Sludge Watch ==> Piling it High - Sewage Sludge Industry Meets the Light of Day

[Maureen Reilly]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3688/piling_it_high/

May 21, 2008
Piling it High
The sewage sludge industry meets the light of day
By Joel Bleifuss


Veolia Water turns sludge into Orgro High Organic Compost at its Baltimore 
plant.
Share   Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine Nancy Holt, a retired nurse from 
Mebane, N.C., is beset by mysterious neurological problems. She blames the 
cause of her illness on the multiple unknown toxicities of the sewage sludge 
that has been spread since 1991 on the fields across from her house as 
“fertilizer.”

And Holt says she isn’t alone. People in her neighborhood have a high 
incidence of cancer and thyroid problems. Local creeks are no longer safe 
for kids to play in — the danger of staph infection is too great.

In 2001, Holt began chronicling the health problems in her area of rural 
Alamance County — 12 miles north of Chapel Hill. Soon she was tracking 
reports of sludge-related illnesses and deaths across the country.

“I put together the symptoms, the illnesses, the high cancer rates, the 
thyroid disorders in this community,” she says. “It is non-scientific, of 
course.”

“And we have precocious puberty, little girls developing breasts at 5 or 6 
years old, little boys developing armpit hair. And that is something that 
people don’t want to talk about,” Holt says. “They will talk about their 
thyroid glands, their cancers, but they will not talk about early puberty. 
We are on a true toxic tilt.”

For the first time since she became involved in the sludge issue, Holt is 
guardedly hopeful that her concerns will finally be addressed, and that the 
sulphurous alliance between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 
municipal sewer authorities and Synagro Technologies (the nation’s largest 
sludge disposal firm, which was recently bought by the Carlyle Group) — will 
be exposed for the blight it is.

In April, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public 
Works Committee, announced that her committee will hold hearings on the 
issue this summer. The catalyst is a confluence of recent news reports about 
sludge-related scandals.

In the Potomac River, 60 miles upstream from Washington, D.C., scientists 
have discovered many small-mouth male bass with eggs inside their sex 
organs. The cause of these “intersexed” fish is almost certainly endocrine 
disruptors — also known as estrogen mimickers — in the water, chemical 
pollutants that disrupt an animal’s natural hormonal system.

In February, the Washington Post reported that the concentration of 
intersexed fish is greatest near towns or near heavily farmed land. One 
major source of these endocrine disruptors is thought to be the 
post-treatment “cleaned” water from municipal sewage treatment centers that 
is discharged directly into the Potomac River system and runoff from fields 
“fertilized” with sludge.

In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey scientists surveyed chemical contaminants 
found in sludge “destined for land application” and concluded, “Potential 
concerns about the environmental presence of OWCs [Organic Wastewater 
Contaminants] include adverse physiological effects, increased rates of 
cancer, and reproductive impairment in humans and other animals, as well as 
antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria.”

In 2004 when the intersexed fish were first discovered in the Potomac, Gina 
Solomon, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) told 
the Associated Press, “It is not good news that there’s something that 
feminizes fish in your water.” Particularly when the Potomac is the source 
of drinking water for Washington, D.C.

Egg-bearing male fish had first been found in 2003 in the South Branch, a 
Potomac tributary in Hardy County, W.V., from which some locals get their 
water. A 2004 survey found that women in Hardy County have 
higher-than-normal rates of cancer of the ovaries and uterus.

This news of male fish bearing eggs was followed with an April report by the 
Associated Press that in 2000, nine Baltimore families — all black residents 
of the city’s east side — received food coupons in exchange for permission 
to allow researchers to spread “Class A” Baltimore sewage sludge (brand 
name, Orgro High Organic Compost) on their yards, till it into the soil and 
then plant grass seed.

The rationale for this experiment was to find out whether municipal sewage 
sludge could lower the amount of lead that children who played in the nine 
experimental yards would absorb. Veolia Water, the corporation that markets 
Baltimore municipal sludge as Orgro, claims its “beneficial biosolids” are 
so safe they are even used on the White House lawn.

“Beneficial biosolids” is the term that Powell Tate, a D.C.-based public 
relations firm, invented in the early ’90s, in an attempt to linguistically 
detoxify the 7 million tons of sludge — industrial waste, hospital waste, 
pharmaceuticals in addition to feces — that the nation’s 16,000 municipal 
sewer systems produce each year.

At the time, the EPA, working hand in hand with the Water Environment 
Federation and the corporate waste disposal industry, reclassified sewage 
sludge from a toxic waste to a fertilizer. As a USDA approved fertilizer, 
sludge was thus exempt from environmental regulations.

Today, waste disposal firms spread more than half of the 7 million tons of 
organic and inorganic toxins on American farms as “fertilizer.”

Andy McElmurray, a farmer in Hephzibah, Ga., fed his dairy cows silage that 
had been fertilized with sewage sludge laced with heavy metals. More than 
300 of them died.

In February, a federal judge ordered the Department of Agriculture to 
compensate McElmurray for losses incurred when his land was poisoned between 
1979 and 1990 by applications of Augusta, Ga., sewage sludge. That sludge 
contained levels of arsenic that were two times higher than EPA standards 
allow; of thallium (a heavy metal used as rat poison) that were 25 times 
higher; and of PCBs that were 2,500 times higher.

What’s more, milk from his neighbor’s dairy farm was sent to market with 
thallium levels 120 times higher than those allowed by the EPA in public 
drinking water.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo was particularly critical 
of the EPA and the University of Georgia for having endorsed “unreliable, 
incomplete and, in some cases, fudged” data about the Augusta sludge. That 
corrupt data was presented to the National Academy of Sciences, which then 
cited it in their July 2002 assertion that sewage sludge does not pose a 
risk to public health.

Alaimo wrote, “Senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash 
scientific dissent, and any questioning of EPA’s biosolids program.”

For example, in May 2003, the EPA fired David Lewis, one of the nation’s 
leading sludge researchers, for publicly criticizing the agency’s pro-sludge 
policy. In February 2004, at a hearing of the U.S. House Mineral and 
Resources subcommittee, Lewis testified:

The EPA has completely politicized the scientific peer-review process, both 
inside and outside the agency. … This whole process, of course, is nothing 
more than a scam. … It is a scam run by program office managers who are not 
qualified as research scientists and whose official position descriptions 
require that they defend EPA policies. In this case, the same EPA officials 
who developed the agency’s sludge policy are using the vast resources of the 
federal government to cover up adverse health effects and environmental 
damage resulting from the scientifically flawed policy they created.
The Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems (http://www.riles.org) has 
been a leader in the sludge fight since the early ’90s. The Boston nonprofit 
was founded in 1990 by Abby Rockefeller, an ecologist involved with 
sewage-related issues since the ’70s. (Disclosure: Rockefeller is a member 
of the In These Times Publishing Consortium.)

Laura Orlando, the group’s executive director, sums up the current state of 
America’s sewer systems this way:

It’s a public works program for corporations to dump their waste into 
publicly owned treatment facilities. We taxpayers pay for it not only in the 
infrastructure costs but also with our health from exposure to its toxic 
products — toxic wastewater and toxic sewage sludge — that are released into 
the environment. We are giving corporations a free ride. They have no 
liability. They dump their toxic waste down the drain and it is out of their 
hands.
Orlando, like Holt, is encouraged by the prospect of congressional hearings.

“There are thousands of people known to be sickened from the land 
application of sewage sludge,” she says, “people whose health is degraded, 
whose livestock have died or whose farms have been ruined. The Senate 
Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing will be the first time 
these people will get a chance to tell their stories.”

Taking the long view, Rockefeller puts it this way: “We human beings, the 
world over, so concerned about the growing shortage of clean water, must 
reconsider our cavalier use of water as the transportation medium for all 
our waste — industrial and personal.”

What better way to mark the 45th anniversary of environmentalist Rachel 
Carson’s June 4, 1963, testimony before the U.S. Senate Government 
Operations Subcommittee hearings on environmental hazards?

Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an 
investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had 
more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored 
Stories” than any other journalist.