Once the nation’s most notorious landfill, it’s finally off the Superfund list

Lipari Landfill in Gloucester County was once so notorious for the “witches brew” of toxins leaking from it that then-U.S. Congressman Jim Florio, who wrote the Superfund legislation in 1980, made its cleanup a personal mission.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed Lipari on its new Superfund list in 1982, and named it the most dangerous dump in the nation. That was one week after Dennis Bonner, now 67, and his wife moved into a home in Pitman across from Alcyon Lake, which became so polluted by the landfill that it had to be closed.

“Love Canal had just happened in the late ’70s, and the whole town had to be abandoned,” Bonner said. “So we had just moved into town and thought, ‘Will they have to close it down too?’”

While the communities around Lipari did remain open, the landfill became emblematic of all that was wrong with the unregulated, unlined dumps scattered around the Philly region and U.S., where haulers routinely disposed of industrial waste on top of residential waste.

After more than 40 years of cleanup and monitoring — and $300 million — Lipari is no longer a threat, EPA officials say. This month, they announced its removal from the Superfund list. Alcyon Lake has been cleaned and is surrounded by a park, ball fields, and trails. On a recent day, some people at the park said they had never even heard of Lipari.

“It’s a huge success story,” said Bonner, who still lives in the neatly kept house along the lake.

The entire Lipari site, named after former owner Nicholas Lipari, spans 16 acres in Mantua Township, near the Pitman border. Vast quantities of hazardous chemicals and industrial waste had been dumped at the six-acre landfill from 1958 to 1971 when Lipari was finally closed under order of the state Department of Environmental Protection, which also assisted in cleanup.

At Lipari, household waste, liquid and semisolid chemical waste, and other industrial waste were dumped in open trenches dug for sand and gravel mining on former peach orchards. In all, 3 million gallons of liquid waste and 12,000 cubic yards of solid waste were disposed of at Lipari. That included solvents, paints, thinners, formaldehyde, dust collector residues, and resins.

The nasty cocktail of pollutants were trucked in from the Philly region from Rohm & Haas Co. and other industrial and chemical companies. Contaminants oozed from the landfill, migrating out and threatening drinking water for 20,000 people. The compounds contaminated Alcyon Lake.

Lipari experienced at least one explosion and two fires before it was closed. Toxins seeped into aquifers and leached into nearby marshlands. The leachate was carried to Alcyon Lake via Chestnut Branch, a tributary of the Delaware River, but never contaminated drinking water.

After the landfill was shuttered, a fence was erected to keep people away. People were prohibited from boating, fishing, or swimming at the lake.

Lipari was cleaned under Superfund, which emerged from a 1980 federal law that created the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA). The law gave government authority over waste sites, which were prioritized for cleanup. Removal from CERCLA’s National Priorities List signifies that the site no longer poses a significant risk to human health or the environment.

Over the decades, the EPA built a system at Lipari to contain contaminants, treat groundwater, and remove harmful vapors emanating from soil. It installed and sampled 16 monitoring wells to determine how contamination was moving. The wells flushed contaminants and pumped leachate and groundwater for treatment. The EPA capped the landfill with a synthetic membrane to keep pollutants from migrating from the landfill and build a slurry wall. Crews cleaned up groundwater, soil, and sediment outside the property.

They dredged Alcyon Lake and removed contaminants, reopening it in 1995.

The EPA continues to capture and treat contaminated groundwater from beneath the landfill. It also monitors the area.

EPA reached a settlement with Nicholas Lipari, and other responsible parties, and recovered about $100 million toward the cost of cleanup and remediation. Florio, also a former governor of New Jersey, said on the 25th anniversary of Superfund that Lipari’s cleanup had been a personal mission. He died in 2022.

There are currently 1,340 Superfund sites in the U.S., with 114 of them in New Jersey, including the Helen Kramer Landfill, also in Mantua. Pennsylvania has 91 Superfund locations.

Rick Kessler, an EPA senior adviser, and John Prince, deputy director of the EPA’s Region 2 superfund division, both spent decades working on Lipari’s cleanup. They said the leaking Lipari was particularly dangerous because of its proximity to residential neighborhoods.

Kessler once worked for former Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who hosted hearings on Lipari in Washington. So when Kessler saw that Lipari was being removed from the Superfund list, he realized it as a “big deal.” He helped organize a public event Oct. 1. at Betty Park next to Alcyon Lake in Pitman to commemorate that removal.

Prince said Lipari contained a “witches brew” of dichloroethane, benzene, methane, toluene, phenol, and other compounds. The EPA had to learn how to conduct such a large remediation on the fly and manage it “into perpetuity.” He said lessons learned from Lipari helped guide future EPA cleanups.

“It is much more complicated than it may seem to undo the poor engineering of just dumping waste in pits,” Prince said. He noted that the EPA had to learn how to contain landfill leachate, collect it, and monitor it. It also had to clean up the local waterways, including Alcyon, and treat the water.

Pitman Mayor Michael Razze Jr. calls removal of Lipari from the Superfund list a “momentous occasion.”

As a youth in the early 1980s, he attended rallies to have the lake cleaned, crediting former Pitman resident Doug Stuart for his advocacy. Razze recalls kids playing on the landfill in the 1970s and swimming in the lake. Ducks paddling in the lake were missing their feathers. The lake turned colors.

Alcyon is about one-quarter mile from Lipari and connected to it by Chestnut Branch, a small waterway.

“I do think there is a symbolic victory,” Razze said. “It’s the end of a long process started by a group of concerned Pitman residents speaking up and speaking out. It brought us into a national spotlight, not in a positive way.”

Razze said that notoriety has passed.

The lake has been clean of Lipari’s pollutants since the 1990s and the area around it redeveloped. But Lipari still remains in the minds of many as a powerful reminder of what pollution can do, Razze said — and what the perseverance of community members, state and local officials can do to have it cleaned up. Razze said the town, however, still has to remain “vigilant.”