The Water-Wastewater Utility of the City of Marinette has brought down their PFAS numbers considerably since 2017 by source reduction. The reasoning behind this was to bring those numbers down to a level that Waste Management was comfortable with so that they could haul the city’s biosolids to a landfill in Manitowoc instead of by rail to Oregon. Warren Howard Water and Wastewater Utility Operations Manager says, “Waste Management didn’t have a set number. We started at 220 parts per billion if you remember back when the DNR had us haul it to Oregon, where Tyco had paid 3.5 million to get it to that facility.”

Howard says, “there’s been some misinformation out there about the cost. What initially happened was when we set up our budget, once we put in this process, we had estimated that with the price of inflation that it was going to go up around $20,000 more; but then, we had shipping costs, COVID, rail costs went up considerably, so we budgeted $170,000. Originally, we budgeted $100,000.”

The City of Marinette is the first community to move contaminated biosolids in the state of Wisconsin and according to the Waste Management Service Agreement, the anticipated volume that they will be transporting annually from the City of Marinette will be 720 tons.