Small Towns Say ‘No’ to PFAS Treatment Plant

Gillis, 43, pulls over, and she and Donnelly, 45, both get out of the car. But they aren’t here to admire the scenery. Instead, they direct their attention to the Fort Edward Industrial Park, where a low-slung, pale-yellow building sits, occupied by an industrial waste management company called Clean Earth. They talk about its close proximity to community hangouts and other local spots—to Mullen Park, the Empire State Trail, downtown Fort Edward, public schools, their homes.

The sisters have lived in this rural pocket in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains near the Vermont border their entire lives. They grew up in Fort Edward, in the house their parents still call home, and reside on the same street in the neighboring town Hudson Falls. Both Gillis and Donnelly teach science, at the middle school and high school levels respectively.

Over the past year, they have also become leaders in a grassroots group called The Fort Stops PFAS, which they helped form in 2024 to oppose a proposal from Clean Earth. The company is seeking permission from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to treat 5,000 tons of PFAS-contaminated soil at its Fort Edward facility using thermal desorption—essentially heating large quantities of toxic soil to temperatures of 600 degrees or higher to unstick the contaminants. The proposal calls for a pilot, estimated to take about two weeks, to assess the effectiveness of Clean Earth’s soil treatment process and air pollution controls.

Some upstate New York towns have been hard-hit by PFAS pollution. Fort Edward isn’t one of them, but the issue is hardly a remote concern. The community is just 33 miles north of Hoosick Falls, New York, where in 2014 the revelation that the municipal water supply was contaminated by PFAS propelled concerns about forever chemicals into the national spotlight.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are synthetic chemicals that break down very slowly and linger in the environment for hundreds, even thousands, of years. They are found in a variety of everyday items, such as nonstick cookware and stain-resistant carpet, and have been linked to numerous health ailments, including kidney, breast and testicular cancer. Often referred to as “forever chemicals,” PFAS accumulate in our bodies over time. They are so widespread that nearly every person alive has PFAS in their blood.

Gillis, Donnelly and others say the possible downsides of Clean Earth’s project are too great for the community to bear. They worry that treating PFAS-polluted soil from throughout the Northeast in Fort Edward will produce emissions that contaminate their air, water and soil.

“It’s too dangerous,” says Angela Presley, 37, a member of The Fort Stops PFAS. “Treat PFAS where it is—don’t bring it to our town, please.”

One Facebook post on The Fort Stops PFAS page states this clearly: “Did you know Clean Earth is proposing to process PFAS one mile from Fort Edward school buildings?” it says. “Tell DEC to deny the permit! Demand a public hearing!”

In mid-December, the New York DEC announced it had reviewed Clean Earth’s application and prepared a draft permit for the project. The agency accepted written public comments until February 17. The Fort Stops PFAS spent months sharing concerns about Clean Earth’s proposal with the community, spreading the word about what DEC approval might mean and rallying residents to speak up.

On February 17, a coalition of 77 local, state and national organizations signed a letter with Earthjustice urging the DEC to deny the proposed permit to Clean Earth. While the groups acknowledged the need for “safe and effective PFAS remediation options,” they said Clean Earth’s project “is neither safe nor effective,” noting the project’s “flawed scientific foundation” and “its failure to analyze the tests’ impacts on local (disadvantaged communities) should be fatal.” They also warned Clean Earth will likely seek to modify its permit to extend the project continually, and that it was imperative to prevent decades-long toxic exposure to the community.

The letter included a 10-page expert opinion from Denise Trabbic-Pointer, a hazardous material and remediation specialist who spent 42 years with DuPont, a major PFAS manufacturer. She found that Clean Earth “misunderstands the complexity of PFAS removal from contaminated soil,” identifying fault with the company’s method, its pollution control systems and assessment, and that the facility will emit PFAS in air emissions and onto surrounding soil and water. The project, she wrote, “fails both the regulatory and constitutional standards” because “there is no evidence” the proposed tests could destroy PFAS or even effectively separate it from contaminated soil.

“I don’t think Clean Earth expected to meet this kind of resistance,” Presley says. “I think they thought it would be like every other industrial abuse of the area that there has been, and we were like, ‘Hold on. This doesn’t have to be the way it is.’”

Clean Earth says its thermal desorption process won’t have any adverse effects on the community. “There will be no discernible air, water (beyond water vapor) or solids emissions,” the company says in materials explaining its proposal. Nor will the project result in additional noise, odor, light, or an increase in the annual number of trucks received at the Fort Edward facility, the company says.

In an email, Karen Tognarelli, a spokeswoman for Clean Earth, says Clean Earth is asking for a permit to conduct a short-term project. Future projects to potentially treat PFAS-contaminated soils, she says, would require additional review and permitting. “If issued, the permit does not give us permission beyond that short scope and time frame,” adding that “the data generated will help New York as it struggles to find safe and economical options to fix its PFAS problems.”

Clean Earth’s new owners may be part of an industry looking to capitalize on those very problems. At the time Clean Earth opened its Fort Edward facility in 1995, it was owned by ESMI, a private company. In 2018, ESMI was acquired by the Pennsylvania-based Clean Earth, one of the largest specialty waste companies in the United States. Clean Earth is a division of the Enviri Corporation; in November, Enviri announced it would sell Clean Earth to Veolia, a multinational French company specializing in waste and water treatment—the very points where PFAS concentrates as a toxic byproduct, whether in sewage sludge or landfill leachate.

Veolia operates wastewater treatment plants in New York, including Nassau County, Rockland County, Poughkeepsie and Binghampton and Johnson City, and it owns over 30 treatment facilities in the U.S. that remove PFAS from drinking water.

Clean Earth has remediated soils contaminated with gasoline, fuel oils, kerosene, petroleum solvents, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and more at its facility in the Fort Edward Industrial Park. This work hasn’t been controversial. Indeed, many of the PCBs came from company’s own backyard.

For decades, General Electric capacitor factories in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls discharged PCBs into the upper Hudson River, which flows through both communities. In 2009, the company undertook a six-year $1.7 billion dredging project, removing more than 300,000 pounds of the highly toxic chemicals from a 40-mile stretch of the waterway. It was a massive undertaking, but state agencies and environmental groups say the cleanup ended prematurely and was a failure.

In 2014, GE moved its operations to Florida and closed its factories for good. The scars remain, from jobs lost to the factory’s toxic remnants. Today, local advocates say PCB concentrations in fish and sediment remain far too high, and have urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make GE do more. 

In their February 17 letter, the 77 environmental and advocacy groups acknowledged this history as a reason to deny Clean Earth’s proposed permit, concluding that “It is therefore imperative to ensure that this application be denied, to prevent another decades-long project of toxic exposure for the already severely burdened Hudson Falls and Glens Falls communities.”

“The (PCB) problem hasn’t gone away,” says David Carpenter, a professor in the College of Integrated Health Sciences at the University at Albany’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences. “It may have gotten a little less severe, because they certainly removed a lot of the PCBs, but it’s not a safe situation yet at all.”

Carpenter has analyzed blood samples from residents of Fort Edward and Hudson Falls and found elevated PCB concentrations. He’s also conducted a series of studies looking at the health effects of PCBs on people living along the Hudson River, including in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls. That research found elevated rates for a number of chronic diseases and medical problems, including diabetes, thyroid disease, hypertension, low birth weight and stroke.

Many of the Fort Edward and Hudson Falls residents Carpenter interviewed “couldn’t sell their homes,” he says. “Their home values were way down because of the local contamination, and a lot of these people were not wealthy. They couldn’t afford to move to someplace that was less contaminated.”

This damaging legacy informs The Fort Stops PFAS’ activism.

“We always come back to the PCB issue, but we’ve shouldered enough,” Donnelly says. “I’m sure they can remediate some of the PFAS, but they’re not going to get rid of all of them, and the PFAS are going to build up here, and we’re going to see it in our health, just like we’ve seen with PCBs.”

She adds, “We’re tired of being casualties of profits for these companies, and that’s essentially what these small towns become—a casualty in the wake of a large corporation coming in.”

“Nobody I’ve talked to has an issue with trying to find solutions to PFAS contamination and PFAS-contaminated soil,” says Ben Bramlage, a retired DEC environmental conservation police officer who moved to Fort Edward several years ago and is active with The Fort Stops PFAS. But that work should be done elsewhere, he says. “You talk to people in this community, and there’s legitimately trauma,” he says. “The health impacts and the health data for this community are mind-blowing.”

The Fort Stops PFAS sees itself as part of a broader regional movement against PFAS industrial pollution. The group draws inspiration from other environmental wins. Members were also involved in Not Moreau, a grassroots push to scuttle a proposal from Saratoga Biochar to build a biochar plant in the small Saratoga County town of Moreau, a few miles west of Fort Edward across the Hudson River.

If approved, the biochar facility would have treated sewage sludge—what the waste industry calls “biosolids”—to manufacture fertilizer. But the state Department of Environmental Conservation rejected the plan in 2024. Among other things, the agency said the company’s “estimate that its thermal oxidizer will achieve 99.99 percent destruction efficiency for PFAS compounds is not supported by any clear demonstration of the effectiveness of this control technology.”

“People are paying closer attention,” Bramlage says. “People are educating themselves. People don’t necessarily trust the corporate view or the rubber stamps as much, because we got burned.”

Late last year, another obstacle to Clean Earth’s proposal emerged: In December, the village of Fort Edward’s Department of Code Enforcement informed the company that it is only permitted to clean soil contaminated with fuel oil and petroleum at its facility and that the PFAS project requires additional zoning approval. Clean Earth has submitted an appeal, which will be heard by the Zoning Board of Appeals on March 19.

In a letter to the appeals board, Clean Earth argues that its original application to construct a soil recycling plant mentioned petroleum-contaminated soil but was “in no way limited to approval for PCS only,” and that “at no point” during the facility’s history “did any Village official indicate that the Facility’s processing of other non-hazardous contaminated soils was unauthorized or that additional zoning approvals were required.”

“What changed in 2025 was not the Facility’s operations but the political environment,” with “certain environmental activist groups” pressuring village officials about the PFAS project.

In other small and rural places harmed by PFAS, such as Hoosick Falls about 35 miles south of Fort Edward, the problem often comes to light when residents discover they’re drinking polluted water, and testing finds high levels of PFAS in their blood. In these situations, the typical response is to distribute bottled water to residents, install point-of-entry treatment systems at people’s homes and find new, clean sources of water. 

Removing PFAS from contaminated water is achievable, though expensive and technically challenging. What’s harder, if not impossible, is getting rid of the chemicals. The tough carbon-fluorine bonds found in PFAS—among the strongest known in chemistry—make them nearly indestructible.

Rebecca Aicher, project director at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues, describes PFAS destruction as “an important and emerging area of research that is crucial to addressing PFAS contamination throughout communities.”

“There is no silver bullet yet,” Aicher says. “We do not have a way that completely destroys PFAS at scale in soil, water or contaminated materials.”

When PFAS are removed from drinking water, they might be concentrated in granular activated carbon or resins that require disposal, risking their reintroduction into the environment, Aicher says. Another source of forever chemicals is landfill leachate, because many consumer goods containing PFAS end up in landfills. “Removing PFAS from drinking water doesn’t address PFAS as a contaminant and human health risk,” she says.

The Fort Stops PFAS says Clean Earth is painting an overly rosy view of what its facility is capable of. One concern is that the company’s plan will not fully destroy the chemicals. Another is the company’s claim that potential emissions of PFAS into the air will be “very low if not zero.”

Clean Earth’s pilot project would test for over 50 different kinds of PFAS in the soil. A third-party laboratory would test for two types of PFAS in the air—PFOA and PFOS—and any harmful byproducts that may form from the thermal treatment process, such as volatile fluorinated compounds. Clean Earth will also test the air for potential hazardous emissions. The company has said these “will be low.” Treated soil that meets New York’s “beneficial use” criteria is no longer considered a regulated waste and can be sold and reused. In the draft permit, the DEC says that treated soils from the PFAS project can only be reused under a case-specific beneficial use determination.

Yanna Liang, professor and chair in the Department of Environmental and Sustainable Engineering at the University at Albany, says destroying PFOA and PFOS requires very high temperatures, and that breaking their chemical bonds comes with risks. “Once you break the bonds, they can release smaller molecules,” Liang says. “The end product could be hydrofluoride or hydrofluoric acid. That is a toxic gas. So if that is emitted, it can cause air pollution.”

Liang says that there are over 10,000 different PFAS, and that for many of them, “we have no idea of their chemical structures.” Some PFAS, she says, “can be degraded or transformed to PFOA, PFOS.” 

In the expert opinion submitted by Earthjustice, Trabbic-Pointer wrote that “many PFAS can be converted to other PFAS at low temperatures,” which may not be included in Clean Earth’s testing and could result in their release into the environment.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s updated 2024 guidance on the disposal and destruction of PFAS focuses on three large-scale technologies: thermal destruction, landfills and underground injection. Thermal treatment offers the potential advantage of mineralizing PFAS (breaking their bonds) and preventing further release into the environment, according to the document. The guidance also notes that “uncertainties,” such as overestimating destruction and disposal capabilities or failing to account for the potential to produce harmful byproducts and subsequent transformation back to PFAS, could have consequences for “all nearby communities,” including vulnerable communities that “may be disproportionately impacted.”

In 2018 and 2019, Clean Earth conducted a small test to evaluate thermal desorption as a viable technology for removing PFAS from soils.

The company treated 22.6 tons of PFAS-contaminated soil with the DEC’s approval and claimed in a white paper that its thermal desorption approach successfully eliminated greater than 99% of PFOA and PFOS from the soil, while other PFAS compounds were removed to below detectable limits. However, a deeper read of the white paper suggests the results are more nuanced.

During an initial round of testing in December 2018, the PFAS total concentrations decreased by 93.7%. Then, in February 2019, Clean Earth treated the soil a second time, “to investigate whether complete removal of all PFAS compounds could be achieved.” After this second round of treatment, the company found that “any remaining PFAS concentrations had been reduced below the detectable concentrations for total mass concentration.”

At a public information meeting in late 2024, Clean Earth acknowledged that some residual PFAS contamination remained in the soil after the initial treatment in 2018, but it said those residual concentrations would still meet current DEC soil reuse criteria for residential fill.

For members of The Fort Stops PFAS, Clean Earth’s earlier PFAS test has only fueled worries about the company’s capabilities. 

“They treated the soil using what is going to be their proposed method, and the first time they treated it, they were not able to successfully remove the PFAS to their goal amount, and so they had to retreat it,” says Presley, who works in the medical technology field.

Presley’s home is less than a mile from Clean Earth; the Fort Edward Industrial Park borders her property. She and her husband purchased their home, nestled on five wooded acres, about 2.5 years ago, gutted it and fixed it up. “We put lots of effort, lots of investment into a place we loved to be our forever home, if it wasn’t under the cloud of potential contamination,” Presley says. If The Fort Stops PFAS fails in its effort to stop Clean Earth’s project, “we may move,” she says. “Which is a shame, after putting all that work in.”

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Sara Foss is a freelance journalist with experience writing for newspapers and other publications including the Adirondack Explorer and New York State School Boards Association. She lives in Albany with her husband, son and two cats and enjoys hiking, swimming and exploring the outdoors.