Sludge Watch ==> What to do about the poo? Editorial - Wellington Times Ontario

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Sludgewatch Admin:

This is an eloquent, concise summary of sludge issues from a rural community 
perspective.
I note the line that says that Prince Edward County sludge can't be land 
applied until
late in the fall .  Say what?  In Ontario sludge isn't supposed to be 
applied in the late fall, since
there would be no crop growing to take  up  the nutrients - which would just 
run off in the rain and sleet and snow melt.  Prince Edward County is in 
Canada - and isn't growing anything much in November and December....in the 
snow.

Also this is the sludge that has very very high levels of PBDE flame 
retardants and also very high levels of pharmaceutical drugs in the sludge.  
Both of these are a huge issue for public health and the environment.  It is 
hard to understand why such a rural sludge has such high levels of 
contaminants.

All sludges should be tested for a far greater variety of contaminants than 
is currently required.



  Editorial--Wellington Times

**********************************************************

Sludgewatch Admin:
Wellington /Hillier are communities in the rural areas two/three hours east 
of Toronto.

Hazardous waste

Editorial by Rick Conroy, Wellington Times
June 7, 2006

Five large fields around Wellington and Hillier have been getting close 
scrutiny in the past few weeks. They have been getting poked and prodded and 
trod upon as the municipality prepares the necessary paperwork to allow it 
to add these fields to the portfolio of fields on which it may dispose of 
municipal sewage sludge.

Public Works officials are in desperate need for fresh new fields for sewage 
sludge disposal. The municipality has only five fields left on which they 
are allowed to dispose of sludge. Two of these have been loaded to their 
five-year capacity and two of the remaining fields that have been used this 
spring won’t become available again until late in the fall—if at all this 
year. That leaves just one field to take all the sludge generated by the 
Picton and Wellington wastewater treatment facilities this year—or at least 
until these new fields become available.

Many farmers have rejected appeals by the municipality to dispose of this 
waste material on their fields. They worry about the odour as well as the 
long-term effect on their crops and their own health in dealing with the end 
residue of modern society. They also worry about liability, as many insurers 
will not cover property that receives municipal sludge.

So it is welcome news for the Public Works department that a large landowner 
is stepping forward to take the sludge and spread it on his fields. For when 
the municipality is unable to spread sludge on farm fields, it has few 
options, and the one it uses, dumping into a landfill, is expensive. Worse, 
it simply transports the municipality’s problem to another jurisdiction.

First, the water needs to be removed by spinning it dry in a large drum. 
Then the material is loaded onto trucks and hauled to the Richmond landfill 
site near Napanee.

Currently the folks around the Richmond dump have their hands full trying to 
slow down plans by Waste Management Inc. who would like to expand the 
landfill site seven-fold. They also have to worry that if Michigan closes 
their border to Toronto garbage, they could soon see a permanent convoy of 
trucks bringing the metropolis’s garbage to their community. So 
understandably, they have not focused on the issues around absorbing Prince 
Edward County’s municipal sewage sludge—but I think it is safe to assume 
they would prefer we managed our own crap.

So what to do about the poo?

First we have to remind ourselves that sewers are the central repository of 
everything our complex society generates. We gather all the excreta, every 
ingredient, and every chemical compound that is washed down a drain, flushed 
down a toilet or discarded into the catch basin. We stir it altogether and 
mix up a giant soup. Then we put a combination of screens, bacteria and 
chemicals to work in an attempt to neutralize the harmful and dangerous 
compounds to meet increasingly tough standards set by the Ministry of 
Environment.

We capture and neutralize many of the harmful ingredients— but not all.

The final product from municipal sewage is sludge—the distillation of 
everything which we are trying to rid ourselves. That, we put on farm 
fields. Where livestock graze. Where we grow our food.

Of course we have long used animal and even human waste on fields as a 
fertilizer, with few, if any, ill effects. But this practice of distributed 
application of waste is in no way comparable to the centralized collection 
and distillation of all the excreta from factories, hospitals, schools, 
residences and businesses. Furthermore, we have far more chemicals and 
specifically, pharmaceuticals, flowing through our systems now as a society 
than any individual farm field would ever have been required to endure in 
the past.

More precisely, any farm field subjected to urban sewage sludge might be 
exposed to every chemical compound, every heavy metal and every 
pharmaceutical ever made.

We also now know, through the investigation by local environmental activist 
Bruce Cattle, just what is contained in the local sewage sludge. Cattle 
obtained a quantity of sewage sludge from the Picton Wastewater plant last 
year. He sent samples to universities and labs in Canada and the U.S. to 
find out just what we were putting on farm fields.

What he found was both enlightening and disturbing. He learned that the 
sludge produced in Picton contains concentrated levels of metals, high to 
very high levels of PBDEs (flame retardants) as well as trace amounts of a 
wide range of pharmaceuticals— from heart medication to mood stabilizer to 
headache remedies.

Any one of these materials is cause for concern. But the PBDE content is 
particularly alarming, as there is a mounting pile of of evidence suggesting 
a link between environmental PBDEs and neurological disorders in children. 
Several jurisidictions have banned the spreading of sewage sludge on farm 
field in reaction to this evidence.

Of course, children don’t graze on farm fields and are unlikely to come into 
contact with sludge in sufficient concentration to be harmful—but the fact 
is we simply don’t know what the longterm implications might be for those 
fields, the food chain and our own health.

It has only been in the last 20 years that the spreading of municipal sludge 
on farm fields has become a common and widespread solution. Previously the 
primary practice was to dump sludge into the ocean and waterways. But when 
biologists pointed out that the sludge was obliterating life on the ocean 
floor near the dump sites in the mid-80s, a compromise was 
struck—municipalities would stop dumping sludge in the water if they could 
put it on farm fields.

So it is not as though we have had several decades of success in putting 
sewage sludge on fields on which to base our confidence. We are in the 
middle of the experiment. The results aren’t yet in. We don’t know for 
example what the long-term impact of combining heavy metals or 
pharmaceuticals with pesticides. We don’t know what effect these materials 
have on crops, on the food we eat or the water we drink.

We know they meet Ministry of Environment guidelines— but we have no way of 
knowing whether these guidelines are sufficient. Unfortunately we’ve learned 
the hard way that we can’t simply trust governments to safeguard public 
health.

rick at wellingtontimes.ca






  Editorial--Wellington Times

**********************************************************
Hazardous waste
Editorial by Rick Conroy, Wellington Times
June 7, 2006

Five large fields around Wellington and Hillier have been getting close 
scrutiny in the past few weeks. They have been getting poked and prodded and 
trod upon as the municipality prepares the necessary paperwork to allow it 
to add these fields to the portfolio of fields on which it may dispose of 
municipal sewage sludge.

Public Works officials are in desperate need for fresh new fields for sewage 
sludge disposal. The municipality has only five fields left on which they 
are allowed to dispose of sludge. Two of these have been loaded to their 
five-year capacity and two of the remaining fields that have been used this 
spring won’t become available again until late in the fall—if at all this 
year. That leaves just one field to take all the sludge generated by the 
Picton and Wellington wastewater treatment facilities this year—or at least 
until these new fields become available.

Many farmers have rejected appeals by the municipality to dispose of this 
waste material on their fields. They worry about the odour as well as the 
long-term effect on their crops and their own health in dealing with the end 
residue of modern society. They also worry about liability, as many insurers 
will not cover property that receives municipal sludge.

So it is welcome news for the Public Works department that a large landowner 
is stepping forward to take the sludge and spread it on his fields. For when 
the municipality is unable to spread sludge on farm fields, it has few 
options, and the one it uses, dumping into a landfill, is expensive. Worse, 
it simply transports the municipality’s problem to another jurisdiction.

First, the water needs to be removed by spinning it dry in a large drum. 
Then the material is loaded onto trucks and hauled to the Richmond landfill 
site near Napanee.

Currently the folks around the Richmond dump have their hands full trying to 
slow down plans by Waste Management Inc. who would like to expand the 
landfill site seven-fold. They also have to worry that if Michigan closes 
their border to Toronto garbage, they could soon see a permanent convoy of 
trucks bringing the metropolis’s garbage to their community. So 
understandably, they have not focused on the issues around absorbing Prince 
Edward County’s municipal sewage sludge—but I think it is safe to assume 
they would prefer we managed our own crap.

So what to do about the poo?

First we have to remind ourselves that sewers are the central repository of 
everything our complex society generates. We gather all the excreta, every 
ingredient, and every chemical compound that is washed down a drain, flushed 
down a toilet or discarded into the catch basin. We stir it altogether and 
mix up a giant soup. Then we put a combination of screens, bacteria and 
chemicals to work in an attempt to neutralize the harmful and dangerous 
compounds to meet increasingly tough standards set by the Ministry of 
Environment.

We capture and neutralize many of the harmful ingredients— but not all.

The final product from municipal sewage is sludge—the distillation of 
everything which we are trying to rid ourselves. That, we put on farm 
fields. Where livestock graze. Where we grow our food.

Of course we have long used animal and even human waste on fields as a 
fertilizer, with few, if any, ill effects. But this practice of distributed 
application of waste is in no way comparable to the centralized collection 
and distillation of all the excreta from factories, hospitals, schools, 
residences and businesses. Furthermore, we have far more chemicals and 
specifically, pharmaceuticals, flowing through our systems now as a society 
than any individual farm field would ever have been required to endure in 
the past.

More precisely, any farm field subjected to urban sewage sludge might be 
exposed to every chemical compound, every heavy metal and every 
pharmaceutical ever made.

We also now know, through the investigation by local environmental activist 
Bruce Cattle, just what is contained in the local sewage sludge. Cattle 
obtained a quantity of sewage sludge from the Picton Wastewater plant last 
year. He sent samples to universities and labs in Canada and the U.S. to 
find out just what we were putting on farm fields.

What he found was both enlightening and disturbing. He learned that the 
sludge produced in Picton contains concentrated levels of metals, high to 
very high levels of PBDEs (flame retardants) as well as trace amounts of a 
wide range of pharmaceuticals— from heart medication to mood stabilizer to 
headache remedies.

Any one of these materials is cause for concern. But the PBDE content is 
particularly alarming, as there is a mounting pile of of evidence suggesting 
a link between environmental PBDEs and neurological disorders in children. 
Several jurisidictions have banned the spreading of sewage sludge on farm 
field in reaction to this evidence.

Of course, children don’t graze on farm fields and are unlikely to come into 
contact with sludge in sufficient concentration to be harmful—but the fact 
is we simply don’t know what the longterm implications might be for those 
fields, the food chain and our own health.

It has only been in the last 20 years that the spreading of municipal sludge 
on farm fields has become a common and widespread solution. Previously the 
primary practice was to dump sludge into the ocean and waterways. But when 
biologists pointed out that the sludge was obliterating life on the ocean 
floor near the dump sites in the mid-80s, a compromise was 
struck—municipalities would stop dumping sludge in the water if they could 
put it on farm fields.

So it is not as though we have had several decades of success in putting 
sewage sludge on fields on which to base our confidence. We are in the 
middle of the experiment. The results aren’t yet in. We don’t know for 
example what the long-term impact of combining heavy metals or 
pharmaceuticals with pesticides. We don’t know what effect these materials 
have on crops, on the food we eat or the water we drink.

We know they meet Ministry of Environment guidelines— but we have no way of 
knowing whether these guidelines are sufficient. Unfortunately we’ve learned 
the hard way that we can’t simply trust governments to safeguard public 
health.

rick at wellingtontimes.ca