by Guy Page
Today is 2A Tuesday on Hot Off The Press on WDEV, we will talk about what Vermont gun rights advocates are doing to protect your Second Amendment rights from the, as they are colloquially known, the Gun Grabbers. Chris Bradley of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs will join us in the second of today’s show. I’m sure Sen. Peter Welch’s reflexive call for more gun control, which you can read about in today’s Vermont Daily Chronicle, will come up as will a challenge now in the courts.
Listen at 11:05 AM today on WDEV AM 550, FM 96.1, and on wdevradio.com. Call in at 802-244-1777. You can also email your comment or question to news@vermontdailychronicle.com.
We’ll also talk with Burlington Daily News editor Kolby LaMarche about something happening in Burlington that the rest of the state may find interesting – plans to renovate the venerable Memorial Auditorium. I’m sure our audience has memories of seeing concerts, shows, sporting events there, please feel free to call in and share and comment.
But before then I invite you to read today’s Compass Vermont story titled, Ben & Jerry’s #1 in industrial wastewater violations.
My monologue today is based directly on that excellent piece of reporting by Compass Vermont.
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.
Tune in and call in at 11:05!
Listen to every Hot Off the Press podcast on the WDEV podcast page or right here on the Vermont Daily Chronicle podcast page.
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