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Pollution From a Pennsylvania Landfill Caused Problems for Decades. Fracking Waste Made It Worse
As production of natural gas soared, so has the fracking industry’s production of toxic and often radioactive waste.
YUKON, Pa.—In a rural pocket of western Pennsylvania, along the leafy banks of Sewickley Creek, a small, jagged pipe juts just above the waterline, its cement casing carpeted in moss.
The pipe releases treated wastewater into the creek—a popular spot for kayaking and fishing—from a landfill that handles some of the state’s most toxic industrial waste, including from oil and gas drilling.
Two new signs on the opposite shore correct the impression of a forgotten relic. “Warning! Hazardous Waste Discharge Point,” they read. “Arsenic, lead, cyanide, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, and more are permitted substances for discharge at this site.”
The Max Environmental Technologies landfill has been out of compliance with requirements set under the Clean Water Act for most of the past three years and with the federal hazardous waste law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, known as RCRA for short, since July 2023.
Pollution has taken a toll on the creek: Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University tested Max Environmental’s outfall and found radioactivity in the sediment downstream of the discharge point was 1.4 times higher than upstream. The researchers connected this radioactivity to the landfill’s intake of oil and gas waste, which spiked earlier in Pennsylvania’s fracking boom.
“I wouldn’t eat the fish. I wouldn’t swim in the water,” said John Stolz, a professor of environmental microbiology at Duquesne, who co-authored the study and has researched oil and gas waste in Pennsylvania for 15 years. EPA water quality data for Sewickley Creek shows that much of it is classified as “impaired.”
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