35 Years at NHDES: John Duclos
In honor of NHDES’ 35th anniversary, we are asking staff who have been here since the agency’s formation to look back at their time here and what they see for our future. In this edition, we hear from John Duclos, Planning, Projects, and Communications Administrator, who began working for the state Water Supply and Pollution Control Commission, one of the agencies that consolidated to become NHDES in 1987, in September 1979. He started as a water pollution sanitarian in that agency’s Drinking Water and Groundwater Bureau. Then in 1981, he joined the fledgling Hazardous Waste Program, where he served in several roles over the years – minus a one-year stint in the Superfund Program as an on-site coordinator doing emergency removal actions. After that year, John went back to the Hazardous Waste Management Bureau as a program administrator, and then as the administrator of the full bureau for many years. John shifted to the Commissioner’s Office in 2020 to serve as an administrator in that office before taking on the new position as the Planning, Projects, and Communications Administrator.
What made you want to work at NHDES in the first place?
Well, I was an outdoors type of kid, did a lot of camping with the family. I would say I was very fortunate to do a lot of camping, both with the family up north and through the Scouting program, and I got an early appreciation of the beauty of the outdoors.
And then I got a little older, and in junior high school, I was learning about environmental type stuff. EPA had just come into existence in 1970 and they had an Earth Day – April 22, 1970, the very first Earth Day. I learned about all of the bad environmental contamination that the world was seeing. (I learned) the Merrimack River was on the 10 most polluted rivers in the world list; that we were just barely treating anything for wastewater. It hit a note with me where I decided that that’s what I wanted to do. I finally found a purpose of what a lifetime of work could do for the betterment of the environment, and so I chose to get into that field.
What were the biggest environmental challenges of the day when you first started here?
When I started out in the hazardous waste program, people were dumping chemical wastes, you know, burying drums out in the back 40, and I set my sights on identifying those sites and cleaning them up – by getting the tanks and the drums excavated. I spent at least one long summer doing a drum and bulk waste removal project at a pre-superfund site in Epping. That was a six-day-a-week job, sun-up to sundown. We were dealing with a lot of contractors and the issues of cleaning up the site on a time and materials contract, so there was a lot of interesting work in the hazardous waste program in the earliest days of it. That was the biggest environmental challenge of the day for me, cleaning up hazardous waste sites and responding to hazardous waste disposal complaints. It fit my interest of making a difference to the land and water in the state, and I was also interested in doing environmental enforcement work.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen at the agency over the last 35 years?
The agency’s gotten a lot bigger, and it has a lot more complex problems. Most of my years have been in the hazardous waste program and I’ve seen it change from the model of enforcement as being a goal to compliance as being the goal. I had to learn that over time, that we really want good businesses in New Hampshire – hiring a lot of people, making a lot of money and complying with our environmental rules and regulations. And those are very difficult and complex things, and we have to be there as a collaborative agency to assist our regulated businesses through the process of compliance. I was able to do that in the hazardous waste program by instituting a training and certification program for large quantity generators, and I think that opened a door between enforcement being a goal as originally set by EPA at the time and New Hampshire’s way of “compliance is our goal, enforcement is only a tool.”
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the state over the last 35 years?
Growth.
A lot of big manufacturing businesses were in the state and that allowed for the hazardous waste program to deal with industrial compliance at many different types of facilities with many different types of hazardous waste. Then in the last 35 years, a lot of those businesses closed or moved, and we became more of a small-business state, and now we have many emerging high tech areas.
One of the big things that the state was dealing with in the early days was electroplating facilities, where they used to have direct discharges of chemical wastes into rivers and surface impoundments. We had a lot of work to do with electroplating facilities, and the regulations put a lot of those facilities out of business because it got too expensive to properly treat and dispose of their wastes, comply with new regulations, and remediate any past contamination.
What environmental successes have you seen or been a part of?
There are two things that really come to mind when I look back at my career that I’m really happy with. One of those would be the lesson that enforcement isn’t the goal of the agency, it’s compliance, and having a collaborative relationship with industry as long as you are fair to each other is vital to that success. An example of that is the Large Quantity Generator Certification Program, which allowed industry to learn the hazardous waste rules from those that would be doing the inspections and any enforcement, so they knew up front what they needed to do to comply. I’ve seen a lot of improvement in the knowledge base of industry, how they talk and feel more comfortable with the state regulators, understanding that we’re generally there to help them comply with the rules.
The second one was working more directly with industry. I won’t say any names, but a business came in that wanted to have 100% American-made product, but they were getting their circuit boards from an outside source. They wanted to have a circuit board manufacturing facility on site. We’ve lost a lot of electroplating facilities due to environmental contamination, and then this company wanted to build one. We worked with them, and they ended up constructing a state-of-the-world, I’d say, electroplating operation, fully automated, computerized and doesn’t generate hazardous waste. That’s almost impossible to do in an electroplating facility. But they started from scratch and researched the best technologies to use from around the world. We told them the things that would generate hazardous waste and they came up with a fix to not generate it. I learned that working with industry, especially at the earliest possible time, was a great benefit not only to the industry but also to us and the environment.
What are the biggest challenges you see for the next five, 10, 15, or 35 years?
Well, I think on the world map you have climate change issues that are obviously affecting everyone: we had a bad drought, a multi-year drought; we’ve had 100-year floods that aren’t every hundred years anymore; we have a rising sea level and more storm surge issues. Those are big things that are going to challenge us all. We’re going to lose land to the ocean. We have to prepare for the inevitable, I think. So those are what I envision as the biggest challenges not only globally, but also what does it mean to New Hampshire and its environment and resources.
From an inland perspective, this kind of gets back to my roots of saying “clean water.” We are what we drink, and drinking water is very precious. When I started, I don’t think there were very many gas chromatographs around or a large understanding of groundwater or groundwater contaminated with various chemicals, and the sensitivity of those instruments has improved over time. The health risk assessments have also advanced, so that it doesn’t take very much contamination of certain chemicals to have a health impact on people. So, dealing with the contamination that we have, learning more about other chemical wastes from an emerging contaminant perspective, is a challenge that we’re going to see for the next five, 10, 15, 35 years.
I think we have to do a better job nationally to look at the types of chemistry that is developed and put into the marketplace and have an environmental review before they get distributed to the public, I figured we’d learn our lesson, you know, given our past history on that, but it never seems to surprise me how we find one thing that’s good, but we lose sight of what does that mean in its life cycle to produce it, to use it, and then how does it get disposed of. And what happens if it leaks or gets into the environment. So, emerging contaminants and the effect that it has in our air, water and lands.