This is Part II of a blog series looking at the radioactivity of oil and gas waste. If you have not read part one yet, we recommend doing so to understand the full concept of the story. Read Part I: The Cecil Pipeyard, Washington County’s Open Hazardous Secret here.
On March 13th, 2026, the Department of Environmental Protection (“DEP”) finally released its long-awaited report concerning the radioactivity of leachate from Pennsylvania’s landfills and their connection to the acceptance of oil & gas waste. This was a report initially commissioned by the Wolf administration in 2021, following pressure from citizens and community groups over concerns about municipal and sanitary landfills regularly accepting oil & gas waste. What followed was years of radio silence from the DEP, continuous delays, and a lack of transparency before the report was published this spring.
“No risk to human health” was the headline of the report, concluding that the radioactive oil & gas waste in our local municipal and sanitary landfills is perfectly safe. Fracking industry representatives applauded the report as a ‘scientific’ showcase of the lack of danger posed by oil & gas waste. DEP Secretary Jessica Shirley and the Shapiro Administration patted themselves on the back for a job well done.
But a closer reading of the actual data within this report reveals that many of our landfills are dangerously radioactive, and DEP is downplaying it. Why? Because calling this harmful waste what it is would threaten the foundation of the fracking industry responsible for generating it. Unfortunately, this is just one example of DEP providing cover for the industry’s harms at the expense of our communities’ health and safety. You can learn more about this pattern of sacrificing our communities to oil & gas waste and the serious health risks it poses in Part I of this series, focusing on the Cecil Pipeyard.
In response to DEP’s landfill report, CCJ joined Protect PT and other regional organizations in drafting a sign-on letter to the current administration as well as holding a press conference at DEP regional headquarters, questioning the report’s findings and conclusions. While these actions began a dialogue between our organizations and DEP, their response to the letter resulted in no additional action and clearly did not share our level of concern.
If you want to learn more about landfill leachate in PA and DEP’s inaction, CCJ, Protect PT, and a group of partner organizations will host a webinar with the Halt the Harm Network on Thursday, July 23rd, at 7pm. There, we will discuss the report, why this leachate is so dangerous, and action steps we can all take to address these problems. This blog will supplement the discussions from that webinar.
What is Landfill Leachate, and why is its radioactivity so dangerous?
It’s important to understand what leachate is, why it is radioactive, and why DEP’s current approach is so problematic. In general, your typical community landfill is basically a sealed off hole in the ground. Waste is piled on top and layered with dirt to keep sections separated and to compress the waste to be more space efficient. That compression produces liquid waste, which, over time, pools at the bottom of the concrete cap separating the landfill from the ground below it. When it rains, this liquid waste mixes with stormwater, becoming a toxic byproduct. The liquid must be captured, piped, and treated at a wastewater facility to prevent it from seeping into our streams or groundwater. That mixed liquid is landfill leachate.
Because it is created, leachate contains varying amounts of the chemicals, compounds, and materials from the waste it comes from. This is part of the reason there are different types of landfills and waste facilities. The leachate produced by a landfill can have a wide range of risks and require vastly different contaminant and treatment procedures. That’s why different types of landfills must accept the correct types of waste. There are hazardous waste facilities, sanitary landfills, and local municipal landfills. One is where the waste from your house goes, another is where dump trucks empty after trash pickups, and others are for the waste from toxic manufacturing plants and industrial sites. Unfortunately, when it comes to oil and gas waste, Pennsylvania does not make the kind of distinctions needed to protect municipalities that accept it.
If you want to learn more about why oil & gas waste is radioactive and why it is categorized as non-hazardous waste, you can read through Part I of this series, where I examine this in depth.
In short, the fracking process extracts naturally occurring radium from the rock layers where the natural gas is located. Fracking generates enormous amounts of waste and exposes dangerous levels of naturally occurring radioactive material to the surface. This means the drill cuttings, wastewater, waste sand, and even the gas itself are all contaminated with this radium-carrying material. As a result, much of the waste created by fracking is often radioactive, a clear hazard to our environment and our health.
But the regulation of this waste does not reflect this hazard. Oil & gas waste is regulated as residual waste, a catch-all term for non-hazardous commercial, agricultural, and industrial waste. As examined in Part I, this categorization is inappropriate given the often high radioactivity of these materials. The status quo is maintained, in part, because the fracking and waste industries could not survive adopting the regulatory requirements if it were correctly designated as hazardous. This is the root of a whole host of connected issues that have left our communities underinformed and unprotected. Notably, it allows oil & gas waste to be legally disposed of in all types of landfills across the state. The human health impacts of exposure to the radium within this waste are staggering (see more in Part I), so community awareness of the kind of waste your local landfill accepts is essential.
If you live in western or northern Pennsylvania, chances are the same landfill processing your household waste also accepts hundreds of thousands of tons of oil & gas waste. This presents two clear problems. First, those who live and recreate near landfills are not informed that they are radioactive waste disposal sites. The Arden Landfill, a large municipal landfill servicing most of central and northern Washington County, directly abuts many people’s houses, as well as Chartiers Creek, a common stream for fishing and recreating, and a tributary of the Monongahela River. Over the last five years, it has been one of the largest acceptors of radioactive oil & gas waste.
Second, these types of landfills lack the infrastructure and waste-treatment technology to handle radioactivity in their leachate. DEP’s sampling report was the only time these landfills had even tested for radioactivity, let alone done anything to mitigate it. Testing for radioactivity is not a standard monitored or limited parameter with landfill leachate as it has no regulated limit. As a result, an unknown amount of this radioactive leachate has been discharged into our streams over the years. And regardless of the spin deployed by DEP and industry in the report, the actual data within it paints a very scary picture.
The Paradox at the Heart of DEP’s Report
DEP and industry presented its findings on the radioactivity of landfill leachate as if it were a scientific study, with conclusions that can be relied on by operators, regulators, legislators, and the public. That implies rigorous study and testing grounded in sound science and unbiased analysis. But what they really did was:
- Take samples of the leachate from 49 different landfills across the state
- Test them using improper methods against improper standards
- Conduct no meaningful risk analysis
- Confidently claim that this proves the leachate poses no threat
To call this a study feels improper: that’s why we call it a report. Dr. John Stolz, a research chemist and professor at Duquesne University with an extensive background in the impacts of oil & gas waste, will present further details on the specifics of this report’s problematic methodology and findings in our webinar on Thursday, July 23rd at 7 pm.
As background, there are no regulatory standards for the radioactivity of untreated leachate from landfills. This is because landfill leachate is not supposed to become radioactive because landfills are not supposed to accept hazardous or radioactive waste. But because the state does not treat waste from oil & gas operations as hazardous or radioactive (despite all logic and evidence), we are left with a major policy gap that denies operators and regulators the tools to monitor radiation effectively.
This report was an opportunity to, in part, inform updated regulations to fill that gap and better protect our health and environment. Unfortunately, DEP instead used the ambiguity of its outdated framework to misconstrue the data and, whether intentionally or not, provide cover for industry.
The Problem with DEP’s Testing Standard
The main regulatory standard DEP used to assess the radioactivity of its samples is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (“NRC”) standard for discharge of the untreated leachate from nuclear waste facilities at 600 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). DEP stated that since the highest average annual radium level for each landfill was lower than that, there is nothing to worry about. While on its face this may appear to be a fair standard, there are fundamental differences between a municipal landfill and a nuclear waste facility. They are not regulated, designed, or operated the same. Standard landfills have much more leachate, they do not have water treatment technology that can address radioactivity, and operators are not required to treat and limit radioactivity to the lowest reasonable levels. But most importantly, this standard contained one of the highest acceptable thresholds for radioactivity. When this is combined with the lack of deep analysis of the methodology in the report and the testing results, it gives the appearance that DEP picked this standard simply because the facilities could meet it.
On Table 2 of DEP’s report it shows the highest average range of radium levels across the 49 landfills, ranging from 308 pCi/L to 540 pCi/L. If you examine the full data sets for each of these landfills, nearly every one had an individual sample over 1000 pCi/L. Among the highest-sampled facilities were Bradford Landfill, Max Environmental, Imperial Landfill, and Arden Landfill. And what do all of these landfills have in common? They have spent the last 15 years accepting millions of tons of oil & gas waste. Yet DEP stated there is no correlation between the radioactivity of their samples and landfills ‘ acceptance of oil & gas waste.
A more appropriate standard to apply would be NRC’s limit for treated industrial leachate, which is 60 pCi/L. This is a much better benchmark because the majority of tested landfills lack systems or infrastructure to treat radioactivity in leachate. The leachate is almost always simply going to the local community water treatment plant. Under this fairer standard, the lowest sampled landfill would be over 4 times higher than the safe limit.
Using the 600 pCi/L standard didn’t just muddy the water surrounding how this leachate should be evaluated. It provided ample narrative cover to industry to pretend that its waste isn’t dangerous and empowered DEP to completely forgo doing a risk assessment. Instead of putting in the hard work to analyze the human and environmental effects of the proliferation of landfill leachate and to identify regulations and solutions to protect Pennsylvanians, they cherry-picked a standard that allows them to declare that no harm exists and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
There are more damning details in this report that our expert panel will continue to break down together! Join us on Thursday, July 23rd at 7 pm webinar to learn more, hear what we’re doing to keep fighting for accountability, and find out how you can get involved to protect and advocate for your community!