“PIERSON, MI – Nick Schultz bought his property on Pierson Road two years ago so he could grow his own crops and raise animals for meat to try and avoid chemicals from store-bought products.
Now, he thinks his 6-month-old son’s low birth weight and other health issues could be due to fluorochemicals in the groundwater under his land.
‘We’re just kind of wondering if maybe some of his issues are linked to some of these problems with the water,’ he said.
Schultz was one of several hundred people who packed the Pierson Village Hall on Thursday, April 26, for a meeting on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance, or PFAS, pollution in the groundwater at the Central Sanitary Landfill, a decades-old dump owned by Republic Services in southern Montcalm County.
Rockford-based footwear company Wolverine World Wide disposed of PFAS-laden tannery waste for years at the landfill.
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality geologist Kent Walters said February testing found PFAS at levels well above the Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water health advisory level of 70 parts per trillion (ppt) for two PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA, in landfill monitoring wells.
The results came in April 13.
Test results show the highest concentration of total PFAS on the west side of the landfill, in a shallow monitoring well next to U.S. 131, where total PFAS was found at 1,062-ppt.
On the east side of the landfill along Amy School Road, shallow monitoring wells found total PFAS between 60 and 735-ppt.
Of the dozen wells tested, only one, on the north end of the landfill, did not detect any PFAS. Five of the wells had detections of PFOS and PFOA above the EPA health advisory level and the state’s groundwater cleanup standard for the two individual PFAS compounds.”
Read the full article by Bryce Airgood