Sludge For Nothing, But PFAS Forever
For Decades, Sewage Treatment Plants Sold (Are Still Selling) BioSludge To Farmers As Low-Cost Fertilizer. But It's Full Of Toxic Chemicals, Including PFAS.
Headline from April 2024:
“This is Chernobyl” Texas ranchers say ‘forever chemicals’ in waste-based fertilizers ruined their land
In Johnson County, Texas, ranchers say cattle, fish, and horses are dying and getting sick because of a fertilizer spread on nearby farmland. The fertilizer is made from treated human waste from the city of Fort Worth. The company that makes the fertilizer says its products meet government standards.
County officials have launched a criminal investigation, and ranchers are suing, saying runoff from the fertilizer has made their land useless.
“This stuff should be banned all across America,” said rancher Tony Coleman. “I mean, what are our children going to do? You are ruining their land. You are ruining their water source... This has to stop.”
You can read the full story here.
From my inbox May 2024:
URGENT! PFAS Has Contaminated Our Water
I received a block of emails from members of Calhoun: Water Matters, a coalition that was created for Gordon County, Georgia, residents to ask questions about PFAS, tell their stories, and find factual information about PFAS in their drinking water.
They wrote:
Gordon County is currently experiencing extreme PFAS contamination. The Southern Environmental Law Center, the biggest law firm in the Southeast, has filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of the Coosa River Basin Initiative, a nonprofit. They allege the entire watershed of Gordon county has been polluted with PFAS because of illegal dumping of toxic materials through the water treatment plant and Coosawattee River itself.
The water in Gordon county is simply polluted: all of it. The engineer the city hired to fix PFAS maintains that home filtration is not needed. However, PFAS still remains in large numbers on one city water line, and we are awaiting results after GAC filters have been installed on the other city water line to see those numbers.
Thousands of local families have been affected. Families are now resorting to big jugs of water or else a spigot way out in the county to go get water. Cattle still graze on this farmland where 28,000 tons of industrial toxic sludge has been distributed.
What’s going on? The fertilizer comes from sludge, also known as biosolids. It’s the leftovers from treating wastewater.
Farmers in Maine, Michigan, and all throughout this country are facing (or are going to face) similar issues. This problem isn’t just one community, sadly. The PFAS is everywhere! When it comes to PFAS, it’s so pervasive, that if you look for it, you will find it.
Now that the U.S. EPA has announced new limits on these “forever chemicals,” it will impact roughly 66,000 water systems nationwide.
But the EPA’s new PFAS rules don’t apply to biosolids. The EPA said it aims to conduct a first-ever assessment of PFAS in biosolids later this year, which we can only hope will result in expanded regulations. In the meantime, communities need to know they are at risk. It’s likely that any farmland in the U.S. that has used biosolids products has a PFAS problem.
How did the waste get there? Every time you use a toilet or sink, the waste (along with soaps, cleaning chemicals, and medicines) flows through the sewer systems and into sewage treatment plants.
These plants process everything from industrial waste to the liquid that leaks from landfills. All that processing leaves behind sludge, a mass of solid waste. The pollutants and chemicals have been removed but not destroyed in the treatment process. Many drugs and personal care products exit treatment plants unchanged from how they entered.
The U.S. generates millions of tons of sludge every year, and it has to go somewhere. Sewage treatment plants sell nutrient-rich sludge to farmers as low-cost fertilizer. Some sewage plants have even sold or given it away to residents to fertilize home gardens.
Some 19 billion pounds of wastewater sludge was spread on farmland in 41 states between 2016 and 2022. The EPA estimates that 60 percent of biosolids in the U.S. are applied to agricultural lands.
The PFAS crisis in Maine revealed that sludge is a huge conveyor of PFAS chemicals. One farm saw PFAS levels in its water 400 times higher than state limits.
PFAS leach from sludge and into our soil and groundwater. They can be absorbed by the plants we eat. They travel from contaminated feed to dairy cows and their milk.
Farms throughout the country have faced contamination. In several states, residents and advocates are voicing concerns about sludge and its role in PFAS contamination.
Maine has done a lot to address PFAS through policy. It outlawed spreading sludge on fields and passed a ban on non-essential uses of PFAS. Last summer, the state legislature established a $60 million fund to help farms contaminated by PFAS.
We need these policies at a national level. We need communities in throughout the country to have access to funds that can help protect them from this mess.
[Much thanks to the research above provided by Food & Water Watch here.]
Polluters Need to Pay
We need to stop the use of toxic chemicals that end up in sewage plants. We need to hold accountable the corporations that flooded our lives with PFAS in the first place.
Two of the largest makers of PFAS (3M and DuPont) have long-known the potential harms of their product, but hid behind weak regulations and kept their own science hidden from the public. They’ve paid legal fees instead of doing the right thing and pulling harmful products from the market.
A 2022 review of industry documents showed that companies knew PFAS was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested” by 1970, 40 years before the public health community.
“The industry used several strategies that have been shown common to tobacco, pharmaceutical, and other industries to influence science and regulation—most notably, suppressing unfavorable research and distorting public discourse,” the researchers wrote.
Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA)—just one of thousand of PFAS chemicals—helped sustain the success of one of the world’s largest corporations: DuPont (and its spin-off the Chemours Company).
PFOA is an essential component of Teflon, used to make their signature nonstick cookware. Chemours, spun out of DuPont in 2015, now owns and produces Teflon itself. Safety concerns about Teflon and other perfluorinated chemicals started to gain public attention more than a decade ago. In 2005, DuPont paid a $16.5 million settlement to the EPA, which accused the company of violating the Toxic Substances Control Act by concealing knowledge of PFOA’s toxicity and its presence in the environment. It was the largest civil administrative penalty the EPA had obtained in its history at that time, yet the fine represented less than 2 percent of DuPont’s profits from PFOA that year.
Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), another PFAS chemical, was the key ingredient of Scotchgard, a fabric protector made by 3M, a global conglomerate headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, that reported $30 billion in sales in 2016. Scotchgard, introduced to the market in the 1950s, became the benchmark for protecting carpets from stains. But the PFOS contained in it has never been good for people’s health.
“PFOS is persistent, bio-accumulative, and toxic to mammalian species,” according to a 2002 study by the environmental directorate of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Persistent, accumulative, and toxic are not a good combination.
PFOS and PFOA were also used to make firefighting foams used at military bases throughout the country from the 1970s on. When water supplies near these bases have been tested, widespread contamination has been found. The U.S. Department of Defense knew for decades that these foams had possible adverse environmental and health effects before the public was made aware of concerns. Communities near bases from Washington State to New York are pursuing lawsuits against 3M for PFOS contamination in their water supplies.
PFOS was voluntarily phased out of production in the U.S. by 3M between 2000 and 2002, and the EPA issued regulations to limit future manufacturing. Yet the damage to the environment and our health has persisted.
Health Concerns
DuPont scientists concluded that PFOA is linked to 6 illnesses, including kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, thyroid disease, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and high cholesterol.
“Studies indicate that exposure to PFOA and PFOS over certain levels may result in adverse health effects, including developmental effects to fetuses during pregnancy or to breastfed infants (e.g., low birth weight, accelerated puberty, skeletal variations), cancer (e.g., testicular, kidney), liver effects (e.g., tissue damage), immune effects (e.g., antibody production and immunity), thyroid effects and other effects (e.g., cholesterol changes),” according to the EPA’s own fact sheet for PFOA and PFOS.
Research has linked PFOS exposure to immune suppression, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, reduced fertility, and possible cancers in the bladder, colon, and prostate.
Environmental Working Group maintains an interactive map of PFAS contamination here.
Watch Now: Baby Heaven
Last week, NBC News debuted this hour-long special about Camp Lejeune.
Baby Heaven: The Buried Stories of Camp Lejeune
For the first time five mothers detail their heart-break: veteran marines, wives, and daughters most of whom are sick themselves, all of whom lost babies after being exposed to the toxic water at Camp Lejeune. Their journeys are filled with pain and fury as they confront the ways they say they’ve been lied to and deceived for decades. This is a painful but important watch, and I’m so glad these moms have the opportunity to tell their story. Warning: You’ll want tissues.