The Town of Hurley has received a long-anticipated $1.3 million state grant for engineering site investigations and preparation of a remedial investigation/feasibility study to address groundwater contamination caused by emerging contaminants at the town’s closed landfill.
Governor Kathy Hochul announced the grant funding as part of a $37 million statewide program to remove emerging contaminants from drinking water, replace lead service lines and modernize aging systems. The landfill was declared a state Superfund site last year, which made it eligible for cleanup funding.
“Working alongside our state partners, we’ve secured $1.3 million for Hurley to address groundwater contamination at their closed landfill,” said congressmember Josh Riley in a statement. “I’ll continue fighting to deliver critical resources and investments for communities across upstate New York.”
A pilot program called nano-bubbles fractionation to remove forever chemicals PFOS and PFAS from landfill leachate is showing promising results in Hurley. It may be one of many possible solutions to the substances showing up in Woodstock’s municipal water supply.
Canada-based StreamGo conducted the pilot in Hurley free of charge because the company is showcasing this filtration method across the country.
Kingston mayor Steve Noble, Woodstock town supervisor Bill McKenna, Saugerties officials, and people from the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency came to look at the operation.
They were amazed by what they saw and heard, Hurley town supervisor Mike Boms reported.
Dealing with the leachate
“What they do is they take our leachate, and they put it through what’s called nano-bubbles, which are bubbles that are a trillionth of a millimeter, which is really tiny,” said Boms, a retired Onteora science teacher who now teaches at Marist University. “They will force air into the leachate. It causes bubbles, and the bubbles attract the PFOA and the PFOS. And then it rises to the top and you just skim off the foam there, and in that foam you have all or most of the PFOS there. “When they skim it off, then they do a deconstruct. They break it apart to hydrogen gas, water, carbon dioxide and fluoride.”
The Hurley landfill leachate contains 70 to 100 parts per trillion of PFOS.
In the first run that StreamGo did, most of the PFAS were non-detectable, Boms said. “Some of them were down to 87 percent less than what it was originally. And they feel they can get
it all the way down to zero.”
That level of performance would open new horizons for leachate treatment.
“There are three options for solutions for the leachate,” explained Boms. “The first one is to dig the entire landfill up and move it somewhere else, which is stupid because that just brings the problem downstream to somebody else. That’s not a solution. The second option was to catch all the groundwater before it comes into the landfill and divert it upstream somewhere. That to me, I don’t think it’s practical because you talk about groundwater. You’re not talking about a channel. You’re not talking about a stream or a river. Groundwater is everywhere.”
The third option is the kind that StreamGo is working on. After the PFOS is scrubbed, reverse osmosis filtration can clean up the rest so that the water is drinkable, Boms said.
Too good to be true
The UCRRA presently transports the leachate to Kingston, which processes it at the Kingston wastewater treatment plant in the Rondout.
A $600,000 trailer containing filtration equipment would be too large for Hurley’s needs, but Boms suggested that Kingston could purchase it to filter the leachate from Hurley, the Town of Ulster, New Paltz and the Jockey Hill landfill.
Skepticism frustrates Boms.
“A lot of people are questioning whether this is true or not. I ask them why do you feel it’s wrong? They say it’s too good to be true. That’s not scientific,” said Boms. “Just because you don’t think it’s true or it’s too good to be true, doesn’t mean that it’s not true. I understand the chemistry of PFAS, of the strong bonds between carbon and fluoride. Those are one of the strongest bonds ever. And in order to break that bond, you need a tremendous amount of heat to break those bonds. And that’s not cost-effective. This is very cost-effective.”
The simplest solution is often the most effective, Bom said.
A solution for Woodstock?
Woodstock supervisor candidate and former environmental commission co-chair Erin Moran visited the Hurley setup with McKenna and made a presentation recently to Woodstock’s town board.
“Initially I was really skeptical of this whole thing, just because we just started testing, it’s new, the technology is kind of clunky, but getting better and better, but I was pleasantly
surprised when Bill [McKenna] and I went out there,” Moran told the town board. “Where they’re working on wastewater, we’re discussing actually putting this at our wells. So, they would be starting with water that’s actually cleaner than wastewater leachate. It’s really something I think that not only would be a pro-active solution to the PFAS, but down the road we don’t know what else is going to come up in our water.”
The answers Moran got to her concerns about operational costs were encouraging, she said.
“Everything that’s contained in this unit is the same equipment you would find in a water treatment plant, so the employee who is familiar with all of that equipment, he wouldn’t have to learn anything additional or new as far as the maintenance. There are no moving parts in these tanks. It’s basically an annual flush. And as the parts break down, they would be repaired after ten years or so.”
The bulk of the annual cost would be about $30,000 for electricity. Woodstock could use just reverse osmosis to filter out the PFOS because its concentration was low. But Moran said it made sense to put the entire unit online in anticipation of future needs.
A rough estimate for the entire system is between $1 million and $1.2 million, McKenna said.
To councilmember Bennet Ratcliff suggestion that the money would be better spent on finding and eliminating the source of PFOS instead of treating it, Moran thought that nearly impossible because PFOS was everywhere, found in everything from cleaning products to clothing to nonstick cooking surfaces.
PFOS began showing up in Woodstock’s water supply in 2023, primarily from a new well drilled to replace one that had collapsed. The levels have fluctuated but recently have been around three parts per trillion.
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