Promises Piled High 

This article was produced in collaboration with the Environmental Justice Oral History Project.

Whitney Parker can’t escape the steady stream of trash that flows into his rural hometown. 

From sunrise to sundown, six days a week, heavy-duty garbage trucks rumble past his home en route to the approximately 1,000-acre Sampson County Landfill in Roseboro. The trucks deliver roughly 1.8 million tons of waste each year from 44 counties across North Carolina. The air in the surrounding area is permanently tinged with the odor of rotting meat, sewage, and chemicals that lasts long after the trucks are gone.

“I sit in my yard and watch 18-wheelers full of toxic waste drive by—20 or 30 trucks within an hour,” Parker said. “And people say, ‘That’s just how it is.’”

In addition to the landfill, animal feeding operations and processing facilities have long contributed to environmental challenges in Sampson County, placing a heavy burden on the predominantly and historically Black communities that call the area home. 

Decades of advocacy by residents of Roseboro’s Snow Hill neighborhood—plus a lawsuit filed by an environmental legal group—culminated in a landmark cooperative agreement in December 2024 between the Canadian solid waste company GFL Environmental and the local group, Environmental Justice Community Action Network.

Since that deal was inked last year, GFL has updated its pollution and odor monitoring procedures surrounding the landfill and agreed to establish several recycling programs and water filtration systems across the Sampson County School District.

“It’s not to say that the problems have been completely eliminated; residents are still reporting some issues,” said Kyron Williams, the Snow Hill community liaison for the network. “But I think generally speaking, at least as far as has been expressed to me, there’s been pretty good satisfaction between now and last year.”

More recently, the company and community representatives have also begun to establish a new community center and a nonprofit organization. But GFL has missed key deadlines to acquire property for the community center. 

And some residents say concerns about the landfill, which are supposed to be handled through a new complaint system, aren’t being meaningfully addressed. The odor from the landfill is still unbearable, locals say.

GFL Environmental did not respond to requests for comment on the status of the cooperative agreement or ongoing community concerns.

“Every time we demand A, B, C, D, we’re told, ‘Calm down, give them time.’ But this is a billion-dollar company,” Parker said. “It’s been a lot of promises and press releases—but if anybody wants to challenge what we’re saying, show us the receipts.”

From Farm to Foul 

The last time Paul Fisher saw Snow Hill in its original state was in 1966, when he left to serve in the military. He remembers it as idyllic. 

“It was a nice, quiet community. It was clean. Everybody knew everybody,” he said. 

In 1970, Sampson County commissioners first allocated funds for a new solid waste program. The original plan called for several smaller municipal dumps scattered throughout the county. However, after a wave of resistance from majority-white neighborhoods, officials quietly shifted direction. 

By 1973, with little public notice or community consultation, they selected the rural, predominantly Black community of Snow Hill as the site for a consolidated county landfill. Construction began in 1975, the same year Fisher returned from military service.  

Fisher brought his two daughters and built a home on land about a mile away from the landfill that had been in his family since the early 1900s, hoping they could experience a similar childhood. But as they settled in, he noticed many of his former neighbors moving out.

Though ownership and operators of the landfill have changed hands over the years, eventually landing under the management of GFL Environmental, the burden of the county’s decision has remained with Snow Hill’s residents for nearly half a century. 

Eventually, Fisher’s children moved away as well. “My children are a little skeptical about retiring and moving back here … and I wouldn’t blame them if they decided not to come back,” he said.

Maia Hutt, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the lawsuit sought to force GFL to address problems stemming from generations of deferred action by the facility. 

“Prior to this court-enforceable settlement agreement, community members expressed that complaints of nuisance conditions—odor, vermin, traffic, and garbage truck spills—were going unaddressed,” Hutt said in an email. 

According to the original 2024 lawsuit, PFAS, a family chemicals known to accumulate in the human body, have been sent to the landfill for years.  

The lawsuit also claimed that significant methane emissions, groundwater and soil contamination, and other nuisances—such as roadway waste and pests attracted to the rotting smells—reduced the wealth and quality of life for residents.

The provisions in a court-enforceable agreement aim to help make Snow Hill livable again. “This was the product of a multiyear effort by residents, scientists, and local activists,” Hutt wrote.

Fisher says he knows better than to blindly trust GFL. “I think GFL wants to do things for the community—not just because they want to, but because the laws have been changed and they don’t have too much choice,” he said.

The Agreement at a Glance

Williams, who was one of the network’s founding board members and formally joined the staff in November 2024, has been working to ensure GFL lives up to its commitments. According to him, the agreement requires GFL to take action to curb pollution and provide economic and health support for residents. “We used the environmental laws we had access to to bring some relief to the residents of Snow Hill,” Williams said. 

The agreement does this by requiring GFL to stop discharging PFAS into nearby surface waters and enacting strict limits and monitoring to ensure that discharges meet Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards. The company also must get state approval to temporarily treat contaminated water discharged from two landfill points. During the first two months, GFL was supposed to remove at least 50% of five key forever chemicals; within three months to a year, it must remove 80%; and after one year, the treated water must meet the EPA’s official drinking water limits for those chemicals.

Additionally, the agreement requires GFL to remove PFAS from its leachate, or the water contaminated when filtered through the facility’s waste, a historical first for North Carolina landfills. The landfill is also required to expand its air quality tracking by deploying methane-sensing drones and hiring an outside consultant to design a continuous monitoring system.

To date, GFL has submitted applications to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality requesting permits to remove the vast majority of PFAS in its wastewater. On September 24, the state responded by issuing a public notice requiring the installation of a groundwater remediation system to reduce PFAS discharge levels by 90%. The order took effect on November 15. 

The facility has also begun installing a perimeter odor management system to collect data that the public can use to better understand what’s being emitted in real time. GFL launched a complaint hotline and website where residents can report offensive odors, truck spills, reckless trash truck driving, or any other problem causing harm or nuisance from the facility. GFL must respond to complaints within seven business days and meaningfully address them within 14 business days.

Guarded Optimism 

There are signs of progress as the agreement approaches its one-year mark. A public-facing dashboard to monitor odor surrounding the facility went live in November. In addition to the updated pollution monitoring procedures, the landfill has established 10 recycling programs and agreed to implement water filtration systems across the Sampson County School District. 

Jamie King, superintendent of the Sampson County School District, said GFL initially approached him about supporting a recycling program at all Sampson County schools, one of the original terms of the settlement agreement. GFL representatives also suggested a composting system, but King told them he didn’t see the purpose.

As a regular attendee of county commission meetings, King was familiar with residents’ concerns about potential water contamination near the Sampson County Landfill. He believed new water filtration systems would provide a far greater benefit for students. “I came across water filtration systems for that area of the county and asked if it was something [GFL] would consider for students,” King said.

Although routine testing had not detected pollutants in the district’s water systems, King said the new filtration systems, currently installed only in Lakewood High School with plans for expansion districtwide if funding allows, provide added assurance for students and staff while serving as a critical environmental education tool on local water quality.

Born from this community agreement will be a new nonprofit organization, the Snow Hill 501(c)(3), whose primary function will be to administer community development projects funded through this community agreement. The agreement requires GFL to establish a community-controlled fund, the Snow Hill Community Fund, to support Snow Hill revitalization efforts and a regular public meeting cadence for consistent updates and feedback. 

“This component of the settlement will be what the people of Snow Hill make it, and I am heartened to see the community coming together to start the process,” wrote Hutt.

According to Hutt, the community and GFL have begun the joint process of selecting a site for a new community center. The Community Fund is working to allocate the first round of grants.

However, the company has missed key deadlines for property acquisition for the community center, and no architectural plans are available for broader community input. Williams attributes the delay to factors beyond GFL’s and the community’s control. 

“I know a lot of the residents were generally concerned that GFL was refusing to be compliant. But it’s actually a question of finding someone in an area with suitable land that they want to sell,” Williams said.

There’s also concern about the cost of remediation and the quality of a center that’s located on polluted land. “This is a landfill, so you’re talking everything from possible contamination to diesel spills from all the trucks. There’s some mess there that just may be cost-prohibitive.” 

Parker says the community meetings held to date haven’t allowed for accountability, with representatives arriving unprepared to present and providing minimal tangible updates. Although GFL established a complaint system, all responses from the landfill have been limited to explanations of the problem or the odor’s cause; community members say there have been no escalations or meaningful steps to address complaints. 

Combined with still-unbearable odors and industrial dump trucks that speed through the neighborhood at the expense of residents’ and children’s safety, many in the community remain skeptical that this agreement will bring change. 

“The phrase we keep hearing is, ‘We’re working in good faith,’ but there’s no documentation, no proof,” Parker said. “A year later, we’re still waiting.” 

Now in his 40s, Parker has lived in the Snow Hill neighborhood his entire life. While he doesn’t remember a time before the landfill dominated his family’s ancestral land, he does recall when the acrid stench and unending parade of garbage trucks didn’t define daily life in his community.

“We went from thriving and living in technicolor to existing in black and white,” Parker said.

As a child, Parker remembers helping his mother till her garden for their daily produce and riding ATVs through the woods. But he says fresh food and outdoor play were quickly replaced by burning eyes, sore throats, and restless nights that could only be soothed by the constant hum of fans and a rotating collection of air fresheners.

It wasn’t long before daily discomfort turned into health problems; many residents, Parker included, link the landfill to pervasive respiratory illness, cancer, and kidney disease among Snow Hill residents. “Middle school was when we started seeing family with bone cancer, asthma, lung disease,” he recalled. In 2021, Parker’s parents died after years of battling unexplained illnesses.

Williams said Fisher and Parker are not the first nor will they be the last to raise concerns about the agreement, noting that some would have preferred a more aggressive legal approach against GFL in pursuit of reparations for the decades of hardship the community has endured.

“The existing environmental laws and regulations are not really designed to compensate the people that have been harmed. If they want a more aggressive approach, or they’re seeking financial damages … they would need to find outside attorneys that specialize in those types of lawsuits,” Williams said. “There was definitely anger … and even some mistrust, and that’s perfectly understandable and valid.”

After nearly three decades fighting landfill expansion, Fisher continues to attend public meetings convened under the cooperative agreement.

Fisher says he feels especially compelled to stay tuned in to ensure that the money allocated for community use is appropriately spent. “One of my biggest concerns is making sure nobody is doing anything to advance themselves,” he said. “The agreement is for the people.”

Fisher remains hopeful that if this agreement leads to lasting change, his children might return home.

“I feel tied to the property itself and would love to stay around here, pass it on to my children,” he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately portrayed the process of land acquisition for the new community center.

Tatum Larsen is a storyteller and communications professional whose journalism background fuels her commitment to elevating community-driven stories.

Cameron Oglesby is an environmental justice advocate, oral historian, and award-winning journalist whose storytelling centers histories of injustice, joy, resilience, and land stewardship in Black, Indigenous, rural, and southern communities.