Concerns grow over tainted sewage sludge spread on croplands

[turbinetree]

By JOHN FLESHER and MICHAEL CASEY today

LAPEER, Mich. (AP) — For more than 20 years, the eastern Michigan town of Lapeer sent leftover sludge from its sewage treatment plant to area farms, supplying them with high-quality, free fertilizer while avoiding the expense of disposal elsewhere.

But state inspectors ordered a halt to the practice in 2017 after learning the material was laced with one of the potentially harmful chemicals known collectively as PFAS, which are turning up in drinking water and some foods across the U.S.

Now, the city of 8,800 expects to pay about $3 million to have the waste treated at another facility and the leftover solids shipped to a landfill. Testing has found elevated PFAS levels in just one field where the sludge was spread, but farmers have lost an economical fertilizer source and hope more contamination doesn’t turn up.

“I feel bad for them,” said Michael Wurts, superintendent of the waste treatment plant, who ruefully recalls promoting sludge as an agricultural soil additive to growers in the community. “The city didn’t do anything malicious. We had no clue this was going on.”

https://www.apnews.com/32c65a5b3c27468ea2cdd2ce97848825

Native American practice of fertilizer

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1740002?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

But now since the waters are becoming contaminated and other measures being put in place..................

[mopinko]

1. nasty shit. and dow has done a great job of keeping the word teflon out

of the stories on this. i wasnt sure that was what they were talking about, so i googled. the word did not appear in the excerpts that pooped up. just "non-stick cookware", etc.

it's not the only one, but it is the biggie.
nasty, nasty, nasty shit.

[turbinetree]

2. Yepper spot on.............................

[onethatcares]

3. wasn't that called "Milorganite" at one time?

it's taken out of the treatment plants as a semi solid, spread over a field or a large impervious structure and allowed to dry.

then it's milled, put in bags and sold to the public as a nitrogen supplement for their lawns. Largest users are golf courses I think.

No matter how you slice it though, it's a layer of shit on the earth. One with potential hazards for human kind.

I would not use it on my lawn or vegetable garden, ever.

[KT2000]

5. In Washington,

fertilizer is allowed to contain toxic metals - sometimes enough to kill crop as what happened in Quincy, Washington.
The intent is to save corporations the cost of toxic waste disposal.

[KT2000]

4. that stuff is everywhere

Secondary treatment does not rid the sludge of some bacteria that are known to cause illness and some pharmaceuticals. This sludge is sprayed on farmlands, federal forest lands, and state forest lands. It is pretty sickening. There are known treatments that would prevent this. One is incineration to certain high degrees. One new method actually makes bricks out of the cleaned sludge.