This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
For years, residents of Grove City, Pennsylvania, have fought to stop a decades-old landfill from resuming operations in their town. They were worried the landfill would make legacy pollution in the area worse.
But in 2022, information about the kind of waste the landfill would accept raised new fears.
“We realized we didn’t only have a trash problem, but we had a radiation problem,” said Beverly Graham, who lives about three miles from the landfill site and is the recording secretary for the Citizens’ Environmental Association of the Slippery Rock Area, or CEASRA, the local environmental group at the forefront of the battle against the landfill.
The group had found a map of landfills that accept oil and gas waste in Pennsylvania, published by investigative journalists at the Public Herald. One of the sites was Seneca Landfill, owned by the same company, Vogel Holding, that owns the landfill in Grove City.
“We just became very alarmed,” Graham said. Oil and gas waste—and especially the waste generated from fracking in Pennsylvania—is often toxic and radioactive. Researchers have found increased radioactivity downstream from the points where Pennsylvania landfills that accept this waste discharge their wastewater. Despite that, oil and gas waste is permitted for disposal in municipal landfills like the one proposed near Graham’s house.
“It’s in the middle of a population center,” Graham said of the Tri-County Landfill site. The landfill is close to a housing complex, the airport and an outlet mall. It’s only a few miles from Grove City’s Main Street.
“Fracking is a process that ends with toxic waste, and we are not dealing with that.” – Beverly Graham, Citizens’ Environmental Association of the Slippery Rock Area
The site also sits at the crossroads of two highways, making it ideal for trucking in waste from other places, and one reason, Graham said, that the company is so intent on re-opening there. “There’s no need for this landfill to open to take local garbage,” she said.
Oil and gas waste was a key focus in Commonwealth Court on May 6 as CEASRA and one of the townships where the landfill is located made their case for repealing the company’s solid waste permit.
Lisa Johnson, the attorney representing CEASRA and the township, told the judges what she and her clients view as the real impetus behind the landfill in a state where natural gas production has soared since fracking began.
“Pennsylvania has an oil and gas waste problem, and they need somewhere to put it,” she said. “There’s no need for this landfill [in the community]. And why would these environmental harms be inflicted upon the public if it’s not actually needed?”
Johnson said Pennsylvania’s environmental rights amendment, which guarantees the right to clean air and pure water, “demands that this permit be vacated.”
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Alan Miller, representing the Tri-County Landfill, emphasized the legal definition of “hazardous.”
“I keep hearing ‘hazardous waste.’ Just look at our brief. There’s no evidence of hazardous waste having ever been disposed of in this landfill,” he said. “Oil and gas waste is not hazardous waste.”
The old landfill operated from 1950 until 1990, and modern laws governing “hazardous waste” did not exist for much of that time span. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act wasn’t passed until 1976; important amendments pertaining to hazardous waste disposal were added in 1984. And while oil and gas waste meets the dictionary definition of “hazardous,” it’s not classified that way under the law, the result of industry pressure.
In Johnson’s brief arguing against the landfill’s permit to discharge wastewater into a nearby watershed, she explained that the old, unlined site accepted toxic wastes like fly ash, foundry sands and 8,140 gallons of waste from General Electric, which included spent halogenated solvents.
The company and its attorney did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with a local newspaper last year, the owner of the company, Ed Vogel, said “there’s always going to be a few people that are opposed” to the landfill.
“We really try to do the right thing. I have been doing this for years and I make sure we are always following the rules that are in place,” he said. He has also said the landfill would cut costs for the company and create new jobs in the community.
In 2013, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection denied an earlier application to re-open the landfill, citing “a history of non-compliance” at Vogel’s related waste companies, including Seneca Landfill. In 2023, the department reversed course. The company had hired new employees and improved enough that the “recent compliance history is on a par with or better than other comparable facilities operating within the Commonwealth,” the DEP said. There was “no reason” to deny the new application based on compliance history, according to the department.
But since that time, Seneca Landfill and related companies have been issued notices of violation, Johnson said. That includes four in March 2025, two of them for unlawful dumping and handling of solid waste “contrary to rules and regulations.”
In response to questions from Inside Climate News, DEP spokesperson Tom Decker said the agency was not concerned about increased radioactivity downstream of the landfill’s discharge point. “DEP does not believe there will be any environmental or health impacts” from the landfill’s treated wastewater, Decker said, pointing to the results of the agency’s 2016 study on radioactivity in oil and gas waste.
That study said there is “little potential for radiation exposure to workers and the public from landfills receiving waste” from the oil and gas industry, though it also identified “a potential long-term disposal issue” for TENORM, or Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material, the name for radioactive materials that have been concentrated or altered through human activity like drilling.
The study recommended that disposal protocols for this waste “should be reviewed to ensure the safety of long-term disposal of waste containing TENORM.” DEP did not respond to a question about whether it has started a safety review since the study was published.
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The Tri-County Landfill has an approved radiation protection plan, which outlinesrules for monitoring, exposure limits and recordkeeping related to radioactive waste. Its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit under the Clean Water Act requires the company to test for radium-226 and radium-228 quarterly. In an interview after the court appearance, Johnson pointed out that the permit does not set discharge limits for radium.
Initially, CEASRA’s Graham said, the group did not know the landfill would be taking oil and gas waste. When Tri-County’s permit included plans to accept “oil and gas and other oil drilling waste,” and they learned that Seneca also accepted this waste, the group became even more concerned about pollution affecting nearby homes and businesses.
The company has said that the Tri-County Landfill would operate similarly to Seneca and its discharge would be similar to that landfill’s. According to Seneca’s annual operations reports, the landfill detected radium-226 in TENORM waste brought to the site more than 60 times between 2021 and 2023. In each of those cases, the materials were disposed of on site.
The Black Run watershed, where the Tri-County Landfill’s discharge point is located, is classified as impaired. Decker said “the stringent permitting requirements and conditions imposed by DEP in the NPDES permit ensure that the discharge will not contribute to, or make worse, any impairment of the watershed.”
The dispute over the Tri-County Landfill reveals the paradox at the heart of laws that regulate pollution in the United States. As Pennsylvania’s Environmental Hearing Board explained in its dismissal of CEASRA’s earlier appeal of the NPDES permit,laws like the Clean Water Act do not ensure completely clean water or prohibit pollution; they only restrict its emission to certain levels.
“The law does not prohibit the addition of any pollutants to any stream,” the board wrote. Quoting a previous case, the panel noted: “The point of the environmental laws is not to prohibit the discharge of all pollutants, but to intelligently regulate such activity so that regulatory standards are met, environmental incursions are minimized, and any remaining harms are justified.”
These legal limitations are compounded when it comes to oil and gas waste, especially from fracking, which contains proprietary chemicals that companies are allowed to shield from public scrutiny for trade-secret reasons.
“The public isn’t aware enough about what is in this waste,” Johnson said.
Graham’s home is close to where wastewater piped into the Black Run will flow into Wolf Creek. According to resident comments submitted to DEP, these waterways are places where children play and people fish.
“Fracking is a process that ends with toxic waste, and we are not dealing with that,” Graham said. “And if you’re going to frack, then you need to take it all the way through to the safe disposal of the waste.”
If the appeal succeeds, it could have implications far beyond Grove City, for permitting and for other Pennsylvania communities where this waste is treated and disposed of.
“I think that this is an issue that communities and organizations aren’t going to let go of,” Johnson said. “The grassroots opposition to this waste being put in landfills—it’s bigger than just this case.”
