Sewage sludge: Fertilizer or public menace?

Sewage sludge: Fertilizer or public menace?
by Mike Mosedale
[Minneapolis]
http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1209/article11857.asp

Given his 30 years' employment in the sewage treatment field, it is hardly surprising that
Wayne Andersen has become inured to some of the nastier aspects of his occupation. A
manager at the Blue Lake Wastewater Treatment Plant in Shakopee, Andersen doesn't even
notice the stink anymore. "Do you smell anything?" he asks, and then shrugs at an
affirmative response. "Olfactory fatigue, I guess."

Inside the Thickening and Dewatering Building--a cavernous, clean, and brightly lit
industrial edifice filled with thick, acrid air-- Andersen pauses next to a covered
conveyer belt. He plunges a bare hand into an opening and grabs a clump of brown substance
that resembles worm bedding.

It is sewage sludge--the solid by-product of all that goes down the toilets and drains of
some two dozen Minneapolis suburbs.

"When the sludge gets dewatered, it becomes a cake," Andersen explains. Then he makes a
halfhearted vow to properly wash his hands before the next meal and cracks a smile: "But
it's not the kind of cake your wife is going to make you."

That's not to say the sludge from the Blue Lake plant won't make its way back into the
food chain. In fact, all the sludge generated at the plant--about 225 tons per week--is
refined into pellets by a private outfit called the New England Fertilizer Company
(NEFCO), which operates at Blue Lake under a contract with the Metropolitan Council. The
final product is then trucked from Shakopee to western Minnesota, where it is applied to
corn and soybean fields.

"We feel very good about what we do. This is the most ecologically friendly way [to deal
with sludge], because we're recycling all the nutrients," asserts Bill Hansen, NEFCO's
manager at Blue Lake. Hansen typically eschews the word "sludge" when referring to his
company's product. Like many other people in the field, he prefers the term "biosolids."

That's what most industry and government officials have called it since the early 1990s,
when the industry sponsored a naming competition as part of a public-relations move to
foster acceptance of the agricultural use of sludge. Before settling on "biosolids,"
industry officials considered and then rejected a host of other candidates, including "the
end product," "humanure," "bioresidue," "bioslurp," and "geoslime."

Feel-good nomenclature aside, the application of sludge to farmland--a practice that
dramatically increased over the past decade thanks to aggressive promotion by the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency--has come under heavy attack of late. Critics say sludge
poses threats to both human health and the environment because of the presence of toxic
chemicals and disease-causing pathogens.

While there is no scientific consensus, critics point to a growing body of anecdotal
evidence that people have been sickened--and in a handful of cases, killed--by exposure to
sludge. Such allegations have caused a public reconsideration of the issue by the EPA.

The apparent shift in policy is in part due to a report issued in 2002 by the National
Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Among other things, the
report concluded that the risk assessment methodology used in the creation of the EPA's
sludge regulations was outdated.

Then last summer, an Augusta, Georgia, jury blamed the deaths of some 300 dairy cows on
the use of sewage sludge on nearby fields. That case was cited in a petition by a
broad-based coalition of 73 labor, environmental, and farm groups that asked the EPA for
an immediate ban on the land application of sludge.

On New Year's Eve, the EPA rejected that request. But at the same time, the agency did
agree to sponsor a series of studies that would examine the human health and environmental
effects of sludge. In addition, the EPA--which has long required testing for the presence
of nine heavy metals--said it would consider more stringently regulating 15 other
pollutants, including acetone and silver, that are commonly found in sludge.

Laura Orlando, a Boston-based civil engineer and adjunct professor of public health at
Boston University who has long been active in the anti-sludge movement, is not impressed
by the EPA's latest actions. "This means nothing in terms of protecting public health or
the environment," Orlando says. "The only thing that will protect public health is an
outright ban. More research, more testing, or adding 15 chemicals [to the regulations]
will not protect public health."

Those opinions are echoed by David Lewis, a renowned EPA microbiologist whose criticism of
the agency's handling of the sludge issue led to his firing last year. While Lewis is
pleased by the agency's decision to take a closer look at the 15 pollutants, he says that
doesn't go far enough. What's more, Lewis says, the EPA has revealed a bias in its
selection of researchers for the public health studies, an important component of the new
sludge initiative; those researchers--who were picked in a noncompetitive process--"have
historically supported EPA's position that land application of sludge is safe," Lewis
says.

Despite the EPA's acknowledgment of the need for more study, most industry and government
officials still maintain that sludge is entirely safe when properly treated and applied.
NEFCO's Hansen says that his company's product is rated EQ, or "exceptional quality,"
which means it is safer than most. That is because of a special heat-drying process that
kills disease-causing pathogens such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Staphylococcus aureus.

But most of the 42,000 tons of sewage sludge spread across Minnesota farm fields last year
is lower grade, Class B sludge, which typically contains measurable levels of pathogens.
Jorja DuFresne, the biosolids coordinator with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency,
says Class B sludge is safe when properly applied. She points out that the state insists
on certification and training for those who spread it.

In her 22 years working in the field, DuFresne says she has yet to come across a single
documented case of a human health problem arising from the use of sludge in Minnesota.

At the Met Council and NEFCO, meanwhile, officials maintain that the levels of fecal
coliform (an indicator of the presence of pathogens) and heavy metals remain well below
EPA allowable limits. There is one main reason for that, according to Met Council
spokesman Tim O'Donnell: an 85 percent decrease in the amount of heavy metals found in
metro waste water, thanks to "pre-treatment" of sewage by industrial users.

None of that impresses sludge critics like Laura Orlando. "If you say the only thing we
have to be concerned about is these nine heavy metals, many municipalities are doing a
good job. I contend, along with thousands of other people, that sewage sludge toxicity
goes well beyond the nine heavy metals," Orlando says.

In fact, she asserts, there are "tens of thousands of chemicals" that enter the sewage
treatment plant and cannot be mitigated by conventional treatment. Those chemicals--most
of which are never identified through existing testing protocols--wind up on farm fields
and, eventually, dinner plates.

Concerns over one particularly ubiquitous group of chemicals--called PBDEs--have led the
Swiss government to impose an outright ban on the use of municipal sludge as fertilizer,
and other countries are poised to follow suit. But, Orlando adds, PBDEs "aren't even on
the EPA's radar."

"There's no alchemy here," Orlando says of the treatment of sludge. "No magic that can
make all this stuff just disappear."

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Informative urls:


Fateful Harvest : The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret
by Duff Wilson
[Original news articles by Duff Wilson were Pulitzer Prize finalist.]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060931833/


The lady whose local efforts were described in Duff Wilson's book:
Patricia Anne Martin
Safe Food and Fertilizer
617 H St. SW
Quincy, WA 98848
http://www.safefoodandfertilizer.org


[Here are three books the delineate how anti-public relations twistings are shaping the
political process.]


Science Under Siege: The Politicians' War on Nature and Truth
by Todd Wilkinson, David Ross Brower, Jim Baca (Introduction)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1555662110/


Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
by John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1567510604/


Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future
by John Stauber, Sheldon Rampton
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1585421391/


[But after all is said and done, what is more important: maximizing profits or maximizing
children's health? IMO, the answer is clear: until the environment is substantially
cleaner, profits based upon environmental degradation are merely a form of extortion and
embezzlement, and the bureaucrats who create anti-public relations rhetoric are criminal
conspirators in the damage to children's health.]
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