Stopping Sludge

Two hundred people trudged through a foot of wet early snow on a Saturday morning last November to get to a public forum in Concord, New Hampshire on the dangers of the land spreading of municipal sewage sludge. The forum drew people from across the state to tease apart fact from fiction in the sludge fight. Across the nation, thousands are going to meetings like this one, signing petitions, and organizing to stop the dumping of sewage sludge onto agricultural land.

Sewage sludge has been around for as long as sewers have been collecting waste from city drains and sending it to wastewater treatment plants. But it has only been in the past five years, since the rules governing the disposal of sludge were re-written as part of the Environmental Protection Agency's Part 503 regulations in the Clean Water Act, that sewage sludge has had a marketing makeover and the federal government reclassified it from a hazardous material to a "safe" fertilizer. But it's the same old sludge -- a mixture of whatever is flushed down toilets, runs off roads, is disposed of by industries, and enters one of the 15,000 publicly owned sewage treatment plants around the country. Sludge is the poisonous dregs of the treatment process, which was never intended to, nor could it be made to render the noxious stuff -- heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and so on, some of it radioactive -- innocuous.

People working to stop the land spreading of sludge, craftily called "biosolids" by the waste industry, have many concerns about it. For example, leaving aside that the spreading is without full disclosure and therefore necessarily without "informed consent," once spread all liability transfers to the landowner. The presence of toxins and radioactivity in sludge is unpredictable. The control of the 21 pollutants regulated by the Part 503s is lax and there is no control of the tens of thousands of other contaminants. Food grown with sludge is not labeled. And finally, there is outright denial by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the very federal agency that should be protecting the environment, of sludge's toxicity to people, animals, land, and aquatic ecosystems. Opponents of sludge spreading point to sick neighbors, dairy herds staggering with Molybdenum poisoning, and croplands poisoned with heavy metals, but the EPA supports the spreaders.

So far the success at stopping sewage sludge from being spread on land is hit or miss. The effort at promoting cheap disposal of sludge by calling it a fertilizer is a national one, orchestrated by the EPA with the eager complicity of the waste management industry, which stands to profit handsomely, and of city officials charged with dealing with municipal wastes. Efforts to stop it are local. With little or no institutional support, people -- scared and angry -- are educating themselves and using whatever time and resources they have to stop sludge from being dumped on their communities.

California, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Hampshire are states in the forefront of anti-sludge activism. But the action isn't happening on the state level, it is happening in town meetings and other local venues, with local citizens orchestrating the activities.

David Broadwater, a resident of San Luis Obisbo county in California, learned about a plan by Bio Gro, a subsidiary of Waste Management Incorporated (WMX), to spread 17,000 tons of sludge per year on a 1,000 acre ranch in the county. In a flurry of activity, Broadwater and other local activists took Bio Gro by surprise. They lobbied the Regional Water Quality Control Board to vote 6 to 3 last May to require an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the project. Bio Gro decided not to pursue the EIR, which effectively stopped the dumping. The County Health Commission put the issue on the agenda at its July 13 meeting, a first step toward establishing local control of sludge spreading. Broadwater says the next step is getting them to adopt the right kind of regulation. No easy job, but, he says, it's "a story the entire country should pay attention to. The EPA is putting pressure on the state to control local folks. A big steamroller is coming at the entire state."

It doesn't always take petitions, letter writing campaigns, and other grassroots organizing efforts to stop sludge dumping. In the Sacramento/San Joaquin river delta, the Delta Protection Commission, a state appointed board, administratively banned the spreading of sludge. The California Conference of Directors of Environmental Health, representing 52 of California's 58 counties, is urging Governor Pete Wilson to stop all spreading of sewage sludge on farms. In a recent letter to Gov. Wilson, the Conference of Directors proposed that "no biosolids/sewage sludge be applied to any direct food crops in California." Already, California sludge haulers dump 1.8 million tons of sludge on farmland each year. The group is asking the state to address the patchwork of ordinances adopted by different counties and the lack of federal regulations to protect California agricultural land from sludge pollution. Minimum statewide regulations would set the stage for scaling-up the sludge fight in other parts of the country from local ordinances to state regulations and move sludge back into the realm of a hazardous material.

Citizen's in New Hampshire have taken a different approach, mandated by different political rules in the Granite state. Their efforts are directed at passing town ordinances, challenging what Helane Shields, a founding member of the anti-sludge group "Citizen's For a Future New Hampshire," calls the NH Department of Environmental Protection's "open door policy" to sludge dumping in the state.

"The sludge industry says they have to comply with strict state and federal rules. Let's consider this analogy. A state trooper pulls you over and tells you, ' You have to comply with strict speed limits,' then tells you to go on your way and don't go any faster than 170 miles per hour. That is exactly what is happening with EPA and New Hampshire sludge rules. The sludge industry is going 170 miles per hour in New Hampshire. The only way you can protect yourself is by enacting local ordinances or bans."

Shields submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to the EPA regarding two 1997 studies; the "Nine-Site Radioactivity Sewage Sludge Survey" and "Ecological Risks from Land Application of Sewage Sludge." Their requests were denied. New Hampshire's Senator Judd Gregg wrote a May 1998 letter to Carol Browner, Administrator of the EPA, asking her to release the reports to "assure an informed public dialogue on an important and controversial environmental public policy issue." The EPA unexplainably continues to deny access to the requested information.

In neighboring Vermont, where 40% of the state's sludge is now land applied, and according to Ellen Taggart, of the statewide family farm organization, Rural Vermont, "local control is an issue in as much there IS no local control." The absence of local control is an issue that groups such as Rural Vermont and East Montpeliers Citizen's for Clean Compost have rallied around. In East Montpelier, residents voted overwhelmingly to stop construction of a sludge composting plant. The non-binding vote was ignored by city officials, but residents and activists have managed to tie up the permitting process, stopping construction for now. Last month the Clean Land Campaign was formed to help push legislation through the Vermont State House. It would give towns the right to a binding vote on sludge composting facilities, handing local control back to East Montpellier and other towns that want to say no to sludge.

Other grassroots organizations around the nation act as clearinghouses and support networks. Tina Daly, a member of the Pennsylvania Environmental Network, said her group is "trying to give people the ammunition they need so they can fight their own fight." The organization distributes information on sludge, helping people stop sludge dumping at mine reclamation projects and on Pennsylvania farms.

The list of people willing to educate themselves, speak out, and bring accountability to the process is a long one and it's getting longer. The philanthropic community hasn't caught on to the problem. Mainstream national environmental groups have dropped -- or not picked up -- the ball. Elected officials are looking for the cheapest means of disposal and they have found it with loosely regulated land application. But local activists are coming through with innovative and effective controls on toxic sludge.

Laura Orlando

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