#Green hell fertilizer free#

Critics say the agency has consistently ignored the risks. It points out that sludge has never been conclusively linked to any serious illnesses or deaths. The Netherlands and Switzerland effectively ban the use of sludge on farmland, and 37 states regulate it more strictly than the EPA.ĭespite the growing stink, the EPA has remained bullish on sludge through three presidential administrations. Heinz won’t accept produce grown on sludge-treated land. Food companies such as Del Monte and H.J. A federal radiation task force recently warned that sludge might be contaminated with radioactive waste in January, shipments of Canadian sludge with elevated radioactivity levels were turned back at the border. While sludge sold to consumers must be virtually pathogen free, sludge used on farms and industrial sites is permitted to contain low levels of human pathogens. Sludge’s dirty secret is that it may contain anything that goes down the drain-from Prozac flushed down toilets to motor oil hosed from factory floors. In a 1994 episode often cited by sludge foes, an 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy died of a staph infection after biking through sludge at an abandoned mine. In communities where sludge has been used, residents have reported ailments ranging from migraines to pneumonia to mysterious deaths. But as sludge has spread across the country, so have concerns that it may cause as many environmental problems as it solves. Turning sewage into a potent, inexpensive fertilizer means cleaner rivers and oceans. In theory, recycling poop is the perfect solution to the one truly unavoidable byproduct of human civilization. Sludge could be the ultimate growth industry as one trade publication observes dryly, “There will continue to be more wastewater solids to manage with every passing year.” (The rest is incinerated or landfilled.) Recycling sewage is big business: In 2007 the Carlyle Group paid $772 million for the sludge-residuals company Synagro, whose products are the most popular on the market. Today, more than half the 15 trillion gallons of sewage Americans flush annually is biologically scrubbed, “dewatered,” and processed into products with names like BioEdge, Nitrohumus, and Vital Cycle and spread on farmland, lawns, and home vegetable gardens. “The Clintons are walking around on poo,” the EPA’s sludge chief quipped in 1998. The Environmental Protection Agency launched a PR push to rebrand it as an all-purpose soil conditioner and fertilizer it innocuously called “biosolids.” If sludge was good enough for the first family, the agency reminded us, then surely it was good enough for the rest of America. Four years later, dumping sewage into the ocean was banned, and sludge went national.

The weedy plot’s transformation into a carpet of green caught gardeners’ attention, and soon there was a waiting list to buy bags of ComPRO, a compost made from nearby wastewater plants’ solid effluent, a.k.a. IN AUGUST 1987, the National Park Service tore up the White House’s South Lawn and tilled in heaps of a new, locally produced fertilizer.

#Green hell fertilizer free#

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