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.
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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. |
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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.
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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 |
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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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