A front-end loader places trash in a waste shredding machine to reduce its size for better compaction at Lebanon Regional Solid Waste Facility Landfill (Photo Courtesy of NHDES)
Thanks to outdated regulations, NH has a lot of out-of-state trash filling our landfills. After decades of neglect, the state is trying to catch up when it comes to how it regulates and manages its trash.
We all live with garbage, and there is nothing simple or inexpensive about it. The nearly 2 million tons of garbage generated in NH and trucked here from out of state is part of a complicated, expensive, and expansive network of players, handlers, and facilities.
Controversy, lawsuits, and public outcry over landfills and the state’s management of solid waste have been bubbling for years, triggered in large part by the 2018 decision by Vermont-based Casella Waste Systems decision to build a landfill in Dalton near Forest Lake State Park. The proposed Granite State Landfill would replace the company’s current one a few miles away in Bethlehem that is slated to close in 2027.
Trash seems to be top of mind for Legislators as they consider several bills regarding landfills. Prime among them is House Bill 171, which originally proposed a five-year moratorium on the state issuing new landfill permits until 2030. However, in early March, the NH House Environment and Agriculture Committee amended the bill to reduce the moratorium to three years. The NH Senate is considering its own bill, which would institute a six-year moratorium.
Also among the proposed legislation is a bill that would make a $1 million appropriation for the 2025-2027 biennium to the solid waste management fund, and another that would require permit applications for new landfills to contain a detailed plan for leachate management.
In late January, the House Environment and Agriculture Committee heard testimony on House Bill 215, which would require a landfill permit applicant to submit a report listing potential harms and benefits of the project and requires the NH Department of Environmental Services to determine that the landfill is a net public benefit. It would require a landfill applicant to pay a third-party to assess “harms that a landfill would likely cause,” including to human health, property values, tourism, outdoor recreation, and wildlife. “Such impacts may include noise, odor, traffic, groundwater pollution, surface water pollution, greenhouse gas, and other emissions emanating from the facility and to include the emissions from transport of solid waste-related material and by-products to and from the proposed facility,” the bill states.
These are the latest attempts to assess what should happen with NH’s trash—a subject most people quickly forget about. “People put it on the curb and the trash goes away or they take it to the transfer station, [and] don’t think about it again,” says Wayne Morrison of Whitefield, a member of the North Country Alliance for Balanced Change, which opposes the proposed landfill in Dalton. “If a landfill isn’t in someone’s backyard, then they don’t have to think about it, but they do.”
Members of North Country Alliance for Balanced Change have been fighting since 2019 to stop the proposed landfill. Alliance members and others, including elected officials, say the state doesn’t need more landfills since nearly half of the trash coming in is from out of state. They cite concerns about environmental and public health hazards.
There remains confusion over the capacity of the state’s existing landfills and the effects of long-outdated rules and enforcement governing solid waste.
The State of NH’s Trash
The bulk of NH’s trash goes into landfills. Morrison says just 30 or 40 years ago every town had an unlined dump. The state didn’t update its solid waste plan for 20 years, and in the meantime landfills grew. The problem was compounded globally when China stopped importing plastic and mixed paper recyclables in 2018.
“I thought a lot about the municipalities and the impact of all of this on our towns, so I introduced a bill to create a study committee to look at recycling and solid waste in the state of New Hampshire,” says New London Rep. Karen Ebel, Democratic Leader Pro Tem.
Over the course of six weeks, the committee held 14 hearings. It discovered the state has not issued a solid waste management plan in decades, despite the requirement to produce one every six years. “That plan had statutory waste diversion goals in it that were supposed to have been achieved by the year 2000, so obviously, we were woefully out of date,” Ebel says.
To address some of these issues, Ebel created the Solid Waste Working Group in 2021. This statutory committee assists NH DES with planning and policy initiatives related to solid waste management and is comprised of members representing various public and private entities involved with solid waste management.
NH DES released an updated Solid Waste Management plan in 2022 incorporating newly updated waste diversion goals. The plan aims to reduce disposal of waste by 25% by 2030 and 45% by 2050. This applies to all solid waste disposed in the state’s landfills and incinerators—regardless of whether the trash is from NH or coming in from other states.
The plan is to reduce the amount of waste generated and diverting what goes into landfills through recycling and composting. “We have a lot of work to be done, but I do feel good about the groundwork that has been established,” Ebel says.
According to Ebel, NH DES has been underfunded for years and the issue of solid waste management was neglected by legislators. “They used to have a bigger staff,” she says. “They used to have a person that was involved in the recycling market development. They had their entire planning department wiped out. The whole situation over there was challenging.”
Tom Irwin, Conversation Law Foundation’s vice president for NH, says diverting trash from landfills has clearly not been a priority for either the state or the Legislature. “If you look at state law, the Legislature has made very clear that they’ve established a hierarchy and waste reduction is at the top of that hierarchy, followed by recycling and composting and land filling is at the bottom. Yet, land filling has been the primary approach that we’ve followed in the state,” he says.
Ebel’s committee also found NH was an anomaly in the region with half of its trash coming from out of the state. “Turnkey [landfill in Rochester] isn’t far from northeastern Massachusetts, so they do take a substantial amount of waste in from there,” says Mike Wimsatt, director of NH DES’ waste management division. “One issue is lack of capacity in states like Massachusetts, who send their trash by truck or rail to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and western New York. Private operators can take or not take waste from wherever they want.”
Solid waste is a commodity governed by the federal interstate commerce clause because it is transported across state lines, according to Wimsatt. That means the state cannot ban it or pass laws that “significantly discriminate” against out-of-state waste disposal.
“Massachusetts has a landfill moratorium, and Maine has a state-run landfill so the whole issue of out-of-state waste doesn’t really come up [in those states],” Ebel says, adding that Vermont is restricted on what can be put in its only landfill near the Canadian border. “Under the interstate commerce clause, out-of-state waste can’t be banned. So regionally, we’re just like, I don’t know, sitting ducks in a way because our laws hadn’t been updated, and not a lot of attention had been focused on what was going on in New Hampshire.”
Steve Poggi, area director of disposal operations Waste Management (WM), which operates Turnkey in Rochester, says the waste it takes in is about evenly split between in-state and out-of-state trash. “We have more capacity than what we accept. We could fill it to capacity with out-of-state waste, but we have elected as a company not to do that,” he says.
The State of NH’s Landfills
There are six operating landfills and over 250 inactive and closed landfills in NH, most of which are unlined and municipally owned, according to NH DES. The state also has over 200 operating collection, storage and transfer facilities, most of which are municipally owned and operated.
The three public landfills are the Lower Mount Washington Valley Secure Solid Waste Landfill in Conway, the Lebanon Regional Solid Waste Facility in Lebanon, and Four Hills Secure Landfill in Nashua, all of which are municipality owned and operated and take in waste from nearby communities.
The three private landfills are North Country Environmental Services operated by Casella in Bethlehem, the Turnkey facility operated by Waste Management in Rochester, and the Mt. Carberry Landfill operated by the Androscoggin Valley Regional Refuse District in Berlin and owned by nine municipalities and multiple unincorporated towns in Coös County.
Jeff Weld, Casella’s vice president of communications, notes the state could potentially experience a shortfall in landfill capacity and that the entire Northeast faces “significant disposal capacity challenges.”
However, Ebel, Wimsatt and others say the state doesn’t have an immediate issue with landfill capacity, especially given that it is able to take so much out-of-state waste. “We don’t feel like we’re in imminent danger of not having capacity in landfills, regardless of how anyone may feel about them or what’s happening,” Ebel says. “Our responsibility is to our state and not region.”
In its 2021-2022 Biennial Solid Waste Report, NH DES notes, “the assumption that all of New Hampshire’s commercial landfills will close after reaching their currently permitted capacity is unlikely. … Additionally, if New Hampshire achieves the disposal reduction goal by reducing overall generation of solid waste and/or increasing diversion rates, it will reduce the state’s overall disposal need and thereby decrease demand for disposal capacity.”
In 2023, the state disposed of nearly 1.8 million tons of solid waste. Of that just over 1 million tons were from NH sources, and 666,045 tons were from out-of-state sources, according to Wimsatt.
According to Weld, 87% of the waste accepted at North Country Environmental Services in 2023 and 85% accepted in 2022 was NH waste. While data for 2024 is not complete, the rates are trending in the same direction, nearing 90% in-state waste, he says.
Turnkey is the largest landfill in the state and has been owned by WM since 1983. It is permitted to take up to 1.55 million tons of trash annually, and Poggi says it is typically at about 90% of that capacity. The landfill was recently expanded by nearly 60 acres and is permitted through 2034. The Conversation Law Foundation (CLF) sued to stop the expansion, but the NH Supreme Court ruled in favor of the permit.
Irwin of the CLF says the state needs to stop creating landfill capacity. “It just perpetuates this over reliance on disposal and takes the pressure off waste reduction strategies,” he says. “CLF will work to end that reliance on disposal and make progress on waste reduction consistent with the state’s solid waste hierarchy.”
Dealing with trash is a complex and costly issue. For example, only 5% to 6% of plastics in the U.S. are recycled each year, according to a 2023 report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I think part of the problem is that people have been convinced plastics are being recycled and continue to consume them.”
Plastics are piled into landfills, as are materials containing PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), known as forever chemicals that are harmful to humans and the environment. PFAS are in construction materials, electrical equipment, coatings, medical supplies, automotive products and countless household products like stain-resistant carpets and clothing, says James Malley, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of NH and a member of the Solid Waste Working Group, the committee that assists NH DES with planning and policy initiatives related to solid waste management.
“We use millions and millions of metric tons of this stuff, and where does it wind up? In landfills, in the wastewater treatment plants or in the septic systems,” he says.
Whether they are closed or still operating, Ebel says landfills are an ongoing public and environmental health hazard. “We have mountains of this horrible stuff,” she says. “This other huge issue we have is leachate—the toxic stew that comes out by the millions of gallons.”
Leachate forms when rainwater filters through a landfill, and then it leaches, or draws out, chemicals from the waste. The leachate is piped out of landfills and trucked to wastewater treatment plants. Irwin and Ebel say the treatment plants are ill equipped to treat the leachate, which contains PFAS, and it ends up being discharged into rivers or bound up in sludge. The state’s landfills have been cited for deficiencies and other significant problems with leachate overflows and discharges, according to NH DES.
However, landfills, Weld argues, are an important part of the state’s solid waste infrastructure. “Not only do landfills provide a direct resource for waste disposal, but they also backstop every other type of solid waste end site, such as incinerators, because they all produce some sort of residual, such as ash, that can’t be processed further,” Weld states in an email. “Without landfill capacity, costs to dispose waste increases, which limits the capital resources available to explore new recycling, waste reduction, and other programs that we know are successful. Increased disposal costs also result in illegal dumping.”
Disposal Options
The North Country Environmental Services Landfill (NCES) in Bethlehem will be out of disposal capacity in 2027 because NCES and the town agreed in a settlement to limit expansion at the site to approximately 61 acres, says Weld. In an email, Weld says Casella wants to develop the landfill in Dalton to continue to serve more than 60,000 customers and nearly 200 towns once the Bethlehem site closes.
Residents and activists are continuing their fight as NH DES reviews Casella’s landfill application. “It’s a failure of government that is it is even being considered,” Morrison says.
Governor Kelly Ayotte has said she is not necessarily opposed to new landfills but is against the one proposed in Dalton near Forest Lake. “This is a beautiful state park,” Ayotte said in a video released before the November election. “It represents the beauty of New Hampshire. This just defies common sense. We cannot let that happen.”
Weld notes the company did a thorough review of site criteria and explored other opportunities prior to making the determination that the proposed property in Dalton was a suitable site. He states that the company would be open to talking with all stakeholders. “While opposition and criticism tend to get the most publicity and attention, we also know that there are a considerable number of community members who are in favor of the project, welcome the economic development it brings along with it, and have been open to understanding the realities of the highly regulated, highly engineered facilities of today,” he states.
Attempts to reduce the amount of trash going into landfills through recycling has yielded mixed results. Across the state, residents in many towns sort their recyclables before they take them to the town transfer station. “That actually creates a good economy for the town,” Wimsatt says. “They can get the best price for ‘clean’ presorted recyclables.”
These goods get baled and sold to the Northeast Resource Recovery Association (NRRA), which acts as a broker for towns that band together to get a good price. NRRA is a nonprofit in Epsom that partners with municipalities, businesses, and individuals throughout New England to connect them with end markets for recyclables. It is also a member of the state’s Solid Waste Working Group.
Other towns use single stream recycling where all recyclables go into the same bin and are sent to facilities like Turnkey in Rochester. “It’s more expensive and lots of items get contaminated because people put in things that cannot be recycled,” Wimsatt says. “It’s costly to sort and you don’t get a clean product. There is a market for cardboard, but greased coated pizza boxes contaminate the product.”
And burning the trash? “If you think people don’t like landfills, they like incinerators even less,” Wimsatt says. The Wheelabrator incinerator, a waste-to-energy facility in Penacook, is owned by WIN Waste Innovations. Wimsatt says it burns about 200,000 tons of trash annually and uses the heat to make electric power that is set to the grid.
“This handles about 20 percent of our trash, and 80 percent goes to landfills,” he says, noting the ash resulting from burning also ends up in landfill.
That is why much of the focus is on diverting items from ever going into the waste stream. A bill sponsored by Ebel was signed into law in June 2023 and went into effect earlier this year prohibiting anyone who generates a ton or more of food waste per week from putting that waste into a landfill or incinerating it (though there are some exemptions).
“By weight, a third of what ends up in our landfills is food waste, which also produces methane gas,” she says, adding NH DES recently hired a food waste diversion specialist.
Starting July 1, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries will be banned from landfills and incinerators. These batteries are in all types of products from toys and cordless power tools to electronics and vehicles.
Ebel says the Solid Waste Working Group recommended pursuing extended producer responsibility (EPR) for paint recycling and in the future for batteries. “It reduces the burden on municipalities and taxpayers, and it incentivizes those producers to produce less waste,” says Irwin, noting that Maine has an EPR law in place. “It’s about making the producers of waste responsible and bear the cost of the waste they are putting out into the market.”
Malley, the UNH professor, says he has seen over his 40-year career that it’s often the seemingly cheap and easy solutions like shipping trash out of the country or landfilling that wins out, even after decades of recycling and reduction campaigns.
Societal and political winds change, but it takes continued education and focus on diversion practices to make a difference. He is cautiously optimistic about the progress of the Solid Waste Working Group and the solid waste management plan. “I hope we’re able to keep resources, get the infrastructure to have food diversion,” Malley says. “I think we’ve set some really good, achievable things, and I hope we keep doing them.”
New Landfill Rules
Last November, the Joint Legislative Committee on Administration Rules (JLCAR) issued a preliminary objection to the NH Department of Environmental Services’ (NH DES) proposed updates to the rules governing landfill requirements.
The rules attracted significant attention and public input due to the years-long fight against the proposed landfill in Dalton, a town of 900 people. In December, the committee approved the NH DES’s new landfill rules in a 9-1 roll call vote after a short hearing.
The New Rules:
- Strengthened site requirements: Landfills must ensure that any contaminant releases are detectable and can be remediated before reaching groundwater, surface water, or sensitive areas.
- Infrastructure considerations: Site criteria now account for stormwater, leachate, and landfill gas system locations.
- Expanded setbacks: Increased distance requirements from homes, schools, daycare centers, and hospitals.
- Enhanced system designs: Upgraded requirements for leachate and stormwater systems aim to prevent contamination and address climate change impacts.
- Improved liners: Stronger landfill liner designs add an extra layer of protection against leaks.
The Opposition: Rep. Peter Schmidt, D-Dover, the committee’s lone no vote, says the idea these rules are better “is almost disrespectful to the amount of opposition that these rules have received from
the public.”
Attending both committee hearings were members of the North Country Alliance for Balanced Change, who were among those who submitted hundreds of pages of comments detailing their objections.
“The tunnel vision of DES is fixed exclusively on the guidance of the waste industry. It is not only the owners of landfills who are ‘affected’ by the proposed rules,” wrote Sarah Doucette of Whitefield in a letter to the committee.”
BCM Environmental & Land Law, which represents the North Country group, noted the rules were flawed and “lacked scientific basis.”
The Supporters: Mike Wimsatt, director of NH DES’ waste management division, in an email statement, defended NH DES saying it met with and received comment from a broad range of stakeholders, including members of the community and citizens groups. He states the “final rule proposal was shaped by comments received from all of those parties.”
During the hearing, committee member Rep. Carol McGuire, R-Epsom, says the rules are an improvement. “I would like to have a better baseline in the rules before we settle the issue of the policy if any of [this session’s proposed landfill] bills pass and change the requirement,” McGuire said.
Confusion Over the Fate of NH’s Largest Landfill
Rochester officials are preparing for Turnkey Landfill, the state’s largest landfill, to close in a decade, which would cause a budget shortfall in the millions for the host city.
“A lot can change within the next decade in terms of technologies, program options and other opportunities such as partnerships, so the city is presently focused mostly on preparing for the significant financial impact of the closure,” says City Manager Katie Ambrose in an email.
But a company official with the Turnkey Landfill, which is owned and operated by WM (Waste Management) since 1983, says closure is not in its plans. “We have no intention of closing,” says Steve Poggi, WM’s area director of disposal operations.
The confusion stems from uncertainty over how long the landfill can continue to operate until it reaches capacity. In an April 2023 finance committee meeting, former Rochester Deputy Mayor Peter Lachapelle, WM”s public sector representative, told the City Council expansion was unlikely. In an email, Ambrose indicated the timing of the closure of the landfill ultimately depends upon space and how quickly it meets its capacity.
WM has a long-standing relationship with the city, which Poggi says receives approximately $10 million annually in benefits and avoided costs. A transfer station may be constructed on site in the future, but likely not before 2034.
In the April 2023 meeting, Ambrose reported Waste Management’s assessed value is $65 million and that a closure would bring an estimated loss of $40 million in land value alone. The property tax revenue associated with the assessed value is around $1.6 million, and there would be a loss of between $5 million to $6 million in host fee revenue annually. Collection and disposal fees are estimated to at least double to $1.3 million but likely more.
Ambrose states that even if Waste Management was to obtain a new permit “the landfill would be limited by available disposal capacity without an expansion. We do not have a closure date in writing, but Waste Management staff have shared in conversations that it is unlikely additional expansion would be feasible and have advised that we prepare for a 2034 closure.”
But Poggi says shuttering the landfill is not in the company’s plans. “WM is in the process of developing a plan to extend the life of the facility beyond 2034, and that plan would require new permits,” he wrote in an email.
A permit to expand Turnkey by nearly 60 acres was approved by the state in 2018 and put its permitted capacity at 1.55 million tons annually, he says.
