Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill Spills Hundreds of Gallons of Toxic Leachate While Asking to Dump Waste in the Monongahela River

Author: Dylan Basescu

On June 17, 2024, the Westmoreland Sanitary Landfill (WSL) applied for a permit to dump up to 100,000 gallons of toxic wastewater leachate into the Monongahela River every day. As part of this application, WSL promised to construct and operate an entirely new wastewater treatment facility since its leachate is so toxic to the environment without being treated. It would then be up to WSL to ensure that this leachate is handled safely and disposed of without violating state and federal environmental laws, so it is worth asking how WSL runs the wastewater facilities it already operates.

Thankfully, WSL has answered this question for the public by spilling roughly 900 gallons of untreated, toxic waste into the environment. On April 2, 2025, a garbage truck hit the WSL leachate pipe, which spewed toxic waste onto the ground for more than five minutes before the pipe was shut off. Though some of this leachate was trapped by the anti-spilling measures, WSL still can’t tell the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the public whether it illegally dumped toxic waste into Speers Run, a tributary of the Monongahela River that WSL already pollutes on a regular basis. This is the same toxic waste WSL wants to treat and then dump directly into the Monongahela River in massive quantities. Until the DEP knows just how much waste is being spilled by these types of accidents, it should not issue another permit to the WSL to create even more infrastructure that will suffer similar accidents and negligence.

Even with these hundreds of gallons of toxic waste dumped into the environment, the DEP did not notify the public about the details of this egregious violation until Protect PT submitted a Right to Know Request to gather this information. Currently, the DEP only shares basic information about the existence of environmental law violations using its eFacts website unless it gets Informal File Review or Right to Know Requests. This is especially concerning when the WSL is actively trying to build more polluting infrastructure that will damage the surrounding environment miles down river, including for hundreds of thousands of people living in Pittsburgh and along the downstream Ohio River. If this infrastructure malfunctions and dumps untreated waste into the environment, the public will not fully understand the dangers they are facing unless everyday citizens file technical requests for information and wait upwards of a month for the government to respond to information requests. This is an unacceptable lapse in transparency that will expose more Pennsylvanians to harm in the event of fully predictable accidents.

The WSL’s compliance history, including this dump of 900 gallons of leachate into the open air, is already an indicator of how the WSL will behave if it gets another permit to dump leachate into our public rivers and streams. As Protect PT has already notified the DEP, this compliance history includes 27 violations, 4 consent orders and agreements, and 1 consent assessment of civil penalty since the beginning of 2020. These violations include a “[f]ailure to take necessary measures to prevent pollutants from reaching waters of the Commonwealth,” “Failure to properly operate and maintain all facilities which are installed or used by the permittee to achieve compliance,” and “[f]ailure to immediately report a pollution incident to DEP for non-NPDES permitted activities,” among many, many others. With yet another example of the WSL’s negligent disregard for public safety, the DEP has no rational choice but to deny the WSL’s application to pollute the environment even more. At this point, when the WSL has accepted so much fracking waste that it cannot deal with its radioactive, toxic leachate, the only realistic option left for the DEP is to shut down WSL and remediate the surrounding communities of Rostraver and Monessen given all the harm that has already been done.