Sludge Watch ==> Bronx NY - What Stinks? New York Organic (sludge) Fertilizer Company

[Maureen Reilly]

March 25, 2008,


What Stinks? The Mourners Wore Hazmat Suits
By Tina Kelley
New York Times

The coffin held the South Bronx. The mourners wore asthma inhalers and face 
masks. And the litany of complaints regarding the New York Organic 
Fertilizer Company was all too familiar: the smell was unholy, the demands 
righteous.

Neighbors of the New York Organic Fertilizer Company, on Oak Point Avenue in 
the Hunts Point section, held a candlelight vigil in front of the plant this 
afternoon. Sludge from the city sewer system is burned there and made into 
fertilizer pellets.

The South Bronx is dying from the odor, said Wilfredo Febre, a member of the 
environmental justice committee of Mothers on the Move.

The groups demands, addressed to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Emily Lloyd, 
head of the citys Department of Environmental Protection, included imposing 
higher standards on the company and the Hunts Point Water Pollution Control 
Plant, and reducing odors in the neighborhood.
South Bronx residents are basically sick of the years of breathing that 
nauseating smell of the sewage, said Mr. Febre, who lives a half-mile from 
the company and has to close the windows if the wind is from the south or 
southwest.

Michael Saucier, a spokesman for Environmental Protection, said a 
multiagency effort is under way to investigate a broad range of odor sources 
in the Hunts Point area.
A call to Synagro Technologies, a Houston-based company of which the company 
is a subsidiary, was not immediately returned.

The fertilizer plant, which opened in 1992, has on occasion been viewed as a 
good neighbor. But in recent years it has been cited for air-pollution 
violations and even the subject of a shareholder resolution brought before 
Synagro.

The environmental protection agency in New York said it was committed to 
keeping the discussion going, and to find out the problems real sources.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/what-stinks-the-mourners-wore-hazmat-suits/