RALEIGH, North Carolina, July 07, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Waterkeeper Alliance and Waterkeepers Carolina are severely disappointed with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) over their recently adopted general permit requirements for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) to install biogas digesters. The NCDEQ strategically released the updated permit over the July 4th holiday weekend. As the advocates representing over 30,000 North Carolinians, as well as the greater interests of all impacted communities, we are evaluating next steps in our continued battle for more stringent requirements for facilities with farm digester systems, including robust water quality monitoring and compliance to ensure clean water for all North Carolinians.
Media Statement:
“This permit is woefully inadequate and fails to assure compliance with water quality protections as required under North Carolina law. It’s a perfect storm of opportunistic greenwashing, climate change profiteering, and regulatory truancy designed to invent a new dirty energy sector. These CAFOs biogas projects do nothing to reduce hog waste cesspools and will likely make water quality impacts even worse for communities downstream. There are cleaner, safer options, but greedy corporations don’t want to pay for them. North Carolinians will continue to absorb the full cost, while industry takes all the profit. We will not stop until NCDEQ does its job by putting the interest of the people over corporate pressure.”
- Kemp Burdette, Cape Fear Riverkeeper and Larry Baldwin, Campaign Coordinator, Waterkeeper Alliance
Background:
The biogas permit falls woefully short on public health and environmental protections, and effectively locks in the failed lagoon and sprayfield system for another generation. The permit offers inadequate procedures and rules to monitor these new technologies and processes. It does not take into account pipelines or cumulative impacts, which leaves communities and their waterways needlessly vulnerable to pollution. It also fails to require any of the waste management technology improvements the industry agreed to install over 20 years ago.
CAFOs have caused great damage to North Carolina’s communities and waterways for decades. Millions of gallons of untreated animal waste is stored in open cesspools, and runs off directly into watersheds, threatening drinking water sources and causing algal blooms, fish kills, red tides, pathogen exposure, and other dangerous conditions. Employed by the multinational corporate animal agriculture industry to reap the most profit with minimal regulatory oversight, this toxic practice wreaks immeasurable havoc on U.S. waterways, human health, and property values. Adding a digester system to these facilities constitutes an entirely new process and should therefore require new performance standards from the state.
Swine factory farms have disproportionately impacted low wealth communities and communities of color throughout eastern North Carolina. Advocates note that new directed biogas operations are a false solution that avoids addressing the real problem of replacing antiquated lagoon and sprayfield systems with cleaner, sustainable technologies. Directed biogas presents a significant change to CAFO operations, specifically how the waste is handled. New digester lagoons (or cesspools) are constructed and covered to capture the energy potential, resulting in a larger amount of methane, which can escape into the ecosystem. According to one recent study by Imperial College London, methane emissions along the biogas supply chain, which can run through watersheds and residential properties, are common and could be twice as large as previously estimated.
To ensure that directed CAFOs-generated biogas is the new revolutionary process it is purported to be, NCDEQ must require and enforce new performance standards. CAFOs offer multiple pathways of pollution and covering a lagoon only increases risks of groundwater contamination. At a minimum, North Carolina must impose surface water monitoring around these farms.
About Waterkeeper Alliance
Waterkeeper® Alliance is a global movement uniting nearly 350 community-based Waterkeeper Organizations and Affiliates around the world, focusing citizen action on issues that affect our waterways, from pollution to climate change. The Waterkeeper movement patrols and protects over 2.75 million square miles of rivers, lakes, and coastlines in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. For more information, visit waterkeeper.org.
