The Landfill Next Door
We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about where our trash ends up but, when you live next door to a landfill, you don’t have that luxury. The burning smell of chemicals, the flocks of circling vultures, the constant rumble of truck traffic and the accompanying exhaust are just the most obvious impacts of living near acres of garbage, especially when that garbage isn’t managed properly. Neighbors in rural eastern North Carolina never wanted any of this. They were told, back when plans were first floated to expand the county dump, that they wouldn’t have to worry about a massive future expansion or the arrival of toxic trash. So, when the footprint grew into the largest landfill in North Carolina and there was evidence that dangerous waste was making its way into the community’s water supply, residents took legal action, and made history in the process.
Episode Transcript
BROKEN GROUND: The Landfill Next Door
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Host: It’s a cold but sunny morning in March as Sherri White-Williamson drives a small tour bus around rural, eastern North Carolina.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): And … right up here to the left …
Host: This isn’t your typical neighborhood tour.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): That’s Smithfield …
Host: Sherri grew up here, in Sampson County, so she knows her way around. She points out trucks delivering feed to the industrial turkey plant in town …
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): So there are 18-wheelers coming and going from the Butterball plant.
Host: And pipelines that transport animal waste that’s been converted into methane gas.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): … there are pipes popping up all over the place.
Host: Sherri drives the 12-seater van past a meat processing plant that shares a fence with people’s backyards.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): And these folks talk about how most of the time they’re burning candles or have incense or something burning to tolerate the odor. But like I said, this is a good day.
Host: This is what Sherri and her nonprofit, the Environmental Justice Community Action Network – also known as EJCAN – call a “Toxic Tour.” For Sherri, a major goal of the tour is to help people who don’t live here see, smell, and hear what it means to be neighbors with industries that threaten your health and well-being every day.
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About 15 minutes into the tour, in a community near Roseboro, called “Snow Hill,” the landscape rises in the distance.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): That thing that looks like a hill over there is landfill. That’s trash. It was flat like the rest of this land you’re looking at.
Host: The group catches a glimpse of the 1,000-plus acres that make up the Sampson County Regional Landfill, the largest in North Carolina. For decades, this mega-landfill has accepted millions of tons of trash from across North Carolina – 250 trucks’ worth per day. Some containing dangerous, manmade chemicals that can contaminate people’s drinking water. And as this waste decomposes, it emits a stench that essentially keeps folks trapped at home.
Many point to the landfill as the first major polluting industry to come to Sampson County – and one that transformed life in the neighboring community.
Now … after all these years … what can be done to reverse its damage?
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Host: This is Broken Ground, a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. I’m Leanna First-Arai, your host. Here at Broken Ground, we dig up environmental stories in the South, and introduce you to the people at the heart of them.
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Today, we’re talking about a place we all use, but rarely think about … the landfill.
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Without proper management, landfills can spread toxins to the soil, water, and air … and change their neighbors’ lives for the worse. That’s certainly the case in places like Sampson County, North Carolina … Uniontown, Alabama … or Bristol, Virginia.
Landfills exist all over, of course, from the densest city blocks to wide open countryside. SELC’s six-state region alone contains 493 landfills. After all, the way we live generates A LOT of trash. But landfills in the rural South can pose a unique threat to their neighbors. Limited access to water infrastructure means many Southerners rely on wells, which makes our drinking water more vulnerable to contamination from outside sources.
In this episode, we’ll bring you along for one community’s fight against a landfill that promised economic treasure, but instead delivered trash. So much trash. That trash hearkens back to the very origins of the national environmental justice movement. But in today’s version of the story, there’s hope that residents will finally get the relief they deserve.
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Lake Wood School Road Resident: Good morning. How are you all doing?
Group voices: Good morning. How are you?
Lake Wood School Road Resident: I am blessed to be here. Wonderfully blessed.
Host: The toxic tour stops at a home on Lakewood School Road to hear from a woman who lives there, but who asked us not to use her name. She’s wearing a face mask and a backward baseball cap, and greets the members of the Toxic Tour from her porch.
The landfill is a few miles away, but …
Lake Wood School Road Resident: The fragrance from the landfill comes to see me. I don’t have to go see it.
Host: On cooler days, she says the smell might not be as noticeable. But on others …
Lake Wood School Road Resident: You go to church, you hop out the car, you walk fast to get in the church. Back in the day, you’d see people standing outside just talking. Nope, do my talking inside.
Host: That’s not the only way her neighborhood has changed.
Lake Wood School Road Resident: There were farms on the road. And you know, people had gardens. The land is still there, but nobody farms.
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Sherri White-Williamson: Prior to the landfill going there, the community was a robust community. It’s an African-American community. There were businesses, it was thriving. But the landfill slowly destroyed all of that.
Host: Sherri – the director of EJCAN – agrees that Sampson County looks dramatically different from when she was a kid. She spent much of her career in DC, working in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and when she would come back to visit, she saw the ways her hometown was changing as the landfill grew.
Sherri White-Williamson: These huge animal operations were starting to pop up around the place.
Host: Concentrated animal feeding operations or “CAFOs”, exploded in the ’90s in eastern North Carolina, where pigs now outnumber people 33 to one. And these are no family farms. These facilities dump millions of gallons of hog feces and urine into unlined cesspits, before spraying it all onto agricultural fields, presumably as fertilizer … turning soil, water, and air toxic.
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Sherri White-Williamson: Sampson County is number two in hog production in the United States.
Leanna First-Arai: Mm-hmm.
Sherri White-Williamson: Sampson County is also number one in turkey production in the state.
Host: Turkey industry toxins like nitrogen and phosphorus have been linked to asthma and cancer.
Sherri White-Williamson: There is also an Enviva wood pellet processing plant here.
Host: Add up all of the pollution coming from all of these sources, and you get something called “cumulative impacts.” It’s a critical concept in environmental justice work. But like many environmental agencies across the country, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality rarely takes cumulative impacts into account when issuing permits to polluting facilities.
Sherri White-Williamson: So if you’ve got five facilities in an area emitting that pollutant at the federally acceptable level, and you’re only looking at one facility at the time, that community is getting exposed to maybe five times the federally accepted level of whatever that pollutant might be.
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Sherri White-Williamson: So we are absolutely very concerned about cumulative impacts in everything.
Host: It’s a stunning idea, isn’t it? The concept that you could be surrounded by polluting sources and the government would effectively pretend each one was the only one? Unfortunately, there are lots of places around the South like Sampson County – areas effectively treated as ‘sacrifice zones’ for economic development. But none of those areas started out that way. And so I think it’s worth going back in time a bit to see how this particular landfill fight started … both to better understand how industry comes to use a beloved community as a dumping ground, and to figure out what we can do to make things right.
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Host: When the landfill opened in 1973, it was relatively small … fewer than 20 acres and managed by the county. But in the late 1980s county commissioners began to consider a deal with a private company called Browning-Ferris Industries, or BFI.
BFI Archival Audio: It’s our garbage, and it isn’t going away. But if we work together, private citizens, industry, government, all of us, we can face this challenge. And BFI’s sanitary landfills will remain a vital element in this formula. Tomorrow’s field of dreams. For communities with vision and courage.
Host: A field of dreams? The plan would involve turning the local dump into a regional landfill, managed by BFI and accepting trash within a 60-mile radius. In return, Sampson County would receive annual host fees from the company and free waste disposal. But community members who actually lived near the proposed site – more than 70% of whom are people of color – didn’t buy that the tradeoff between cash influx and their health was a fair one.
Sherri White-Williamson: There was an interesting coalition that formed, not just the Snow Hill community, but from folks across the county who were concerned about a landfill being placed in the county.
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Host: Newspapers and documents compiled by a long-time Snow Hill resident show that when neighbors learned of the landfill proposal, they jumped into action, organizing a coalition called the Concerned Citizens of the Snow Hill community, setting up informational meetings with county officials, and writing op-eds in the local paper. We’ve recreated some of their voices here.
Kathleen Hart (voiced by Gigi Shellie): We do not want the landfill in our neighborhood. Garbage from counties in a 60-mile radius will be coming into Sampson County. How closely will their garbage be monitored for toxic waste.
Host: Some community members proposed alternative waste management solutions that were ahead of their time.
Mercer Johnson, Jr. (voiced by Wolf Williams): Agriculture is our backbone, not waste disposal. Let’s take care of our own waste with a mandatory recycling program.
Host: People worried about the landfill expanding … worried that toxic chemicals from its waste would leak into their well water … worried that daily life would change with a sprawling dump as a neighbor. But county officials, BFI representatives, and supposed “waste experts” remained steadfast that the community’s concerns were groundless. An NC State professor even wrote this to the Sampson Independent newspaper …
NC State Professor Bob Rubin (voiced by Daniel Amerman): Something like this doesn’t become a problem until it’s brought to somebody’s attention. If people didn’t know about it, there wouldn’t be any objections. The commissioners are basing their decision on what we know, not on what we feel, and on the best interests of 48,000 people in Sampson County, not the emotions of 180.
Host: “If people didn’t know about it, there wouldn’t be any objections.” Well, that’s one infuriating way to look at it. At an informational meeting, County Health director Kenneth Jones further dismissed residents’ concerns, promising …
Kenneth Jones (voiced by Fred Bugg): Absolutely no hazardous materials will be disposed of in the landfill.
Host: Which wasn’t technically a lie, but WAS a pretty deceiving linguistic loophole, since there ARE toxic substances that aren’t classified as “hazardous waste.” At another meeting, that same county official said …
Kenneth Jones (voiced by Fred Bugg): Less than 15 percent of you in the group have seen the working face of the landfill, which is about 15 acres.
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Host: The “working face” of the landfill is where trucks are actively dumping trash.
Kenneth Jones (voiced by Fred Bugg): If BFI operates it, it will still be about 15 acres.
Host: These condescending quotes reveal a common thread in many stories of environmental injustice. That is: decisionmakers and polluters working in cahoots to conceal information from the communities they’re impacting. Sometimes that trickery works … and sometimes … it doesn’t.
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Warren County archival audio (protestor): We will not allow Warren County to become a dump site.
Host: Just a decade before, about two hours north, residents of Warren County, North Carolina had protested to stop the dumping of 60,000 tons of toxic, PCB-laden soil in their county.
Warren County archival audio (reporter): The signs and chants of the protesters made clear their opposition to having the toxic chemical buried in their county.
Sherri White-Williamson: For those who don’t know, Warren County is really where the national environmental justice movement started.
Host: It also resulted in a landmark study: the 1987 “Toxic Wastes and Race Report,” commissioned by the United Church of Christ. Race, it revealed, was the most significant factor determining whether a person lived near toxic waste, with three out of five Black or Hispanic-Americans living near these dangerous sites.
Sherri White-Williamson: It raised the awareness of elected officials, of the religious community. But the other thing that it did was it forced several organizations and the federal government to conduct some studies to start understanding where toxic dumps were being placed.
Warren County archival audio (protestors singing): Ain’t no stopping us now. Ain’t no stopping us now.
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Host: Whether or not the Snow Hill community had their northern neighbors in mind as they organized against the Sampson County landfill, their sense of deep injustice was clear. Resident Stacy Phipps wrote to the paper:
Stacy Phipps (voiced by Vince Melamed): None of our officials bothered to tell county residents and especially the Snow Hill residents until the 11th hour. Were we tricked, disfranchised, or what?
Host: Things came to a head on February 3rd, 1992, at a public hearing before the commission’s vote on the landfill. The Fayetteville Observer Times reported:
Lois Weaver (voiced by Kelly Nugent): About 500 people attended a public hearing Monday night on a regional landfill, many of them carrying placards making their opposition clear. Some of the placards read, “NO BFI,” “Brings Franchised Immorality,” and “BFI – Convicted Criminals.”
Host: After the three-and-a-half hour public hearing, all five county commissioners voted in favor of the regional landfill. None of those commissioners lived in Snow Hill.
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Maia Hutt: People knew privatizing the landfill, expanding the landfill would fundamentally change life in this part of Sampson County, and they were not listened to.
Host: That’s Maia Hutt, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. She remembers the first time she ever saw the landfill – from a plane.
Maia Hutt: It’s like a scar upon the earth.
Leanna First-Arai: Yeah.
Maia Hutt: And just the scale of it was so shocking to me.
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Host: Maia says the fears residents had about the landfill – its massive expansion, its impact on lo cal waters, and its acceptance of unsafe, polluting materials – all came true. Remember the “working face of the landfill” that was supposed to stay …
Kenneth Jones (voiced by Fred Bugg): … 15 acres.
Host: That grew to more than 200 acres. And the 60-mile radius for trash pickup? That spread five times further, eventually pulling in trash from the mountains to the coast. And perhaps most upsetting, within three years of that contentious public hearing where the County Health Director promised …
Kenneth Jones (voiced by Fred Bugg): Absolutely no hazardous materials will be disposed of in the landfill …
Maia Hutt: Dupont and then Chemours were sending PFAS-laden waste to the Sampson County landfill. Hundreds of tons …
Leanna First-Arai: Jeez.
Maia Hutt: … of PFAS-laden waste.
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Host: PFAS are a group of chemicals used in everything from non-stick cookware to stain-resistant carpeting. They’re more commonly known as “forever chemicals.”
Maia Hutt: What’s really important to know about this class of chemicals is that they are extremely, um, resistant to breaking down. They stay in your system. And so the ones that have been the most studied, those have been, you know, linked to forms of cancer. They have been linked to liver and kidney diseases. The more studies that are done on these chemicals, the more we learn about how dangerous they are.
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Host: Given the ubiquity of PFAS in consumer products, many landfills contain the chemicals. But as Maia told us:
Maia Hutt: The amount of PFAS in the leachate at the Sampson County landfill is just orders of magnitude above the average in the United States.
Host: ‘Leachate’ is the liquid that’s created when rain or other water mixes with the landfill’s waste. Maia says you can think of it like …
Maia Hutt: Garbage juice. And that garbage juice is supposed to not leave the landfill.
Host: But in the case of the Sampson County landfill, it has, making its way into soil and local waters, and bringing PFAS with it. Once these forever chemicals are in the environment, they can make their way into the private drinking water wells that people here rely on.
Maia Hutt: A lot of Sampson County is very geographically isolated and rural. There isn’t great water infrastructure. This is a statistic that’s true for North Carolina generally, but I think we really see it play out in Sampson County, which is that racial composition of a community is the greatest determinant of whether or not they have access to clean water. And so in Sampson County, we see predominantly Black and Latino communities who not only are bearing all the impacts of this pollution, but, you know, they’re reliant on drinking water wells, which are easily contaminated.
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Host: Of course, as the woman living on Lakewood School Road told us earlier …
Lake Wood School Road Resident: The fragrance from the landfill comes to see me.
Host: … the landfill also pollutes the air with that awful smell.
Maia Hutt: You have that, and then you have, I think, the scarier question of what is creating that smell. Because, you know, the smell is a indicator of chemical compounds in the air. And when we think about the kind of compounds that are produced by landfills and the ones that are odorous, you’re talking about benzene and vinyl chloride and formaldehyde. And those are, you know, carcinogens. They’re really bad for your health with chronic exposure.
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Host: At over a thousand acres today – the size of about 800 football fields – the landfill utterly changed life in Snow Hill. Each time it expanded, it effectively lowered the threshold for other polluting industries, who likely saw a county that could be swayed by economic development arguments, and a populace whose concerns could be safely ignored. That’s how a quote unquote sacrifice zone grows. Weak laws, corporate negligence, and local governments hungry for economic engines come together to concentrate pollution in communities like Snow Hill.
Maia Hutt: As the industry becomes more concentrated and there’s more and more pollution, the trade-off there is community becomes more fragmented and more burdened. It gets harder to live there.
Host: Harder both physically and emotionally, as Sherri White-Williamson can attest.
Sherri White-Williamson: I think that the community is disappointed and discouraged with what isn’t happening here, because all they can see is, is that they’ve been dealing with this thing for 50 years and it seems like no one has paid them any attention, no matter how loud they holler or who they try to talk to.
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Maia Hutt: I think, you know, the frustration from doing everything right …
Host: Maia Hutt, again.
Maia Hutt: … organizing and going to the meetings and doing everything that, you know, you’re supposed to do and not being listened to is something that’s still really deep in there.
Host: “The frustration from doing everything right.”
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Host: The environmental justice movement has made serious strides since the 1982 Warren County protests, but Sherri says when she looks at the concentration of pollution in Sampson County today, and in communities of color across the country, there hasn’t been nearly enough progress. When researchers published a twenty-year follow-up to the original “Toxic Wastes and Race” report in 2007, they found:
Sherri White-Williamson: Nothing had really changed. And I believe if someone did a study or wrote a book now, I don’t think that they would find very much difference in where toxic waste is placed now any more than they found in 1987 or 2007.
Host: Many Sampson County residents, like the one we heard from on the Toxic Tour, have spent decades fighting for their right to a clean, safe environment. And sometimes the progress seems glacial.
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Lake Wood School Road Resident: When I retired in ’05, my mission was going to be to get some water run down Lakewood School Road. Well, this is 2024 and I still don’t have water down Lakewood School Road! So my mission has not been successful.
HOST: While she and her neighbors live miles from the landfill, the well water they rely on has obviously been compromised by one or more polluting sources. Sometimes it’s foul-smelling, and it can stain her clothes and pots when she uses it for cleaning.
Lake Wood School Road Resident: It’s kind of like you don’t wash clothes if you know you’re having company, because you don’t know what the water gonna smell like or what your house gonna smell like when they get there, and you don’t want them to think it’s just the fact that you’re nasty. (laughing)
Host: Recently, she and other residents met with a county official about installing water lines. But it didn’t go anywhere.
Lake Wood School Road Resident: And I did ask him about grants or, or something that might – they might could get to help us with the water situation. And he told us at that time that there were no grants available. Sherri and I had talked, and there WAS some money available. But he wasn’t going to apply for it for us.
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Lake Wood School Road Resident: We’ve done what we were asked to do. You know, we had our water tested, we had us some meetings, we signed the petition. What more can you do?
Host: ‘The frustration from doing everything right.’
Lake Wood School Road Resident: I think that we should get what we need. And what we need is some water. Please help. Thank you.
Tour Attendees: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your story.
Host: What she and her neighbors ALSO need is for the landfill to control its stink. Maia says there’s legal grounds for that.
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Maia Hutt: In North Carolina, there’s a odor control law. I’m going to nerd out a little bit now. (laughing) Uh, there’s a odor control law that basically says if an odor from a solid waste facility is crossing the border of the property line, then that facility needs to install odor control technology.
Host: She points out that in Apex, North Carolina, near the Research Triangle …
Maia Hutt: Near a predominantly White community, there is a landfill that has an odor control plan. The Sampson County landfill, which is infamously smelly, has serious odor problems, has no odor control plan. We have asked DEQ to implement one. People living in the area have submitted numerous complaints. And those complaints have been – from what the public records show – basically, DEQ asks GFL, ‘Hey, what do you think is causing the odor?’
Host: GFL Environmental is the company that has owned the landfill since 2018.
Maia Hutt: And GFL gives them an answer and then they say, ‘Okay,’ and they close the investigation on the complaint. So that’s just an example of where DEQ isn’t even doing the baseline of, like, what the regulations and the laws require and what they have done in other communities.
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Host: You may be wondering at this point: what could I possibly do about any of this? After all, you may not live in a community that sends trash to Sampson County’s landfill, but your waste certainly ends up in one somewhere. Maia says, there are ways for individuals to manage their trash more ethically.
Maia Hutt: The number one thing is waste diversion. Composting, recycling, like, creating less waste to begin with.
Host: Maia says another way individuals can make an impact is by putting pressure on the big guys.
Maia Hutt: The Chemours of the world – what are they doing?
Host: There’s lots of way to push back on these polluting companies – by attending public hearings on upcoming permit decisions, writing your local officials, maybe even plugging in with grassroots organizing and dreaming up a direct action.
Maia Hutt: The same way that I can reduce my contributions to a landfill by making choices in my everyday life, a corporation that is contributing large amounts of pollution that end up in landfills, they can make those decisions too, and in fact, they probably have far more resources.
Host: Of course, getting the big players to change course can be a titanic feat. One that can clearly take years, if not decades. That’s why Sherri White-Williamson has a mantra of sorts for her environmental justice work.
Sherri White-Williamson: Small wins are important.
Host: “Small wins are important.”
Sherri White-Williamson: For communities, oftentimes it’s the small successes that gives them the belief that they can make change.
Host: Sherri tells me about a recent win in Sampson County.
Sherri White-Williamson: The American Rescue Plan from the federal government provided funding for water infrastructure. And Sampson County got the largest grant in infrastructure funding in the state.
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Sherri White-Williamson: Um, 13.28 million dollars to hook up 350 homes at no cost to the homeowners, in a part of the county, um, where they had been trying for more than two decades to get water.
Host: Frustratingly, that community doesn’t include the homes on Lakewood School Road. They’re about a half-an-hour away. But still …
Sherri White-Williamson: Of course, there are hopes in other communities that they can get something similar.
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Host: Another win for Sampson County? The state’s Department of Environmental Quality began collecting data on the leachate in the landfill and on the water quality of the streams surrounding it. How’s that a win you ask?
Sherri White-Williamson: Oftentimes data does not exist in many of these communities to be able to definitively indicate where some of the illnesses and the impacts that communities are experiencing are coming from.
Host: In fact, it was this data collection that revealed the extraordinarily high rate of PFAS contamination in the leachate that Maia Hutt mentioned earlier.
Maia Hutt: … just orders of magnitude above the average in the United States.
Host: With that knowledge, DEQ finally turned its attention to the residential drinking water wells that people who live near the landfill rely on.
Maia Hutt: And they found PFAS was ubiquitous.
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Host: As upsetting as it was, that new data meant that EJCAN, working with SELC, now had a strong legal case to make against the landfill company.
Maia Hutt: This is the moment in time where we have that data and we thought it was very important to move quickly.
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Host: And so earlier this year, SELC warned landfill owner GFL, that unless they stop PFAS-polluted leachate from reaching people in the community and clean up the PFAS already in the environment, SELC would sue.
Maia Hutt: The community has the law on their side. Like, they are in the right. They have strong claims and we have the resources to help them translate that into concrete change.
Host: And it worked. After months of negotiation, SELC and GFL reached a landmark agreement to address the PFAS – a 33-page deal that was just confirmed by a federal judge this past week.
Sherri White-Williamson: I think it’s fantastic.
Host: We called up Sherri White-Williamson to see how she was feeling.
Sherri White-Williamson: Of course, it was a great deal of relief, and even more so, a great deal of joy because of what it portends to do for the local community.
Host: Among other concessions, the landfill has to stop PFAS-laden “garbage juice” from leaching out of the landfill and into local water. It also has to address the stink that keeps people stuck indoors. Plus, GFL has to set up a “Community Benefit Fund.” That’s a sizable pot of money that Snow Hill residents can use to fund county water connections, pay for PFAS filters, even subsidize home water bills, for example.
Sherri White-Williamson: Just a lot of good things that have come out of the deal.
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Host: If you’re a bit skeptical after hearing this story, that’s understandable. When it comes to the Sampson County Regional Landfill and the community’s safety, there’s a long history of broken promises. But Sherri says she has new reason to believe GFL will follow through.
Sherri White-Williamson: If something isn’t done according to the consent decree, there is the opportunity for the lawyers to take further legal action if necessary. Hopefully, it would never come to that, but it does allow for a certain amount of confidence.
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Host: Despite this hard-fought win, there’s lots more work ahead. Sherri says she’d like to see stricter regulations on the hog and poultry industries here. And long term, she wants federal and state legislation to address cumulative impacts in a concrete way. After all, the environmental injustices residents face here are not unique to Sampson County.
Sherri White-Williamson: Sampson County is a microcosm of so many other rural communities, and I think that the environmental justice conversation so often has not included the issues in rural communities. It’s sort of like out of sight, out of mind. Um, I think the average person, when you say “rural,” would automatically think of aesthetic and green open spaces and I think it’s very important to get people to understand that the picture isn’t really that way.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): Okay, this is the backside of the landfill, y’all …
Host: That’s why, at 72 years old, Sherri says she’ll keep giving those Toxic Tours through rural Sampson County.
Sherri White-Williamson: When you come and actually see and smell and get a chance to talk with community members so that they can share their actual experience with you, it is different than just reading from a sheet of paper. For us, this is an important part of the story.
Sherri White-Williamson (on tour): There’s a hog farm behind that line of trees and this is the spray field right here in front. And these folks over here would tell me …
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Host: That does it for this episode of Broken Ground. If you’d like to learn more about the landfill fight, or if you’d just like to see some pictures of the fantastic people we interviewed, head to our website at Broken Ground Podcast dot o-r-g. Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment … rooted in the South. It’s produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Noa Greenspan, Paige Polk, Jennie Daley, and me, Leanna First-Arai, with the invaluable assistance of Ko Bragg, Pria Mahadevan and Sam Lenga. Our theme music is by Eric Knutson. Special thanks to Sampson County resident Paul Fisher for sharing his archive of documents on Snow Hill’s landfill fight. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love it if you’d write us a review on your favorite podcast app. We read them all. Thanks for listening.
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