just as Sewickley Creek is a single branch of a larger watershed, the landfill’s outfall is one node in a vast network of waste disposal that stretches across Pennsylvania and the United States. In addition to taking industrial waste like plastic battery pieces, lead paint debris and fly ash, Max Environmental’s Yukon site is one of more than 25 landfills in Pennsylvania that accept the solid waste that comes from oil and gas drilling.
- EPA issues new order for Westmoreland Co. hazardous waste landfill over stream pollution
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Yukon is a small town of a few hundred people, but the problems at Max Environmental are indicative of a national crisis. Oil and gas companies and the government agencies responsible for regulating them have never fully reckoned with it, in part because the industry successfully lobbied for federal regulations that exempt most of its waste from stricter rules that govern “hazardous” waste.
The town of Yukon, Pa. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News
Fracking waste skyrockets in Pa.
As Pennsylvania’s natural gas production soared during the 21st-century fracking rush, so too has the industry’s solid waste and wastewater. The state first required companies to report volumes of solid oil and gas waste in 2010. In 2023, the most recent figures, there were 929,216 tons of solid waste generated, and 96 percent of that was sent to landfills or waste treatment facilities.
Wastewater production, meanwhile, skyrocketed from around 168 million gallons per year before the boom in 2003 to more than 3.3 billion in 2023.
This waste poses enormous regulatory challenges for state and federal authorities because it is highly toxic and often radioactive. Options for disposing of it have ranged from injecting it underground, a practice linked to earthquakes in other states, to repackaging the often extremely salty water as a dust suppressant for public roads, where it can contaminate soil and water—and of course, sending it to landfills. Each of them is deeply flawed as a long-term solution.
Activists and scientists say the government has failed to contend with the massive amount of this waste being created every day. Even basic details like where fracking waste ends up are often difficult to confirm.
In 2023, a study of landfills by Duquesne University and University of Pittsburgh researchers concluded that state records tracking oil and gas waste in Pennsylvania were “conflicting and inadequate.” They found significant discrepancies between the amount that companies reported delivering to landfills and what the landfills said they accepted. These discrepancies make it much harder to assess the environmental impacts.
“Part of the problem is that nobody can really get a handle on how much waste is actually there,” said Stolz, a co-author of the study.
Meanwhile, the problem keeps growing: natural gas production in Pennsylvania alone topped 7.5 million cubic feet in 2023, the most recent figure, a 47-fold increase over two decades.
That production reached record highs during the Biden years, and the Trump administration’s energy policies may push that ceiling higher. In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, “Unleashing American Energy,” aimed at increasing oil and gas development in the U.S.
There is also evidence that new wells drilled in Pennsylvania tend to become less productive faster than older wells, said Ted Auch, the Midwest director at the Pennsylvania-based FracTracker, an organization that studies the impacts of oil and gas development.
“The lifespan of a given well is shorter for newer wells than it was at the outset of the fracking boom,” Auch said. “What that means is that the industry is using more and more water, generating more and more waste, using more and more stuff to wring that unit of gas out of the shale rock.”
‘Significant noncompliance’ at Max Environmental
In 2017, a Connecticut-based private equity firm, Altus Capital Partners, purchased Max Environmental and its two landfill facilities in Yukon and Bulger, Pennsylvania. Max Environmental’s new chief operating officer, Bill Follett, said the change in management and access to more funding would position the company for “future success while ensuring environmental compliance.”
Instead, violations continued. Max Environmental is now under two consent orders from the EPA to improve its operations. The agency temporarily required the landfill to stop disposing of hazardous waste on site, a process that has since restarted.
“We identified significant noncompliance at Max,” said Jeanna Henry, chief of the air, RCRA and toxics branch in the enforcement and compliance assurance division of the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region, in a November interview. One key issue is Max Environmental’s treatment process for hazardous waste.
“With the sampling that they’re doing, some of the batches are passing and some of those are failing,” she said. “I’m not sure I could say at this point if we’ve seen improvement, but they are doing the work that they’re required to perform under the order.”
In a statement to Inside Climate News in December, Carl Spadaro, the environmental general manager at Max Environmental, said initial testing of its treated waste showed compliance “about 90 percent of the time,” which is “consistent” with historical results.
Max Environmental documents
Obtained through a Right to Know request to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, public documents provide more detail about the government’s inspections, monitoring and correspondence with Max Environmental about the Yukon facility. View them here.
“Any treated waste that does not pass initial testing has always and continues to be re-treated until it meets required standards. This kind of practice is common in the hazardous waste management industry,” Spadaro said.
In December, Spadaro said the company is “in compliance with our permits.”
But in a Jan. 16 email, the EPA responded to questions about Max Environmental’s permits with this sentence in boldface: “Max is not currently in compliance with either RCRA or NPDES permits related to the Yukon site.” NPDES is the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, under which permits are issued to facilities that discharge pollutants into waterways.
There was no public indication of the wastewater pipe’s contents until March 2024, when a local environmental group, the Mountain Watershed Association, installed the warning signs. People who use the water downstream for recreation are often unaware of the outfall’s existence. The creek flows to meet the Youghiogheny River, known as the Yough, which empties into the Monongahela River, one of Pittsburgh’s three iconic waterways.
Pollution in Sewickley Creek
“I tell people that Sewickley Creek is likely the most polluted waterway in the entire Yough watershed, and it’s because of many things, but more than anything, Max is there,” said Eric Harder, the Youghiogheny Riverkeeper at the Mountain Watershed Association (MWA), which has conducted independent testing at the outfall and advocated for residents’ interests with the state government.
Testing in October suggested the company exceeded its permit limits for heavy metals like zinc and lead, and total suspended solids, an indicator of poor water quality. These echo similar findings by the EPA, which in 2023 said Max Environmental exceeded its permit limits for cadmium, zinc, nitrogen and other pollutants.
“It’s basically a time bomb that’s built over empty coal mines,” Harder said. “And in a rural setting where people have been impoverished and underserved for many years.”
For Stacey Magda, managing community organizer at the MWA, the state of the outfall is emblematic. “It’s not maintained properly. It’s in really bad shape, and that’s really the norm for the whole facility,” she said, standing on the opposite bank, dry leaves crackling underfoot as she stared at the outfall. The pipe looks like it belongs to an earlier time, like the abandoned mining buildings in the woods nearby.
She watched the pipe dripping, the leaves drifting in the current. Prolonged drought in Pennsylvania in 2024 exposed twisty roots and thick stripes of sediment on the eroding creek banks. When the creek is high, the pipe is not visible at all.
Stacey Magda, managing community organizer at the MWA, walks next to Max Environmental’s Yukon landfill. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News
The Max Environmental site’s long history as an industrial landfill, its location atop two former coal mines and its close proximity to homes and farms make it a particularly demanding site to monitor and contain.
“The regulators really didn’t either have the capacity, the resources or the understanding to take those concerns and complaints seriously,” Magda said. “They are now, and it’s significant that they are now, but there’s a strong sense that it’s still too late.”
Regulatory actions by the EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP, in the last two years have slowed operations at the landfill, but it’s not hard to see why the people of Yukon aren’t optimistic about the future, given the site’s past.
“There have been so many violations over the years,” said Debbie Franzetta, who has lived in Yukon since 1988. “And what they do is they pay the fines, and they continue to operate.”
‘Radioactivity is forever’
In 2012, Max Environmental’s CEO at the time, Bill Spencer, gave an interview about the opportunity that fracking presented for the company. He said Max Environmental was “finding what the needs of the oil and gas industry are and fulfilling [them].”
The company’s environmental general manager, Spadaro, who serves in the same position today, called Max Environmental “an ideal partner to drilling companies.”
DEP records show the Yukon landfill accepted about 106,000 tons of oil and gas waste between 2015 and 2019. In 2015, this waste accounted for nearly 97 percent of the non-hazardous waste the landfill took in, though it’s been a far smaller percentage in recent years. From 2011 to 2021, the Yukon site accepted the second largest amount of liquid oil and gas waste among landfills in Pennsylvania.
Oil and gas waste can become radioactive during the extraction process. As workers drill deep into the earth, they encounter naturally occurring materials like radium, radon, uranium, potassium and thorium. Fracking requires the use of massive quantities of water, and much of this water comes back to the surface contaminated by the elements underground, as well as proprietary drilling chemicals added by the companies. Solid waste, like drill cuttings, sludges and filters, can also become contaminated.
Spadaro said Max Environmental “does not accept” radioactive waste and checks each arriving truckload for radiation “just like all other waste management facilities in Pennsylvania.”
The entrance to the Max Environmental landfill in Yukon, Pa. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News
But between 2021 and 2023, state records show that Max Environmental detected radioactive materials in waste 34 times at Yukon and accepted it anyway. That’s because the company makes an exception for naturally occurring radioactive material and technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive materials, known as NORM and TENORM, said Lauren Camarda, a DEP spokesperson and the communications manager for the agency’s southwest office.
The oil and gas industry is one of the major sources of TENORM. The most common isotope detected at Max Environmental in those years was radium 226, the same one that scientists found increased levels of in the sediment downstream of Max Environmental’s outfall at Sewickley Creek.
Every time Max Environmental detects radioactivity in incoming waste, the company must seek approval from DEP to dispose of it onsite, Camarda said.
Camarda said in an email that the “type, characteristics, and amounts of waste approved for disposal have not significantly changed” at Max Environmental since fracking began in Pennsylvania. This is mainly because the facility has always accepted industrial waste materials “that are now considered hazardous by modern standards,” and the site’s testing levels and parameters already reflected that reality. The one change to Max Environmental’s residual waste permit related to fracking came in 2012, when DEP approved an amendment to allow the site to solidify oil and gas waste.
Stolz said this type of processing was one of the revelations from his research on landfills that most shocked him. The processing allows companies to accept highly toxic fracking wastewater as long as they claim they “immobilize” it.
“How are they immobilizing it? Well, they’re putting it into kitty litter, they’re putting it into sawdust, and then they’re putting it into the landfill, and then, of course, everything percolates down, and the waste accumulates and it winds up in the leachate,” he said, describing industry practices in general.
Max Environmental’s Spadaro said the site hasn’t accepted fracking wastewater for several years, but when it did, the company used lime-based materials “that ensure adequate solidification.”
Although the volume of oil and gas waste sent to Max Environmental has decreased since its peak, the company accepted hundreds of tons of this waste in 2023, the most recent figures. And the legacy of the boom years remains, literally, in the ground.
“People have to understand that radioactivity is forever,” Stolz said. “And we know that the Marcellus in particular is incredibly radioactive.” The Marcellus formation is the oblong-shaped shale gas deposit that lies beneath Pennsylvania, a diagonal slash from the northeast corner of the state to the southwest.
A view of Sewickley Creek in Yukon, Pa. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News
Radioactivity downstream, contaminating mussels
Nathaniel Warner, an associate professor of environmental engineering at Penn State, has found increased radioactivity in the sediment of waterways even 18 miles downstream of facilities that had accepted fracking wastewater in the past.
Trying to find out if this contamination has entered the food chain in Pennsylvania,
Warner tested the tissue and shells of freshwater mussels living downstream of wastewater discharge points. What he found was alarming.
“What we know is that even when you’ve removed the source [of pollution], that radioactivity sticks around in the environment,” he said. Warner’s studies found elevated levels of radioactivity in the mussels’ bodies and shells.
Scientists worry that radioactivity could be magnified as it travels up the food chain from freshwater mussels to the muskrats who eat them to apex predators like the bald eagle. “If [animals are] consistently in contact with something that’s decaying radioactively, you can accumulate genetic damage,” said Daniel Bain, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh who was involved with the 2023 study on oil and gas waste and landfills.
Warner said it’s difficult to quantify the true public health costs of the radioactivity released into the environment by the oil and gas industry, in part because it’s such a complex question and in part because it’s understudied. But that does not mean there is no impact. Radium, radon and uranium are all known to cause cancer.
“For years we’ve spread oil and gas wastewater on roads. We used to put it into pits right next to the well, put it in the groundwater and discharge it to streams,” Warner said. “From that historical practice, there’s elevated radioactivity, there’s elevated salinity, there’s decreased diversity of critters.” What’s harder to know are the long-term effects on people.
Pennsylvania has spent years cleaning up contamination from coal mining and historical oil development that the companies left behind. Bain said that fracking waste is the latest iteration of that troubling pattern.
“That’s part of what we’re going to have to deal with as a region,” Bain said. “We have to be really vigilant about where that waste is going and what kind of impact it’s causing.”
Complaints increase with more fracking waste
When the landfill started to accept more waste related to fracking in the 2010s, many residents noticed that the tangible impacts of the landfill on their everyday lives worsened. “That period of time was a really tough time for people with any kind of asthma,” MWA’s Harder said. Residents repeatedly called DEP to complain about noise, odors, mud and truck traffic, according to agency records.
In 2015, when Max Environmental accepted 92,039 tons of oil and gas waste, the people of Yukon called dozens of times to report smelling chemical odors that caused headaches and burned their noses and throats. They rated the smell a 9 out of 10, compared it to eggs and rotting flesh, said it made them gag and clogged their ears. When the wind blew, they watched dust settle in their yards and coat their dogs’ paws. To avoid the odor, they kept their windows shut on nice summer evenings and left their flower gardens untended.
“We have to be really vigilant about where that waste is going and what kind of impact it’s causing.”— Daniel Bain, University of Pittsburgh scientist
DEP notes about the calls show that they also registered their frustration: “been over a year and the problem still exists,” “something has to be done- nobody should have to put up with this,” “appeals for it to stop on a Sunday before he goes to church,” “seems like they call forever and no one ever does anything,” “how long are they going to get away with this?”
In January 2015, a DEP staff member took down this call: “05:00 PM JUST GOT HOME AND HIS PROPERTY SMELLS LIKE A CHEMICAL PLANT- JUST GIVE A REASON TO KEEP CALLING -LET THERE BE A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL.”
“Violations noted” appears over and over again at the bottom of the complaints.
In 2017, two Yukon residents filed a class-action lawsuit against Max Environmental over air pollution, alleging that the company had caused property damage through its release of “noxious odors and air particulates.” The complaint said the company has “a well-documented history of failing to control the emissions generated by its operation,” pointing to 41 instances when DEP inspectors noted off-site odors between 2013 and 2015 and three odor citations issued by DEP in 2013 and 2014.
The lawsuit settled in 2024 for a total of $425,000. As part of the settlement, the company admitted to no wrongdoing. “We have adjusted our operations to reduce the potential for odors and dust migration. There have been no off-site indications of water impacts,” Max Environmental’s Spadaro said.
Only $275,000 of the settlement was earmarked for residents, a sum that many of those affected saw as inadequate. Just under 270 households filed claims in the suit, making the average payout per family about $1,000.
“It’s nothing for how much we lost,” Joan Kodrin, a Yukon resident, said to a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter last year.
Craig Zafaras, who has lived in Yukon for decades, said Max Environmental “didn’t bother me until they started taking the fracking waste.”
Craig Zafaras lives directly next to the Max Environmental landfill in Yukon, Pa. Credit: Scott Goldsmith/Inside Climate News
“I have no issue with fracking,” he added. “I have issue with people that don’t do their job.”
With this new waste stream came more dust and a strange ammonia-like odor at his home across the street from the landfill. “They tried to cover the smell with a chemical, which was worse than the actual smell itself,” he said.
On some days it was so bad, he would drive out of town to escape it.
During an EPA-led community session about the landfill in October, Zafaras talked about the chemical smell he had noticed on his property and the headaches and sore throats it seemed to cause. He outlined his many unsuccessful attempts to convince the DEP and EPA to conduct testing where he lives, and not only at the landfill.
“I fear this is toxic to my health and others,” he said. “No one seems to care.”
Read Part 2 of this story The ‘horror story’ of hazardous waste in a small Pennsylvania town
