Sludge Watch ==> Paper Sludge - Causing sparks in Ontario farm press

[Maureen Reilly]

http://www.betterfarming.com/2007/october/envir.htm

Regulations may soon be on the way for paper-sludge spreading
The use of paper sludge products like Nitro-Sorb remains contentious and the 
Ontario Federation of Agriculture, for one, is advocating more controls
by DON STONEMAN

Love it, hate it, or tolerate it, paper sludge and the products it is made 
into cause sparks wherever they are used in rural Ontario.

Haldimand farmer Bob Misener doesn’t care about the controversy. “We’re 
happy because it’s a source of plant nutrients that doesn’t cost us a lot of 
money,” says Misener, who farms about 3,000 acres of soybeans, corn, cereals 
and clover near Caledonia.
“When you aren’t making any money, you have to look for cheaper sources of 
nutrients.”

Near Blackstock, in Durham Region, dairy farmer Deb Vice has pushed for 
years to have land applications of paper biosolids and all associated 
products regulated by the Ministry
Environment through Certificates of Approval which spell out how a product 
will be applied, at what rate and under what conditions.

A particularly contentious product being used on some farms is Nitro-Sorb. 
Some farmers like Misener refer to the stuff spread where he farms as “paper 
sludge mixed with lime.”

Durham applicator Bob Campsall says it is more complicated than that. The 
product he calls Nitro-Sorb TM is a mixture of paper biosolids from Atlantic 
Packaging plants in Scarborough and Whitby, compost from Durham Region, and 
lime. Nitro-Sorb TM is regulated under the federal Fertilizers Act and 
therefore isn’t classed as a Non-Agricultural Source Material (NASM). NASMs 
are generally regulated and spread under Certificates of Approval by the 
Ministry of the Environment (MOE).

Michael Payne, a biosolids specialist with the Ontario Ministry of 
Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), says the MOE has classified 
Nitro-Sorb as a fertilizer and therefore does not regulate it.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) hasn’t licensed Nitro-SorbTM as a 
fertilizer, but that doesn’t mean any laws are being broken, according to 
Kate Billingsley, national manager of the fertilizer safety office at the 
CFIA. Products which are
“a straight N, P, K” don’t require registration, she says.

Campsall works for Ontario Disposal Limited (ODL), which also builds berms 
for gun clubs using another contentious product called Sound-Sorb. Campsall 
says he has nothing to do with that product.

But he can’t get away from it. Sound-Sorb’s opponents were so vociferous 
that an Expert’s Committee on Sound-Sorb was launched and gave a report to 
the government in 2003, which called for stiffer regulations and monitoring. 
The committee admits that Nitro-Sorb wasn’t in its terms of reference but 
passed judgment anyway, saying:
“The use of paper fibre biosolids material mixed with mineral soil should 
also be subject to MOE control with respect to its preparation and use in 
the environment by a certificate of approval or legal instrument that 
provides equal or better protection for human health and the environment.”

ODL’s owner, Harvey Ambrose, told Better Farming that his company is not 
involved with Empire Agri-Services of Canfield, which local news reports had 
said was distributing a similarly-named, and equally controversial, product 
in the Greater Toronto Area.

David Brenzil, formerly the president of Empire, is now spreading a 
Nitro-Sorb product under the name of DL Brenzil Enterprises. “There’s 
different types of Nitro-Sorb,” he explains. The paper sludge base for this 
product comes from Abitibi-Consolidated, which has a mill in Thorold. 
Brenzil said he adds compost “but not necessarily lime” to the paper sludge 
he spreads, depending upon the farmer’s preference.

In 2006, the Corporation of the City of Kawartha Lakes (formerly Victoria 
County) passed a bylaw “prohibiting the use of paper fibre biosolids on any 
class of land within the city.”

Bob Campsall says that similar bylaws against Nitro-Sorb spreading have been 
passed by other municipalities, but were withdrawn later. He hopes the same 
will happen with Kawartha’s bylaw.

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture’s Keith Currie, chair of the 
environment committee says, “We would like to see these products regulated 
in some way. We don’t want to tell people that they can’t use them…Once they 
are blended, they are no longer regulated.”

Currie lumps Sound-Sorb and Nitro-Sorb into the same category. Sound-Sorb 
may be mixed with sand left over from sandblasting and contain stone chips 
and heavy metals. “It’s not that we are against these products.
We just want to see some controls on them.”
As for Nitro-Sorb, it might not be agricultural lime, he says. “You don’t 
necessarily know what it is blended with.”

Campsall says that he is applying the product to achieve an agronomic 
objective, and applications that follow the terms of a Certificate of 
Approval will not achieve the same objective. More of the product is needed 
on sandy soils where nutrient leaching is a problem, he asserted. Also, 
working with a certificate will require more paperwork and more environment 
ministry officers on farms.

If Campsall is right, there may be a reason why the MOE has not followed the 
recommendations of the expert committee on Sound-Sorb and adopted a 
certificate of approval approach. “Staffing constraints hamper MOE’s ability 
to process, review and update Cs of A,” blared a headline in the Environment 
Commissioner of Ontario’s Special Report to the Legislative Assembly of 
Ontario last spring.

The MOE already gets 8,000 applications for new or amended Certificates of 
Approval each year but can only approve 6,500-7,000, so there is a growing 
backlog of about 1,000 a year.

Meanwhile, Toronto activist Maureen Reilly has also jumped into the battle 
over Nitro-Sorb. She says that there is growing opposition to Nitro-Sorb, 
paper sludge and other biosolids spreading in Warkworth in the east and near 
London in western Ontario.
Campsall believes otherwise.

He thinks that the program that he is following is gaining ground. In one 
week in August, he signed up another 1,000 acres of cropland for ODL’s 
Nitro-Sorb program. He says that farmers want the product on their fields 
because increased organic matter helps soils to hold off drought. The 
benefits really showed up this year, he says.

Meanwhile, regulations may be on the way, according to Payne. “We are 
working on attempting to close that loophole or clear up that gray area. Any 
regulation change with government takes time.” BF