Known for its lush vineyards and prized local wineries, Napa Valley is where people go to escape their troubles.
“When you first get there, it’s really beautiful,” said Jeff Ellsworth, former mayor of St. Helena, a small Napa community nestled 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. “It mesmerizes people.”
What more than 3 million tourists per year what I’m not seeing, however, is that California’s wine country has a brewing problem—one that’s spurred multiple ongoing government investigations and created deep divisions. Some residents and business owners fear it poses a risk to the region’s reputation and environment.
At the heart of the fear is the decades-old Clover Flat Landfill (CFL), perched on the northern edge of the valley atop a rocky mountain range. Two streams flow adjacent to the landfill as tributaries of the Napa River.
A growing body of evidence, including regulatory inspection reports and emails between regulators and CFL owners, suggests that the landfill and its associated garbage collection business have routinely polluted these local waterways, which flow into the Napa River, with an array of hazardous toxins.
The river irrigates the valley’s beloved vineyards and is used for recreational kayaking by more than 10,000 people a year. The prospect that water and wine flowing from the region could be at risk of being contaminated with dangerous chemicals and heavy metals has driven a wedge between those who speak openly about concerns and others who want the problem to stay out of the spotlight , according to Ellsworth, a former CFL official.
“Napa Valley is among the highest value farmland in the country,” he said. “If there’s a pollution problem, the economic ripples are significant.”
Employee complaints
Both the landfill and Upper Valley Disposal Services (UVDS) were owned for decades by the wealthy and politically well-connected Pestoni family, whose vineyards were planted for the first time in the Napa Valley area in 1892. Pestoni Family Estate Winery still sells bottles and an assortment of wines, including an engraved cabernet sauvignon magnum for $400 a bottle.
The family sold the landfill and disposal services unit last year amid multiple complaints, turning the business over to Waste Connections, a large national waste management company based in Texas.
Before the sale, Cristina Pestoni, who also used the surname Abreu Pestoni, who was COO for UVDS and CFL, it said in a statement that the company’s operations meet the “highest environmental standards” and are in full legal and regulatory compliance. Pestoni is currently director of government affairs at Waste Connections.
In her statement, she accused Ellsworth and “several individuals” of spreading “false information” about CFLs and UVDS.
But workers at the facilities said the concerns were well-founded. In December last year, a group of 23 former and current CFL and UVDS employees filed a formal complaint to federal and state agencies, including the US Department of Justice, alleging “apparently negligent practices in the management of these toxic and hazardous materials at UVDS/CFLs for decades.”
Officials cited “inadequate and compromised infrastructure and equipment” that they said “affects employees as well as the environment and community.”
Among the concerns was the handling of “leachate,” a liquid formed when water filters through the waste as it breaks down, leaching chemicals and heavy metals such as nitrates, chromium, arsenic, iron and zinc.
In the complaint, officials also cited the use of so-called “ghost pipes,” describing unmarked and unquantified underground pipes that they say were used to divert leachate and “compromised” stormwater into public waterways instead of being retained for “proper treatment” “.
Several fires have broken out at the landfill in the past decade and are a concern are also raised regarding the handling of radioactive materials in the facility.
Even the “organic compost” that the UVDS facility generates and provides to local farmers and gardeners is likely tainted, according to the officials’ complaint, which cites “widespread contamination” of the compost.
“These industrial sites affect the environment and the residents of Napa Valley,” former UVDS employee Jose Garibey Jr. wrote in email from 2023 to Napa County officials. “Also, the biggest earners for the wine country could be significantly affected; the wine industry, tasting rooms, wineries, hotels, resorts, restaurants and local businesses.”
Pestoni did not respond to a request for comment. Other representatives of CFL, UVDS and Waste Management also did not respond to requests for comment.
“Both UVDS and [CFL] they have no business being in the grape growing areas or the upper Napa County watershed,” said Frank Leeds, past president of Napa Valley Grapegrowers, which runs an organic vineyard opposite the UVDS composting operation. “There are homes and vineyards all around that are affected by them.”
Leeds co-owns a vineyard near UVDS with his daughter, Lauren Pesch; Pesch said she has deep concerns about CFL water contamination and has seen pipes from the UVDS property carrying liquid into the creek next to her vineyard.
But the broader wine industry itself has not expressed public concern, and when asked for comment on the issues, there were no responses from Napa Valley Grapegrowers, Napa Valley Vintners or California Certified organic farmers.
Michelle Benvenuto, executive director of Vinegrowers of Napa County, said she was “not familiar enough with the details of this issue” to comment.
Anna Brittan, executive director of the nonprofit Napa Green, a sustainable viticulture program that lists UVDS as a sponsor, also said she was not aware of any contamination concerns held by members.
More than a dozen Napa Valley vineyards or wineries did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment.
Toxic PFAS detected
The Clover Flat Landfill opened in 1963 and, along with UVDS, provides a range of valuable services to the community, according to the facility’s websites, including collecting and capturing methane gas for conversion to electricity. It provides enough energy to power the equivalent of 800 homes and operates with “net zero” emissions, according to the website.
As before revealed by the GuardianThe US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has named CFLs as one of thousands of facilities across the country suspected of handling harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
Following a request by regulators to analyze leachate and groundwater samples at the landfill, Pestoni reported to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board in 2020 that a third-party analysis have detected PFAS in all samples collected.
PFAS are man-made chemicals that do not degrade and have been linked to cancer and a number of other diseases and health hazards. Levels of PFOS and PFOA—types of PFAS considered particularly dangerous—were found in landfill leachate many times higher than the drinking water standard recently set by the EPA.
In early 2023, the San Francisco Bay Area Water Quality Control Board sampled a creek downstream of the CFL for eight PFASs, identifying multiple PFAS compounds in each sample, according to Email from Water Board Inspector Alyx Karpowicz to Waste Connections.
“There are discoveries in the river of the same compounds found at the Clover Flat Landfill,” Karpovich informed the company.
When asked about the results, a water board spokesman said the concentrations of PFAS in the creek samples were low enough that “chronically exposed biota are not expected to be adversely affected and ecological impacts are unlikely.”
The site racked up a number of regulatory violations and left at least one state investigator worried about “long-term contamination of the stream.”
IN 2019 Report, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife official found that the landfill had “heavily contaminated” both streams that flow through the landfill site with “large amounts of soil debris, leachate, waste and sediment.” “There was essentially no aquatic life,” noted the investigator.
Heavy metals are also present at “alarmingly high detection levels” at the landfill, said Chris Malan, executive director of the Institute for Conservation Advocacy, Research and Education, a watershed conservation nonprofit in Napa County.
Last year, the CFL arranged a lawsuit filed against him by the California Sports Fishing Alliance, which said his discharges were harming aquatic life and endangering people who use the Napa River for recreation. The CFL agreed to implement new erosion control measures and take action if testing shows contaminants above certain levels, among other measures.
Also in 2023, the state fined him approximately $620,000 for discharging “leachate-laden” and “acidic” water into one of the streams, among other violations.
Last fall, a group of water board officials visited the landfill to find the “ghost pipes” alleged in the workers’ complaint. They reported in an October 2023 Email that they discovered an array of pipes and a culvert that required further investigation, the email said.
There remains an “ongoing investigation” into environmental concerns related to CFLs and UVDS, according to Eileen White, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area Water Quality Control Board.
Apart from the environmental investigation by state and local officials, The US Department of Justice issued subpoenas for information from the UVDS, as well as from more than 20 other companies and individuals in the region. This investigation appears to focus on local political connections and contracts rather than environmental concerns.
Little public reaction
Ellsworth, the former mayor, is among a small group of community members who have tried to take their own action against the UVDS and CFL.
In February 2021, dozens of residents expressed complaints for odors, noise and light pollution from UVDS in a virtual meeting. Some began litigation but were unable to fund an ongoing legal battle and abandoned the effort.
Ellsworth says the Napa Valley wine industry prefers to keep quiet about any concerns about pollution.
“We tried to talk to wine industry trade organizations in Napa Valley. They completely cornered us,” he said. “Everyone is afraid to talk or too apathetic or doesn’t want to see it.”
This story was co-published with New Ledea journalism project of the Environmental Working Group
