On a warm July morning, Joe Suleyman — dressed in a neon vest, short sleeves and blue jeans — stood on a grassy hill in New Hanover County. White clouds drifted across a bright blue sky above a lush landscape. With water and forest in the distance, the pastoral scene could have been a county park or a quiet stretch of farmland.
But it wasn’t. Beneath the grass-covered mound lay decades of buried garbage. Suleyman was standing on a capped section of the New Hanover County Landfill, west of the city and tucked between two branches of the Cape Fear River. This mound was once an open cell where trash was dumped for years before it reached capacity and was covered and sealed.
Suleyman, director of the New Hanover County Recycling and Solid Waste Department, has overseen the landfill for more than a decade. Under his leadership, the site blends technology with environmentally focused practices to manage about 400,000 tons of waste a year from more than 240,000 residents. The goal, he said, is to protect public health and the environment.
“Underneath this landfill hill [...] there’s a three-layer liner system,” Suleyman said. “Between each layer is a detection zone where we actually look between liners to see if the primary liner has failed and is leaking into the secondary liner.
”We can check that on a routine basis.”
Still, even a well-run landfill faces challenges that go far beyond the daily task of compacting and covering waste. One is how to reduce emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Another is managing the liquid that trickles through layers of trash — a potentially toxic mix known as leachate. This murky runoff can carry a cocktail of pollutants, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that don’t easily break down in the environment. Found in a multitude of products and packaging that often end up in landfills — such as food wrappers, electronics, nonstick cookware, cosmetics, and stain-resistant carpets and upholstery — PFAS are now widespread in waste streams.
Scientists have linked PFAS exposure to serious health risks, including low birth weight, elevated cholesterol, thyroid disease, immune suppression, and kidney and testicular cancers. In North Carolina and around the world, managing PFAS in landfill leachate has become a major challenge for municipal wastewater treatment facilities.
An emerging problem
A recent report by the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international clean-water advocacy group, details a 19-state survey of waterways downstream of wastewater treatment plants and biosolid application fields, with a focus on disproportionately affected communities, according to a news release about the report.
Riverkeepers tested water near wastewater plants and biosolid fields and found PFAS in 98 percent of the waterways. Levels were especially high downstream, detected at 95 percent of sites below wastewater plants and at 80 percent of downstream biosolid application fields, the report states.
Haw Riverkeeper Emily Sutton, a contributor to the report, said the results raise serious concerns for an Alamance County community.
“We’re concerned about the pre-regulatory landfill in Swepsonville that is owned by Alamance County and has significantly contaminated drinking water,” Sutton said. “There’s also a sludge field owned by the city of Graham, directly across the street from this landfill. We’ve been working to isolate which source of contamination is the more significant contributor. We have community members on wells whose drinking water has tested at over 3,500 parts per trillion for total PFAS.”
In contrast, the EPA set maximum contaminant levels for six PFAS — 4 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, and 10 parts per trillion for PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS, PFNA and HFPO-DA (GenX).
Pre-regulatory landfills are old waste sites in North Carolina that closed before Jan. 1, 1983, when modern landfill rules took effect. Built without liners or other protections, they often contaminated soil and groundwater and are still costly problems for local governments.
North Carolina has 668 pre-regulatory land fields spread across the state, a spokesperson for NC DEQ’s Department of Waste Management confirmed in an email.
The problem extends well beyond North Carolina. Waterkeeper Alliance CEO Marc Yaggi called PFAS contamination a national crisis: “Our latest sampling confirms that it’s widespread and persistent, threatening waterways and public health across the country.”
A study released in September by Chinese researchers on PFAS in landfill leachate from municipal solid waste facilities in Shanghai suggests the problem is global. The researchers found that many treatment processes struggle to remove short-chain PFAS from leachate and groundwater, and it identified reverse osmosis as the most effective method.
A layer of protection
Modern landfills are built in sections called cells, each lined with protective barriers designed to capture leachate before it seeps into soil and groundwater.
“[The] liner system is made out of high-density polyethylene," Suleyman said. “It’s the same material that milk jugs are made out of. Much thicker, though. It’s 60 mils thick.” Suleyman said a liner is equal to the thickness of 120 trash bags layered together.
At the New Hanover County Landfill, each cell has two liners at the bottom. Beneath them is a synthetic clay matting system that serves as a final line of defense. It swells when it comes into contact with water to plug any holes in the liner above it, Suleyman said.
Each cell also includes “inspection zones” — a series of pipes that stick out of the ground. Cameras are periodically lowered into the pipes to check whether the liners are intact or punctured and allowing liquid to escape, he said.
The landfill’s open side has nine 15-acre cells; two have been filled and a third is nearly full. Once the cost of engineering and design is added to construction, each cell costs about $1 million, Suleyman said. This amount does not include the cost of the reverse osmosis system used to remove PFAS from landfill leachate that is captured from the cells.
‘A closed-loop system'
“If you imagine: A landfill liner system is a big bathtub, and it’s filling up with this dirty water. Instead of a plug or a drain, it goes into a pump system, and then from there, we pump it to our treatment system,” he said.
Once in the lagoon, a curtain system slows the flow of leachate and helps solids settle, Suleyman said. Beneficial bacteria then break down some of the waste during the aeration process. The liquid next passes through an ultrafiltration system, where more biosolids are removed, he said. Finally, it moves through reverse osmosis filters, leaving clear, purified water that is stored in a tank.
“It’s a closed-loop system,” Suleyman said. “Whatever comes here, stays here. Even the clean water stays on site — we use it to irrigate.”
Before the reverse osmosis system was installed, PFAS levels in the leachate once measured 30,000 parts per trillion, Suleyman said. Since then, the filtration system has consistently removed the chemicals.
A costly enterprise
During leachate purification, the system can process up to 75,000 gallons per day, Suleyman said. But that reverse osmosis is power-hungry.
“The power bill alone, for the reverse osmosis, is about $14,000 to $16,000 a month — just the power bill,” Suleyman said. “We also spend tens of thousands of dollars replacing the filters.” Other expenses include replacing pumps and leaky valves as needed, he said.
When factoring in the cost of constructing each cell along with leachate treatment, Suleyman said landfill customers are getting a good return on what they pay to discard waste.
“There’s a lot that goes into running a landfill, and it’s very expensive,” he said. “To be able to offer the community the opportunity to dump off, say, 200 pounds of their garbage for $5.20 — that’s one of the biggest bargains in town.”
The New Hanover County Landfill has the resources to install and maintain technology that prevents PFAS-laden leachate from escaping into groundwater and treats hazardous material in the water. Unlike some communities, area residents also benefit from a separate municipal water treatment facility operated by the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority. It uses a granular activated carbon system to reduce PFAS in the drinking water supply.
But in places like Swepsonville, where a pre-regulatory landfill and a sludge field site is nearby, residents have a harder time dealing with wells contaminated with PFAS.
“Some counties are very wealthy, like New Hanover, and others aren’t,” Suleyman said. “They’re going to be faced with a tough decision — the same kind of decision that came when the federal government required landfills to have liner systems.”
“A million dollars an acre — a lot of counties can’t afford that, so they just shut down operations,” he said. “There’s been a shift to more regional landfills, like Sampson County, and they’re a for-profit business, so they’re accepting waste from across the state and even out of state. We don’t know what’s in that waste.”
Suleyman added that people who blame landfills for PFAS contamination have it wrong.
“It’s not like landfills make PFAS,” he said. “The PFAS comes in with your trash.”
Taking responsibility
Environmental groups are pressuring state lawmakers to hold PFAS manufacturers accountable for the costs of cleanup, including the contamination of waterways such as the Cape Fear River. Instead, though, the burden of treating PFAS in drinking water has fallen on municipal utilities like Wilmington’s Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which has spent tens of millions of dollars installing and maintaining a granular activated carbon filtration system to strain PFAS out of drinking water.
Those costs have been passed on to ratepayers.
Lawmakers have also introduced so-called “polluter pays” bills, including House Bill 569. The measure would require polluters to reimburse public water systems for the cost of cleaning up PFAS contamination.
HB 569 passed the North Carolina House of Representatives by a wide margin but has seen no action in the Senate since early May 2025.
Another potential remedy is the court system. Numerous lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the state, utilities and communities seeking compensation from manufacturers that have discharged — and continue to dump — PFAS and other hazardous chemicals, such as 1,4-dioxane, into waterways. Advocates also point to waste-reduction efforts like recycling and food-waste collection as ways to cut the trash going into landfills — and, in turn, the leachate that carries PFAS into the environment.
While the debate over accountability and cleanup continues, Suleyman envisions a future where the landfill itself becomes part of the community’s landscape in a very different way.
“My vision is to have areas planted with trees — heavily forested, with trails winding through them,” he said. “We’ve got several lakes out here that we’ve stocked with fish, so you’ll be able to bring your kids out here.”
How this story came together:
My reporting began after I read the Waterkeeper Alliance report describing how wastewater treatment facilities struggle to keep PFAS-contaminated leachate out of nearby waterways. That led me to a North Carolina riverkeeper who contributed to the study and had written about residents living near a pre-regulatory landfill with PFAS-contaminated wells. I had also heard positive things about the New Hanover County Landfill’s environmental initiatives, so I contacted its director to tour the site and learn how they manage waste.
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
