Two N.C. cities pick contrasting strategies when pressed to reduce environmental harm.
Burlington and Asheboro are less than 50 miles apart. But when it comes to addressing the pollution each has caused in the downstream drinking water on their respective rivers, the Haw and Deep rivers, the two cities couldn’t be more different.
One worked through embarrassment and denial to try to fix the problem, contributing to groundbreaking science. The other is fighting tooth-and-nail in court against environmental groups.
What happens in each city and its rivers will help determine the future of drinking water quality along the Cape Fear watershed.
Asheboro, like many N.C. municipalities, has contracts with nearby landfills and industrial factories, such as the plastics manufacturer StarPet. The companies pay the city to treat the wastewater from their facilities.
The city treats the water, but some of the chemical pollutants cannot be removed with traditional treatment. One example is 1,4-dioxane, an odorless, colorless industrial solvent generated in the production of plastics, laundry detergent, antifreeze and shampoo. The chemical is likely to cause cancer in humans, according to the EPA.
Asheboro regularly dumps 1,4-dioxane into the Deep River, which flows through Randolph, Chatham and Lee counties before joining with the Haw River, where the two smaller rivers converge to form the Cape Fear River, a source of drinking water for 1.5 million North Carolinians. In November, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality notified residents of a discharge of 1,4-dioxane from Asheboro at a concentration nearly 30 times what is considered safe.
Downstream water treatment plants, including the Wilmington-based Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, have no ability to remove the chemical from the rivers. Doing so would require a massive investment into new technology on the downstream ratepayers’ dime.
There are no discharge limits on 1,4-dioxane. Asheboro can keep disposing of as much as they want. That was decided last year by former N.C. administrative law judge Donald van der Vaart, when Asheboro, Greensboro and Reidsville argued in court for their right to continue dumping the chemical. Van der Vaart struck limits from the cities’ permits.
The Southern Environmental Law Center sued the city of Asheboro under the Clean Water Act, and now, the EPA is involved. The center believes that Asheboro has a legal mandate to stop discharging chemicals into drinking water. The EPA conducted a public hearing about the city’s pollution in October.
“Asheboro’s pollution is against the law,” says Jean Zhuang, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “They are benefiting financially from taking on this pollution. That would be fine if they were adequately using their authority to make sure that that pollution wasn’t going to be harming people downstream.”
The EPA has offered no timeline for its decision on whether to take over the permit and put limits on Asheboro’s 1,4-dioxane discharges into the river. At the EPA public hearing in October, the Asheboro city attorney spoke in support of the city’s right to continue dumping. He was the only person at the event to do so.
“The city of Asheboro has an active permit and is in compliance,” City Manager Donald Duncan says. “There are no established, legal limits on 1,4-dioxane.”
Asheboro’s defensive response isn’t the only avenue available for N.C. cities accused of putting the public health of residents in other parts of the state at risk. Burlington shows that another reality is possible.
DROPPING THE DEFENSES
Like Asheboro, Burlington makes money processing the industrial wastewater. In Burlington, it’s primarily textile mills rather than plastics manufacturing.
When state regulators began requiring sampling for PFAS in 2019, Burlington found extremely elevated levels downstream of their wastewater treatment plants. PFAS, commonly referred to as “forever chemicals,” are a group of manmade chemicals linked to adverse effects on human health. Burlington discharges its wastewater into the Haw River.
Just a few months after these first tests, Burlington received a notice of intent to sue from the Southern Environmental Law Center.
“When we got the notice of intent to sue, we were defensive,” Burlington City Manager Bob Patterson says. “We weren’t doing anything wrong. We were following our permits. We weren’t intentionally discharging PFAS. It felt like we were being attacked.”
Rather than litigate like Asheboro, Burlington decided to cooperate.
The city worked with an engineering consultant and researchers at Duke University to identify the sources of the chemicals: Elevate Textiles and Shawmut, two major textile mills that use PFAS to treat their fabric, and two nearby landfills. They also discovered that a process the city was using called Zimpro, which uses heat and pressure to treat wastewater, was unwittingly converting PFAS precursors into more dangerous forms of the chemical.
Wielding the Clean Water Act, the city worked with the two textile mills on minimization plans to reduce the amount of discharged PFAS. Ultimately, each mill transitioned to PFAS-free chemistry in early 2024.
DO SOMETHING ABOUT POLLUTION
Last year, Duke University published the results of its scientific work in Burlington. The analysis could help other municipalities identify the sources of PFAS in their wastewater, especially the stealthy precursor compounds.
“What Burlington did here just shows how powerful these municipalities are and how much authority they have to control the pollution coming from their industries,” Zhuang says. “Burlington recognized the potential impact of that pollution on communities downstream, and they were willing to work with us and Duke University to identify that source and get their industry to do something about that pollution.
“Asheboro absolutely should follow suit, and require StarPet to adequately control their 1,4-dioxane pollution because they have full authority and ability to do so.”
The situation in Burlington is not perfect. The city is still discharging some PFAS from its wastewater treatment plants, meaning it ends up in the rivers. The landfills have not figured out a way to minimize or treat PFAS on site. It’s a problem plaguing landfills across the country.
Burlington also found elevated levels of 1,4-dioxane in its wastewater.
Using the methodology from the PFAS study, the city was able to identify Apollo Chemical as the culprit. The city worked with the company to create a plan to capture as much of the chemical on-site as possible, and send it elsewhere for treatment. Apollo no longer discharges the chemical to Burlington.
“Not only are other wastewater plants in other places using our PFAS study, but we ourselves are actually using it as a guideline,” Patterson says.
Burlington is going a step further to combat PFAS pollution. Cary-based Invicta Water has developed a patented technology to destroy PFAS, rather than just filtering them out. Over this winter and spring, Burlington is volunteering to be a proving ground for Invicta.
Burlington and Asheboro face similar challenges. One chose cooperation, the other chose court. For the millions of North Carolinians who drink from rivers downstream from their treated water, the difference matters. ■
— Jane Winik Sartwell is a writer for Carolina Public Press, an independent, in-depth and investigative nonprofit news service for North Carolina. This story was previously published at www.carolinapublicpress.org
