Walk into any home and garden store
and you’ll see row after row, bag after bag of fertilizer.
Last year, 110 billion pounds of commercial fertilizer and 4.2 million
pounds of sewage sludge were spread across American farmlands, public
spaces and home gardens; products that, thanks to various governmental
loopholes, do not have full labeling or ingredient disclosure requirements.
That’s because the government and many fertilizer and waste
management companies don’t want you to know that your food
is being grown in “recycled” hazardous waste.
 |
A sickening flow of heavy metals, nerve
gas residue, dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, industrial solvents,
petroleum oils, and radioactive plutonium, americium, radium
and strontium-90 makes its way from the Lowry Landfill Superfund
site southeast of Denver, down 17 miles of pipe, and into the
Denver Metro sewage treatment plant. There it joins the city’s
domestic and industrial waste, and comes out the other end as
sludge, which is used to fertilize wheat. |
|
Recycling is undoubtedly one of the great environmental success
stories of the late 20th century. Thanks to curbside recycling and
other community-oriented programs promoted by the Environmental
Protection Agency [EPA], roughly 30% of the nation’s solid
waste is diverted from landfills and incinerators, and reprocessed
into new products. Unfortunately, however, the EPA has also embraced
recycling as a method of disposing of billions of pounds of industry-produced
hazardous waste and toxic-laden sewage sludge.
Creating loopholes
to dodge hazardous
waste disposal laws
Since the late 1980s, when a majority of 116 nations at the Basel
Convention voted to prevent the United States from exporting its
hazardous waste to poorer countries under the guise of “fertilizer,”
the agency has exploited, and even created, loopholes in Congressionally-mandated
hazardous waste disposal regulations to allow pollution-producing
industries, sewage treatment agencies, waste management companies,
and the $60 billion-a-year fertilizer industry to dodge federal
hazardous waste disposal laws, including the Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act (RCRA).
What this means is that any material containing elements beneficial
to plant growth, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, zinc,
chromium, manganese, copper, calcium, boron or sulfur, can be labeled
and used as a fertilizer, regardless of its other contents. Industrial
and mining wastes — including plutonium, arsenic, mercury,
cadmium, lead, PCBs and dioxin — are taken from tailings,
sumps, holding ponds, furnaces, and even captured from pollution
control devices, and legally sold to fertilizer companies or spread
directly on farmland. Sewage sludge, which may contain dangerous
levels of pathogens, as well as PCBs, chlorinated pesticides, asbestos,
industrial solvents, petroleum products, radioactive material and
heavy metals, can also be sold to home gardeners and farmers as
fertilizer, and spread on public lands such as golf courses, parks
and playgrounds.
It also means that polluters get to avoid the steep cost of proper
hazardous waste disposal (usually landfilling at a certified landfill,
or incineration), and can even make money from their toxic effluence.
“If you’re a business person, and are given the option
of whether to spend money disposing of hazardous waste properly,
or make money by selling it [legally], which are you going to choose?”
asked one Utah state regulator pointedly.
The market in hazardous waste has also created a profitable niche
for waste management companies, who act as brokers between polluting
industries and those who “recycle” hazardous waste,
or as recyclers themselves, hauling materials and recycling and
reselling them.
Nobody knows just how much hazardous waste, under the guise of fertilizer,
is being spread over the land, kicked into dust and inhaled, absorbed
by plants, and eaten by people and animals. Or what kind of effects
it might be having on food crops, human health, or the environment.
Superfund sludge fest in
Denver
Adrienne Anderson and Patty Martin are members of a steadily growing
network of activists who find the EPA’s laissez faire attitude
about fertilizers unacceptable, and they are doing their best to
change it, struggling through a web of regulatory laws and loopholes
described, variously, as ‘surreal,’ and ‘like
something out of Alice in Wonderland.’ “You start getting
into it, and you can’t help but do the deer in the headlights
reaction,” says Anderson. “You just stare blindly for
awhile and then, hopefully you move on.”
Anderson, a professor in the Environmental Studies Program and Ethnic
Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has
been following hazardous waste issues for 20 years, having started
out in the 1980s with the National Toxics Campaign. For the past
four years, she has also been following a sickening flow of heavy
metals, nerve gas residue, dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, industrial
solvents, petroleum oils, and radioactive plutonium, americium,
radium and strontium-90 as it makes its way from the Lowry Landfill
Superfund site southeast of Denver, down 17 miles of pipe, and into
the Denver Metro sewage treatment plant. There it joins the city’s
domestic and industrial waste, and comes out the other end as sludge
or, as it is euphemistically known, “biosolids.”
This sludge is being used to grow wheat and other crops that have
been sold to make, among other things, “specialty baked goods”
for bakeries across the country. “They are indeed very special
baked goods,” says Anderson. “They’re grown in
sludge incorporating Superfund site wastes from a dump where nuclear
wastes were unloaded for years. Here, plutonium and other wastes
from our nation’s weapons of mass destruction program —
with the issuance of this precedent-setting permit — have
become acceptable additives for our nation’s food supply.”
Anderson has been fighting to stop the Denver Metro Wastewater Reclamation
District and its partner Waste Management, Inc. from allowing the
Superfund wastewater (which contains industrial, municipal and military
waste from Rocky Flats and Rocky Mountain Arsenal) plant to go through
the city sewage system since 1996, when she was appointed to the
water district’s board of directors by Denver Mayor Wellington
Web to represent the sewage plant’s workers, at the request
of their union. A woman who always does her homework, Anderson stumbled
across a secret settlement between Metro Wastewater and the City
and County of Denver before her first board meeting. When she mentioned
her findings, the sludge hit the fan. “The reaction was extremely
hostile.” She says she was told to keep quiet.
An uphill battle to tell the Denver story
Anderson did not keep quiet. With the help of her students, she
kept digging. She tried to make her findings public, but both of
Denver’s dailies, The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News,
were named by the EPA as liable parties who dumped toxic waste at
Lowry, and were among those responsible for footing the bill for
clean-up costs. A conservative columnist for the Denver Post (which
is owned by the same publisher as the Salt Lake Tribune) conducted
a smear campaign against Anderson, adding still another layer to
a story Anderson describes as “the Cadillac of corruption
involving hazardous waste disposal.’’ This is a story
about military-related coverup of waste disposal, of chemical weapons
material the government doesn’t want the public to know exists,
of the use of federal loopholes that are wide enough to drive a
nuclear waste truck through, and about government corruption, collusion
and conflicts of interest all the way up to the White House and
back down again,” she says.
Anderson eventually filed a whistle-blower complaint under seven
national environmental laws (with the assistance of Hugh Kaufman,
an EPA investigator and well-known whistle-blower himself), which
she won. (Based on subpoenaed documents between the Denver Post
columnist and the PR agent for Metro Wastewater, the judge ruled
that the columnist was a “puppet” for the sewage district’s
illegal campaign of defamation against Anderson.)
50 more years of toxic
sludge from Denver?
Still, Metro continues to use taxpayer money to fight her over
the issue, and the toxic waste continues to flow from Lowry into
Denver. Denver Metro continues to truck the contaminated sludge
out to farms and public lands. (Anderson and her students recently
discovered that the sludge was being spread on school district property
in Colorado Springs; the school board forced Denver Metro to come
and dig the sludge back up.) The water district is also bagging
and selling their “beneficial biosolids” at nurseries
and home and garden shows as “MetroGro,” which the local
alternative press — which did cover the story — naturally
dubbed ‘MetroGlo.’
“The sewage district has no treatment capability for hazardous,
and certainly not nuclear, waste,” says Anderson. “They
screen out the big pieces, add some chemicals to neutralize the
biologic material and heat it — none of which has any effect
whatsoever on the large volume of compounds coming from the Lowry
site. This is just a means of dodging clean-up costs and skirting
liability for Superfund waste.”
Though Anderson and a large group of local farmers, wastewater workers
and anti-sludge activists would like to take the Denver Metro case
to federal court, they can’t — at least not for 50 years.
“Under federal law, you cannot challenge a Superfund site
decision until the cleanup is over,” Anderson says, “and
they say the waste is going to be flowing into the Metro system
at least that long.”
Could toxic sludge from Salt Lake City be next?
Anderson knows that the Denver case is extreme, and that the majority
of cities that sell biosolids to farmers and home gardeners do not
have radioactive Superfund material going into their sewage system.
But they could, she cautions, and other toxic materials often find
their way surreptitiously into the waste stream, thanks to a regulatory
loophole which gives absolution to formerly toxic substances, once
they are given “regulatory cleansing.”
Just last month she uncovered another agreement that allows Lockheed
Martin in Littleton, Colorado to pipe toxic waste into the Littleton/Englewood
wastewater plant, where the waste will be turned into, yes, “beneficial
biosolids,” and used for agricultural purposes in eastern
Colorado.
“Given that there’s a commingling of pathogen-filled
domestic waste and toxic industrial waste, this is not a healthy
scenario,” says Anderson, who points to the growing number
of cases across the country of injury, harm and even death from
exposure to sludge, primarily from the pathogen content. The Inspector
General of EPA itself recently issued a report saying that the recycling
of sewage sludge is not protective of human and environmental health,
but the agency continues to promote the policy.
Anderson is also concerned that the Denver Superfund and Lockheed
Martin scenarios will be repeated elsewhere in the country —
namely Utah. Anderson is well acquainted with Utah environmental
issues from her past work with the Toxics Coalition, and is currently
researching the Goshute/Private Fuel Storage (PFS) situation for
the “Environmental Ethics: Race, Class & Pollution Politics”
class she teaches. The Salt Lake area, like Denver, she points out,
is surrounded by military installations and Superfund sites. “This
is a precedent that could be used at other facilities where Superfund
sites have waste they don’t want to recognize or deal with,
and Utah certainly has many such sites,” she says.
While Utah regulators say nothing like the Denver Metro/Lowry situation
has happened here, they do admit that, theoretically, it could.
“Superfund is an interesting program,” says Scott Anderson,
manager of the hazardous waste division at the Utah Department of
Environmental Quality (DEQ). “Each site has a different manager,
and they only have to follow RCRA if they feel it’s applicable
in that situation.”
Adds Fred Pehrson, branch manager of Permits, Compliance and Monitoring
for DEQ’s Division of Water Quality, “In theory, a situation
like the Lowry one could happen here, but I can’t find it
conceivable that any of our treatment entities would let something
that hazardous into the waste stream. Utah has a very aggressive
industrial pre-treatment program, and we do oversight to ensure
they are not discharging anything that would negatively affect the
biosolids.”
Fateful harvest in Washington
state
|
Read
the book ...
Duff Wilson tells Patty Martin's story in his book,
Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town,
a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret, published
by HarperCollins. To order it from Amazon, click
here. |
|
Patty Martin, like Anderson, has witnessed firsthand just how low
some companies will sink to avoid liability and disposal costs.
Martin is the former mayor of Quincy, Washington, a quiet agricultural
town of just over 4,000 in the Columbia River basin. Nothing in
her life prior to 1996 — her resumé includes stints
as a professional basketball player in Sweden, a pharmacy manager/dentist
in Alaska, a swimming coach, frozen-foods company manager, and full-time
mom — hinted that she would become a whistle-blower, found
an activist group, sue the EPA, and gain the national spotlight
as the subject of a Pulitzer-nominated newspaper series and a book.
It was during her tenure as mayor that Martin began looking into
possible explanations of why some of her constituents’ crops
were failing. Her dogged inquiry led her to the local fertilizer
company, Cenex/Land ‘O Lakes. Cenex, it seemed, had been dumping
a toxic stew of heavy metals, pesticides and radioactive materials
on local farmland; they were also, Martin found, selling similar
versions of that same stew as fertilizer. And they weren’t
the only ones doing it. Martin felt like she’d stumbled into
a bad dream.
“It’s really unbelievable what’s happening, but
it’s true,” she told Duff Wilson of the Seattle Times
in 1997. “They just call a dangerous waste a ‘product,’
and it’s no longer a dangerous waste. It’s a fertilizer.”
Martin’s discovery of the hazardous waste/fertilizer connection
was not greeted with warmth around Quincy — or anyplace else,
for that matter. Around town, people feared that her cage rattling
would destroy the town’s economy, which depends heavily upon
agriculture. She was threatened and verbally attacked, both in private
and in town meetings, voted out of office and, worst of all, shunned
in her own town, she says. Friends, neighbors and fellow church
members quit speaking to her and her husband, and her children were
harassed to the point that she ended up home-schooling for a while.
After Wilson’s three-part series, “Fear in the Fields,”
was published in the Seattle Times, Martin couldn’t even go
to the grocery store without being told to “just shut up and
leave town.” She describes that time in her life as “incredibly
painful.”
A year after the Seattle Times exposé, Washington became
the first state to limit heavy metals in fertilizer, and to require
full disclosure labeling (albeit on an Internet site, not on the
labels themselves). Shortly after, California and Texas adopted
regulations limiting some heavy metals. Unfortunately, however,
the limits set by the states are far higher than Martin and other
activists consider acceptable. And in creating those limits, the
state also legalized the practice of disposing of hazardous waste
via fertilizer, which, until that point, was illegal.
Though many people credit Martin for the state’s action, she
says she had nothing to do with it, and rues that it happened. “Sometimes
legislation means legalization,” she says. “That’s
certainly not what I wanted to happen.”
Beware what you wish
for when you sue the EPA
Also spurred by Martin’s crusade, the Washington Toxics Coalition
and the Sierra Club filed suit against the EPA in 1998 for failing
to regulate hazardous waste in fertilizer as aggressively as it
does hazardous waste in landfills. That suit, says Martin, backfired
even worse. As the result of their out-of-court settlement, the
EPA announced new federal regulations for hazardous waste-derived
fertilizer — regulations which legitimize and legalize the
recycling of hazardous waste into fertilizer, and allow the disposal
of hazardous waste on public lands and farmland in every state in
the country. The ruling also minimized public concern over potential
ill health effects from exposure to arsenic, cadmium, chromium,
dioxin, lead and nickel. On the plus side, the EPA did create limits
on heavy metals in zinc micronutrient fertilizers, which are the
ones most often made from hazardous waste. (Farmers often blend
zinc with other fertilizers to grow crops such as corn, potatoes,
rice and fruit trees.)
“With all due respect to those who brought the law suit against
the EPA, if you don’t know what you have, you don’t
know what you’re gonna get,” says Martin. “You
need to intimately know the statutes and laws before you get into
the legislative arena.”
Martin has entered the arena herself, with a suit filed last October.
The suit, explains Martin’s attorney, Melissa Powers of the
Western Environmental Law Center, objects to the EPA’s policy
of taking hazardous waste out of the regulatory scenario based on
its ultimate destination, and also asks that the EPA adequately
consider the environmental impacts of that policy.
“What the EPA is allowing to happen with fertilizer is very
disturbing, partly because I don’t think a lot of farmers
really know what’s going on with chemicals they buy; I know
consumers don’t know. People in this country still have this
idea that if it’s legal, it must be safe — we place
so much faith in our systems; but sometimes they don’t work.”
Powers is also concerned about the potential impact of loading the
soil with large amounts of heavy metals. “We just don’t
know what we’re doing to the environment,” she says.
The old system of controls
is adequate,
says a state fertilzer control officer ...
Until the recent EPA ruling, fertilizer regulation was left entirely
in the hands of the fertilizer control officer in each state, all
of whom belong to AAPFCO, the Association of American Plant Food
Control Officials. AAPFCO’s purpose is to “promote uniform
and effective legislation…and cooperate with members of the
[fertilizer] industry to promote the safe and effective use of fertilizers
and protection of soil and water resources.”
Clair Allen is Utah’s representative on the AAPFCO board,
and fertilizer program manager for the Utah Department of Agriculture.
Every fertilizer on the shelf in Utah has to have Allen’s
stamp of approval. But for now, his stamp tells consumers only two
things: that the product weighs as much as it says it does, and
that the levels of beneficial nutrients claimed on the package are
accurate.
However, he says, that may change this summer, if the AAPFCO board
decides to adopt guidelines for the rest of the country similar
to those created in Washington State.
Allen doesn’t object to the EPA’s new regulations, or
the ones AAPFCO is currently hammering out, but he says he feels,
as do many of his friends, that the hullabaloo over Martin’s
exposé was just that: pointless, noisy excitement.
Every fertilizer manufacturer is already required to present him
with a full list of ingredients, he says, and those that are hazardous
waste-derived are supposed to be flagged as such. “If I feel
like it’s harmful,” he says, “I don’t permit
it.” He acknowledges, however, that some companies might not
be completely honest in their reporting, so he’s going to
start spot-checking 15-20 products a year for heavy metals. “And
if they don’t pass, then they won’t be sold here —
unless they change their recommended application rates.”
Allen feels that what happened in Washington was a freak occurrence,
and that the percentage of fertilizers that contain heavy metals
is negligible. “All fertilizers don’t come from products
that contain heavy metals; probably less than 10%,” he says,
“and the percentage of those that are made from hazardous
waste is tiny; it’s mostly just the zinc micronutrient products.
My bottom line is, there’s minimal risk in using fertilizers
in Utah. If it’s on the shelf, it’s reputable.”
... bullhonky, says
Patty Martin
“Bullhonky,” says Martin, who uses one particular product
— Ironite — as an indicator of just how seriously state
fertilizer regulators take their role of consumer protection advocates.
Ironite, one of the most popular home garden and golf course products
sold in Utah, is made from silver mine tailings dug from a proposed
Superfund site near Humboldt, Arizona. It contains 0.25% lead and
nearly 0.5% arsenic — heavy metals known to cause cancer,
seizures, mental retardation and behavioral disorders.
Ironite company officials say the lead and arsenic in its product
are bound with other chemicals that prevent them from being biologically
available to plants. They are so adamant about the product’s
safety that the owner of the company flew to Seattle with his lawyer
and ate a spoonful in front of investigative reporter Duff Wilson
after he wrote about Ironite in the Times series.
Ironite, however, has been pulled from the shelves in Maine and
all across Canada. It failed Washington’s new standards until
the company changed its recommended application rate. Last July,
the San Francisco-based Environmental Law Foundation (ELF) filed
suit against Ironite for false advertising, since the company promotes
its products as safe for the environment and human health. ELF plans
to ask the court to order Ironite to halt distribution in California
until they reduce the amount of lead and arsenic in the product,
and until it begins labeling it in compliance with California law.
|
| What
is Sludge, AKA biosolids?
There’s nothing new about the practice of recycling
human waste into fertilizer; It’s been done for
thousands of years, particularly in areas where animal
manure is hard to come by. It does, after all, contain
many essential plant nutrients, including nitrogen,
phosphorus, sulfur, zinc and copper. What is new is
the staggering levels of germs, viruses, drugs, synthetic
hormones, heavy metals, radioactive material, dioxin,
PCBs and other toxins that enter the typical modern
sewage system.
Sewage is a mixture of everything flushed down the toilet
and poured down the drain in all the homes and commercial
and industrial buildings — including hospitals,
labs, restaurants, dairies, meat packaging plants, funeral
homes, auto shops, chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturers
— connected to a municipal waste system. (Some
industries are required to pre-treat their waste before
sending it down the drain.)
Once sewage reaches a waste water treatment works (WWTW),
it goes through a series of processes to separate the
solid waste from the water, which is filtered, cleaned
and discharged into a nearby body of water (in the Salt
Lake Valley, either the Jordan River or Great Salt Lake).
Since the goal of wastewater treatment is to clean the
water, not the solids, most of the pathogens and contaminants
end up in the semi-solid, half-organic “biosolid”
residue, which is then processed to limit concentrations
of some chemicals and heavy metals, and to reduce disease-causing
pathogens.
Most WWTWs produce two classes of biosolids: Class B,
which have been treated, but still contain potentially
high levels of pathogens, toxins and heavy metals, and
Class A, which contain lower levels of pollutants. The
EPA deems Class B biosolids acceptable for use as fertilizer
on farms (as long as certain buffer requirements and
crop harvesting restrictions are followed) and for land
reclamation (Kennecott uses them to remediate mine tailings).
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Class
B biosolids can contain the pathogens that cause typhoid
fever, dysentery, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, cholera,
hepatitis, meningitis, pneumonia, paralysis, encephalitis
and severe respiratory problems.
Class A biosolids, on the other hand, are supposed to
contain no detectable levels of pathogens, and they
are monitored for nine heavy metals. EPA scientist and
outspoken sludge critic David Lewis, Ph.D. says, “Whether
these sludges pose little or no risk to public health
and the environment depends on what is in the sludge
and how it is processed.” He found some batches
of Class A to possess “material that was highly
irritating to mucus membranes and the respiratory tract.”
Class A biosolids are promoted as being safe for unrestricted
use in both public spaces and home gardens.
South Valley and Central Valley water reclamation districts
sell (through E.T. Technologies) Class A biosolids which
have been composted with green waste. You can buy it
in bulk at the Salt Lake and Trans-Jordan landfills.
As Richard Koenig from the Utah State Extension Service
says, “It’s all in what you’re comfortable
with.” — DOR |
|
The EPA is supposed to release a report on Ironite this year.
In its 2002 ruling, the agency acknowledged that “concerns
regarding exposure to arsenic in Ironite products are worthy of
serious consideration, particularly since it is a widely marketed
consumer product intended for use by home gardeners and others.
As such, the potential for misuse and/or accidental exposure (especially
to children) cannot be discounted.” However, the report continued,
“…there are technical issues associated with estimating
risks from exposure to contaminants in Ironite that merit further
study before the Agency can reach any definitive conclusions as
to the potential risks of the product.”
... or maybe the truth
is somewhere in between
Richard Koenig is an associate professor and an expert on soil
fertility with Utah State University Extension Services. He is the
ultimate middleman in the fertilizer/biosolids debate, working as
he does with farmers, state regulators, the fertilizer industry
and consumers.
Koenig spent five years studying the effects of Class B biosolids
(see sidebar, “What is Sludge?) on feed crops, and feels that
while there are legitimate safety concerns regarding their use,
state and federal regulations, in most cases, are adequate to protect
consumer health. “There have been isolated cases in other
states where treatment plants have had high levels of heavy metals
or pathogens, but the regulatory agencies are usually able to track
them down quickly,” he says. “In Utah, we don’t
have a lot of industry loading the waste stream with heavy metals,
and our pre-treatment standards are very high.”
Biosolids (mainly Class B, which are not sold to consumers) can
carry a heavy load of pathogens, he acknowledges, but says that
they are monitored much more closely than farm waste. “You
hear a lot of people say ‘oh I would never use biosolids on
my garden,” he says, “Yet at the same time they’ll
run out and get a pickup load of raw manure. Just because it comes
from a cow or a chicken, doesn’t mean it’s safe; there
are pathogens in livestock manure as well.”
Koenig believes commercial fertilizers are also mostly safe, though
concedes there have been some bad apples. He figures that 5-10%
of fertilizers are hazardous waste-derived — a higher percentage
than others have claimed — but agrees it’s mostly the
micronutrients that are contaminated. And while he feels that regulations
on heavy metals are a good idea, he also places much of the responsibility
for finding safe products in the hands of consumers.
“It’s essential for anyone looking at any kind of fertilizer
material to ask a lot of questions,” he says. “You should
ask the provider ‘what is it?’ ‘where is it from?’
“what is it derived from?’ ‘Has it been tested?’
‘Can I see copy of the analysis?’ The more questions
you ask, the more the companies will step up and provide safe products.”
A surprising number of people — federal regulators, farmers,
attorneys, scientists, wastewater treatment plant employees and
people involved in agricultural research at Utah State University
— refused to be interviewed for this story.
Among them were the lawyers at ELF, who decided not to discuss their
case against Ironite because, as one attorney put it, “the
company is very powerful, and we have to be careful what we say.”
Local agricultural scientists and regulators also refused to comment
on Ironite. The most interesting refusal came from a professor at
Utah State, who sent this polite — and telling — response:
After reviewing your questions in detail, I have found that this
is one of those sensitive issues that may not lead to common understandings
between interested parties.
Diane Olson Rutter is a Catalyst staff writer and a gardener
who deeply regrets that she dumped 3,000 pounds of biosolids on
her organic flower and vegetable beds two years ago. You can reach
her at catalystedit@earthlink.net.
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