To the Editor:
Your July 8 article accepts the city’s central excuse at face value: that Bellingham must keep burning sewage until some future technology can destroy PFAS. That premise deserved scrutiny, not an echo.
Gasification is not the answer. It is still thermal treatment — burning enormous energy to cook the water out of wet sludge — incineration’s expensive cousin. Its nearest real-world test, Edmonds, has been a six-year failure of cost overruns, clogging, smoke and a system the vendor still cannot run. With no proven PFAS-destruction technology in sight, “waiting” means years more burning — and years more PFAS and pollution sent into our air and Bellingham Bay.
Here is the story the article missed. Burning disperses these pollutants; landfilling contains them. The city’s own public works staff already know there is a cheap, clean, EPA-endorsed interim path: landfill the sludge now, safely contained, until genuine PFAS technology exists. They learned it at a national convention — yet never put it before the council in an honest, line-by-line cost comparison. Decision-makers are choosing with the cheapest, cleanest, safest option hidden from them.
None of this will stay a matter of opinion. The city’s Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act violations will be tested in court soon — and I have already defeated the city’s motion to dismiss my challenge in Whatcom County Superior Court.
The city’s plan is an illusion of caution built on inertia, and your article gave it cover. The real question is not “when will the technology arrive.” It is why public works refuses to show decision-makers the alternatives that protect our money, our air and our water.
—Larry McCarter, Bellingham; July 8, 2026