‘Perpetually chemical’-laden sewage sludge is a nationwide emergency

by Dave Dickey, Columnist, Examine Midwest
February 4, 2025

by Dave Dickey, Columnist, Examine Midwest
February 4, 2025

It is a public service announcement to any farmer who both has fertilized their crops with sewage sludge or is contemplating doing so this spring to save lots of on enter prices.

Cease. Do not. To do in any other case probably places your farm in danger.

The Environmental Safety Company promotes the agricultural use of biosolids, which is sewage sludge that has been handled to satisfy the necessities within the EPA’s regulation, “Requirements for the Use or Disposal of Sewage Sludge.” 

The EPA’s 2022 Biosolid Annual Report exhibits that 31% of all biosolids had been utilized in agricultural functions. One other 24% had been used on residence gardens, landscaping, golf programs and the like.

However EPA is asleep on the change in relation to testing sewage sludge for the presence of polyfluoroalkyl substances — extra generally often known as “without end chemical substances.” It doesn’t.

Which is inexcusable since EPA was knowledgeable in 2003 by 3M, then the nation’s chief producer of PFASs for merchandise like Teflon pans, that prime ranges of PFAS had been turning up within the nation’s sewage.

Sure, greater than 20 years in the past. EPA’s tepid response was to ask 3M for extra data. EPA’s sluggish stroll has confirmed pricey.

It wasn’t till final April that the feds ramped up a PFAS testing program for the nation’s ingesting water. As for sewage sludge? In January, EPA lastly launched a draft danger evaluation for sewage sludge that:

“…displays the company’s newest scientific understanding of the potential dangers to human well being and the atmosphere posed by the presence of PFOA and PFOS in sewage sludge that’s land utilized as a soil conditioner or fertilizer (on agricultural, forested, and different lands), floor disposed (e.g., positioned in a sewage sludge-only landfill known as a monofill), or incinerated.”

For agricultural functions the EPA danger evaluation thought-about three specific situations:

• utility to a farm elevating dairy cows, beef cattle or chickens
• utility to a farm rising fruits or greens
• utility to reclaim broken soils resembling an overgrazed pasture

The outcomes of the draft danger evaluation ought to be alarming to farmers fertilizing with sewage sludge:

“…in some modeled situations, there might be human well being dangers exceeding the EPA’s acceptable thresholds to these residing on or close to impacted farms or primarily counting on their merchandise. These dangers are related to a number of particular person publicity pathways if the impacted individual consumes the modeled quantities of meals or water from the biosolids-amended farms (e.g., ingesting 32 ounces of milk per day, ingesting 1 liter of water per day, consuming 1 egg per day, or consuming 1-2 servings of fish from the impacted waterbody per week).”

What dangers? Final yr, EPA categorized two sorts of PFAS that may be present in sewage sludge — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) — as prone to be carcinogenic to people.

And extra regarding, EPA in April 2024 declared “there is no such thing as a degree of publicity to those contaminants with out danger of well being impacts, together with sure cancers.” Perpetually chemical substances may also be liable for hepatic, immunological, cardiovascular, and developmental results.

For its half 3M was lower than forthright again within the day in sharing with the feds what it knew about PFOS. Someday this yr, 3M claims it’ll stop without end chemical manufacturing. However a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of kilos of without end chemical substances produced over greater than 50 years stay within the atmosphere and our blood.

The underside line is that farmers all around the United States have unknowingly unfold contaminated sewage sludge loaded with without end chemical substances on their land, thanks in no small half to EPA’s failure to make investigation of PFAS a precedence greater than 20 years in the past.

Farmers are simply now waking as much as the unlucky information that they could have polluted their very own fields.

Lawsuits are already flying. One to control is Farmer, Alessi, Schultz, and Coleman v. EPA. The lawsuit accuses EPA of negligence in informing the general public of the the hazards of without end chemical substances:

“EPA’s failure, in its biennial reviews, to determine poisonous PFAS that obtainable data exhibits are current in sewage sludge in concentrations which can adversely have an effect on public well being or the atmosphere beneath 33 U.S.C. § 1345(d)(2)(C) is bigoted and capricious, whereas EPA’s failure to control sure poisonous PFAS regardless of ample obtainable data warranting such regulation constitutes an company motion unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed.”

The lawsuit might probably be a bellwether for a flood of litigation towards EPA and maybe 3M.

And in case you had been questioning, cleansing up of present without end chemical substances at the moment within the atmosphere falls into the realm of science fiction.

So what to do?

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It most likely will not be lengthy till states write legal guidelines that forestall farming on acres contaminated with without end chemical substances. Farmers now not capable of farm will want federal help. Congress must reintroduce and go the Reduction for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act.

And as a nation, we should sluggish extra PFAS contamination on our soil and in our water. Wastewater vegetation have the authorized authority beneath the Clear Water Act to restrict PFAS contamination by requiring factories to wash up the effluent despatched their manner beneath the nationwide “pretreatment program.” They need to achieve this. In every single place.

EPA might help by instantly placing a moratorium on the utilization of sewage sludge as a fertilizer till programs and practices are in place making certain it’s without end chemical free.

The nation must be proactive. There is not time to waste.

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