|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
by Guy Page
Today on 2A Tuesday on Hot Off The Press on WDEV, Chris Bradley of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs updated us on his group’s challenge to state laws banning high capacity magazines and requiring a 72-hour waiting period, now before the Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Burlington Daily News editor Kolby LaMarche reported on developers’ $224 million plans to renovate the venerable Memorial Auditorium and surrounding block. We reminisced about concerts, shows and Golden Gloves tournaments there Back In the Day (Kolby’s dad was a Golden Gloves champion) and reviewed the ambitious plan, which has a $33 million funding gap.
I also opined about today’s Compass Vermont story titled, Ben & Jerry’s #1 in industrial wastewater violations.
Here’s a question worth asking out loud: when does “partnership” become a substitute for enforcement?
Because this week, the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation quietly released a federally required report that tells a very different story than the upbeat language in its press release.
Seventeen industrial facilities in Vermont were in what the EPA calls “significant non-compliance” with wastewater permits during 2024. Not paperwork hiccups. Not one-off mistakes. Significant non-compliance means chronic or serious violations, measured by hard numbers.
And topping the list was Ben & Jerry’s.
The Waterbury ice cream plant racked up 130 violations of its wastewater permit last year, along with seven missing monthly monitoring reports. That’s followed by New England Precision in Randolph with 68 violations, St. Albans Creamery with 23, and Agri-Mark — the company behind Cabot cheese — with 14 violations in Middlebury.
These aren’t obscure operators. These are some of Vermont’s best-known brands.
Now, to be clear, these facilities don’t pipe waste directly into rivers or Lake Champlain. They send it to municipal wastewater plants — the same plants handling your household sewage. That’s why pretreatment permits exist: to keep industrial waste from overwhelming those systems or passing pollutants straight through into our waterways.
When a company ends up in “significant non-compliance,” it means they crossed federal thresholds — exceeding limits most of the time, missing required reports, or discharging pollutants that pose real environmental risk.
Ice cream and dairy processing are especially tough on wastewater systems. The organic load in ice cream waste can be ten to twenty-five times stronger than household sewage. Raw milk is worse — hundreds of times stronger. Ben & Jerry’s has its own biodigester to handle that waste, but 130 violations suggest that system struggled for most of the year.
St. Albans Creamery’s violations matter even more. This is a facility with a history of dumping raw milk into the sewer system, in the St. Albans Bay watershed — one of the most phosphorus-polluted areas of Lake Champlain, already plagued by toxic algae blooms.
Listen to every Hot Off the Press podcast on the WDEV podcast page or right here on the Vermont Daily Chronicle podcast page.
Click to hear the latest episodes:
Hot Off The Press – December 15th, 2025
Dave Soulia of FYIVT.com talks about legacy media and jingoist Jingle Bells.
Hot Off The Press – December 12th, 2025
Feedback Friday- we talk about AI and U.S. war on drugs in Venezuela.
Hot Off The Press -December 11th, 2025
Hank Poytras of Planet Hank discusses a multiple sex offender arrested naked in his mother’s car in a public parking lot – and then released on citation.
Hot Off The Press – December 10th, 2025
Bail reform options – and the lack of them – with guest Vince Illuzzi, Essex County state’s attorney and former state senator.
Hot Off The Press – December 9th, 2025
– Burlington Daily News Editor Kolbyl LaMarche on Burlington’s downtown woes, and FYIVT.com editor Dave Soulia on the housing shortage and the push in Montpelier to take away wood stoves.
Hot Off The Press – December 8th, 2025
Callers and host catch up on the hot news from the weekend – particularly the portent of a small school district voting overwhelmingly to keep their high school open.
Hot Off The Press – December 1st, 2025 – December 1 is Return to Work Day for state employees, and due date for Property Tax Letter. Callers and host Guy Page discuss.
HOT OFF THE PRESS – NOVEMBER 28TH, 2025. Feedback Friday!
Hot Off The Press – November 26th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 25th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 24th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 21st, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 20th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 19th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 18th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 17th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 14th, 2025
Hot Off The Press – November 13th, 2025
Share this:
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: Hot Off The Press
No one paid me for my time and expense to retune back to the gun dealers after seventy two hours. Send the GOVIE a bill, seeing he did not stop this unconstitutional law.
Fed up with having to spend time and money in the courts fighting these cave monkeys.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Let’s keep up the good fight. SOS (save our state)
Can someone come up with some scary figures about how many tons of CO2 have been added to the atmosphere from the second trips to the gun shop?
Criminals don’t wait to get their guns, they just steal them.
But now they have to wait at least 72 hours from the time of purchase to steal them…