Why Rhode Island is All Stopped Up

Illustration via IStock/Getty Images and Doreen Chisnell

Most of Rhode Island can flush and forget; Sue and Frank Mancieri are not so fortunate. For the last fifteen years, the stench of human waste has been a regular trespasser on their otherwise immaculate property.

“I babysat my grandson, and we’re outside playing. He says ‘Grammy, smells like poop out here.’ For a three-year-old to realize that it smells like poop — there’s a problem. My daughter would come pick him up and say ‘Mom, why are you living here?’” Sue says. “Because no one’s going to buy the house. We’re the stinky city.”

The Mancieris’ rustic Congress Street home is less than a mile up the hill and around the corner from the Woonsocket Thermal Conversion Facility on Cumberland Hill Road, hard by the banks of the Blackstone River. Every day, tankers and trailers from as many as thirty municipalities in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut deliver about 105 dry tons of liquid sludge and dried biosolids there, where it is incinerated into ash that is landfilled at the Central Landfill in Johnston.

Biosolids are the byproduct of the wastewater treatment process, says Joseph Haberek, the state Department of Environmental Management’s administrator of surface water protection and water quality.

“As sewage gets processed you end up with two products: clean water and the solid material that settles out, along with the aged bacteria that was used to break down the pollutants in the wastewater,” he says. “Rhode Island incinerates the vast majority of our biosolids.”

Woonsocket opened the sludge incineration plant in 1973 and operated it until the late 1980s, when the city entered into a long-term lease with Baltimore-based Synagro Technologies Inc., which proposed to design, build, finance and operate the incinerator as a regional biosolid processing plant. The air was fresh when the Mancieris built their home in 2003. But as the plant aged, the smell’s frequency and intensity grew, despite major upgrades to the facility in 2007 and 2016.

City Council President Daniel Gendron likens it to a “nagging sore back — you may complain about it all the time, but you learn to live with it,” he says. “Sometimes you forget it’s there until you move the wrong way and then it comes back. That’s what this whole odor problem was turning into.”

The incinerator shares the parcel with the city’s sewage treatment plant, operated by Jacobs Engineering. In addition to residential neighborhoods, Cass Park and the John R. Dionne Track and Field complex are neighbors, and when the eau de cesspool perfumed Friday night football games, the wastewater treatment plant and the sludge incinerator blamed each other. In July, two residents filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Synagro and Jacobs, alleging that the noxious smells have robbed them of the enjoyment of their properties and inflicted economic harm.

Odor was the most obvious problem but hardly the only problem. For the past few years, the combined operations have been in a downward spiral of equipment breakdowns, staffing shortages and intermittent discharges of partially treated sewage into the Blackstone, leading to temporary public health closures and permit violations. In March 2023, state Attorney General Peter Neronha sued Woonsocket, Jacobs and Synagro for allegedly breaking several state environmental laws and maintaining a public health nuisance. The litigation is pending.

Meanwhile, the repair and maintenance costs have spiraled in the opposite direction. The city is already carrying $29 million in debt to pay for upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant in 2024 and estimates it would cost another $40 to $50 million to make necessary infrastructure improvements to the incinerator.

“Jacobs and Synagro both told us that they are losing tons of money,” says Mayor Christopher Beauchamp. “When these deals were made twenty, thirty years ago, we got a host fee and other money, but that doesn’t cover what we go through. At one time, the powers that be thought it was a good idea — not so much now.”

In June 2024, Woonsocket announced its intention to phase out accepting liquid sludge at its incinerator. Last August, the City Council voted unanimously to seek an agreement with the Narragansett Bay Commission for the quasi-public agency to take over the incinerator and wastewater treatment plants. In November, the parties signed a memorandum of understanding, setting the terms of a negotiated transfer. Gendron says Woonsocket’s goal is to “permanently shutter the operation of the incinerator.”

That is an unlikely prospect. Even the NBC sends its sludge to Woonsocket for disposal. For the last few months, the commission has been scrutinizing the Woonsocket facilities’ finances, physical condition, staffing and operations; the first order of business would be to bring both facilities up to snuff — not shut down the incinerator, says NBC Deputy Director Jim McCaughey.

There are only three ways to dispose of wastewater sludge: bury it, burn it or turn it into compost.

In the last four years, the Central Landfill has accepted roughly 10,000 tons of dried biosolids — called sludge cake — annually. And the facility “could likely accept more of it but the amount that may be accepted on any given day is not fixed and is driven by many factors, including the consistency of the material itself, where within the landfill that day’s disposal site is located, the amount of other inbound wastes and weather conditions,” writes Jared Rhodes, director of policy and programs for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation. “As with any waste stream, accepting more of this material would decrease landfill life expectancy over time.” As currently permitted, the Central Landfill is expected to reach capacity in two decades.

Bristol is the only municipality in the state that renders its wastewater sludge into compost. It was the brainchild of Halsey Chase Herreshoff, who served as town administrator from 1986 to 1994 and brought back the idea from his travels in Europe. At the time, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also promoted the idea. A 1989 policy paper on proposed sludge regulations touted the practice as a way to improve the quality of the environment and protect human health.

But the discovery of high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in sludge-based compost have led to recent state bans on land application in Maine and Connecticut; Massachusetts and New York are considering similar prohibitions. PFAS are a class of synthetic chemicals with common carbon chains strongly bonded to fluorine. Since the 1940s, manufacturers have been using PFAS’ nonstick, stain-resistant and waterproof properties to produce everything from cosmetics to cookware to clothing. These toxic persistent chemicals are now in our soil, water, air and our bodies; they have been linked to liver damage, developmental delays, cancer and decreased fertility and immune function. In Maine, officials found that PFAS from old industrial discharges had contaminated the sludge, and in turn the compost, along with drinking water, milk and meat.

Bristol’s composting facility began operations in 1992. It currently turns seven to eight wet tons of sludge daily into twenty cubic yards of Grade A compost. In the past, the town earned a percentage of the sales made by third-party vendors who would pick up and market the product to agricultural customers. Last March, the town’s most recent vendor pulled out, and Bristol has been trying to get rid of its biosolid compost through direct sales.   

“A lot of people tell us — ‘Hey, this is a wonderful product,’” says Jose Da Silva, superintendent of the town’s Water Pollution Control facility. “Now we have this cloud hanging over us and it’s gaining momentum.”

That leaves incineration. The state’s two sludge incinerators in Woonsocket and Cranston process 90 percent of the biosolids produced at nineteen wastewater treatment plants in Rhode Island. Cranston’s facility, operated by Veolia Water, has a maximum daily capacity of sixty-two dry tons and processes sludge from seven Rhode Island communities, but mostly from customers in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, says Edward Tally, the city’s environmental program manager.

“We’re near or at a hundred percent capacity. So, if we had some Rhode Island customers that we needed to take on, that would mean we likely have to push out someone else in the region to make space.”

The state is actually in a better position than most, because it has the capacity to handle all of its biosolids, says Janine Burke-Wells, executive director of the North East Biosolids & Residuals Association, a nonprofit that promotes the environmentally sound and publicly supported recycling of biosolids and other organic residuals. But the system is fragile.

“They’re run by private contractors, so the state can’t really dictate commerce. When one incinerator here goes down, it’s chaos — we send our sludge out of state. The Woonsocket situation has been building for a while, and it is already impacting the whole region. States need to have plans before they take away options.”

Warwick is feeling the pinch, says BettyAnne Rogers, executive director of the Warwick Sewer Authority. The city was sending its liquid sludge to both Woonsocket and Cranston, but lost its contract with Synagro in the wake of the uncertainty in Woonsocket.

Cranston was able to accommodate them, but “if Cranston were to encounter problems tomorrow, where do we take it?” she asks. Warwick is currently exploring the possibility of reducing its sludge volume by adding dewatering equipment to the facility. In the meantime, “this has been an ongoing conversation with the regulatory agencies for over a decade at least. And it’s a huge concern for us because that process of solids removal is absolutely integral to us meeting our permit limits.”

The future of wastewater sludge disposal is currently under discussion among the DEM, the RIRRC and the Department of Statewide Planning as they write the state’s thirty-year solid waste management plan.

“It’s been a long process,” says the DEM’s Deputy Director of Environmental Protection Susan Forcier. “We’ve done an analysis to figure out what are the strengths and weaknesses and threats and vulnerabilities. And this definitely is a vulnerability.”

The plan, due to be released in June after public comment, may include recommendations for legislative action to prioritize processing Rhode Island-produced sludge over out-of-state customers, for example, Forcier says. But little had been decided by the late fall.

Richard Stang, a senior attorney in the Providence office of the Conservation Law Foundation, says the state needs to look holistically at reducing the waste stream.

“It’s going to be a multipronged effort: composting food waste, banning certain single-use plastics and PFAS in consumer goods. It all has to work together because there’s no great solution to any of this. You can’t make the waste just disappear. It converts to some other form. And the question is, what’s the other form and what do you do with it?”

When Woonsocket finally unburdens itself from processing wastewater and biosolids, the city will lose nearly a million dollars in annual host fees, discounted sludge incineration and free wastewater treatment. Should a deal with the NBC go through, Woonsocket residents will join the rest of its ratepayers.

“Those fees are going to go up, so it’s going to be a double whammy. But we have to pay it,” says Frank Mancieri, who over the years has reported odor complaints to the city at least a hundred times.

“It’s a quality-of-life issue. Every time I’ve called the hotline, I would talk about quality of life. Quality of life, quality of life — I’ve said it so many times.”

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Ellen Liberman is an award-winning journalist and columnist who has commented on politics and reported on government affairs for more than four decades.