After initially receiving support from North Carolina’s state legislature, two landfill operators in that state have said they will postpone their attempts to use “aersolization” as a way to disperse leachate wastewater at their landfills.
According to an online editorial commentary posted Aug. 26, 2017, by the Greensboro (North Carolina) News & Record, Republic Services and Charah LLC have stated separately they are deferring from installing the systems.
The postponements by the two companies follows an earlier North Carolina legislature approval of the technique, which was later vetoed by the state’s governor. According to the News & Record, the legislature had announced it would meet to discuss overriding the governor’s veto, but that meeting also has been postponed.
The newspaper describes aersolization as “spraying wastewater from a lined landfill into the air with the idea that solid particles would fall back to the landfill and liquid somehow would dissipate.” The technique, says the newspaper, could save operators the cost of treating their leachate. (A United States patent for the process can be found on this Web page.)
Critics tagged this liquid with the unappealing nickname of “garbage juice,” and the News & Record editors write, “In rejecting the measure, Gov. Roy Cooper declared, ‘Scientists, not the legislature, should decide whether a patented technology can safely dispose of contaminated liquids from landfills.’” The newspaper editors say of Gov. Cooper’s comment, “He was exactly right.”
The NC Policy Watch website published an online report in June 2017 that was likewise skeptical of the environmental benefits of the process.