The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  Gregory takes some sludge from a chute and tells me to do the same. It’s black, earthy. It looks and feels like a crumbled brownie, rich and fertile. Farmers love this stuff, says Gregory. They honestly can’t get enough. It’s not as good as artificial fertilizers, which have more nitrogen and phosphorous, but for a free product, it’s unbeatable. I ask him if he’d use it on his garden, and he knows that I’m actually asking if it’s safe. “Sure I would. And I’d have my kids roll around in it. No problem.” If they ever bag it and sell it in garden centers, he’d be a satisfied customer. Why not? It’s a marvel, an expensive and remarkable transformation. Cake from milkshake. It’s nearly as good a transfiguration as turning “sludge” into “biosolids.”

  By 1992, American sewage treatment plants had a problem. For the ninety or so years since most cities had installed sewers, the way human waste had been dealt with had not evolved. Remove sludge from the liquid sewage, then treat the water and dump the sludge at sea, in rivers, or in landfill. Effluent from industrial sources was dumped with little regulation. By 1969, Time could write that the nation’s rivers were “convenient, free sewers.” It described Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, which caught fire twice that year, as “chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with sub-surface gases.” Consequently, the Clean Water Act of 1972 provided big money for municipalities to improve their sewage treatment.

  The construction and renovation frenzy that ensued was the largest public works project in the country to date. By its completion, the United States had 16,000 sewage treatment plants and an improved sewage treatment process. But cleaning sewage more efficiently meant removing more dirt. In other words, the Clean Water Act increased the amount of sludge being produced, which was mostly dumped at sea. Farmers like sludge because it has nutrients, but the same nitrogen and phosphorous can feed and breed algae that suck out water’s dissolved oxygen content, leaving it lifeless. Sewage can suffocate the sea. After too many toxic shellfish beds and algal blooms, Congress passed the 1989 Ocean Dumping Ban Act. This gave the industry four years to come up with an alternative to ocean dumping. Americans produce 7 million dry tons of sludge a year. It had to go somewhere.

  At this point, someone must have remembered the “sewage doctors” of nineteenth-century Europe. Men like Justus von Liebig and Alderman Mechi thought Joseph Bazalgette’s new sanitary sewer system was a criminal waste of a potential fertilizer because it discharged the contents of the sewers into the Thames. Liebig calculated the worth of this lost wealth at £4 million. Karl Marx remarked that London “could find no better use for the excretion of four and one-half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.” Alderman Mechi, luxuriating in the modern convenience of household-supplied gas, imagined a future “when each farmer will turn on the tap and supply himself with town sewage through his meter according to his requirements.”

  Sewage taps never caught on, but until wastewater treatment became pervasive in the early twentieth century, sewage farms, which irrigated their fields with raw sewage, thrived all over. Gennevilliers, outside Paris, produced vegetables highly sought-after by Parisian restaurateurs. The sewage farm at Pasadena, California, grew excellent walnuts. The arrival of cheap artificial fertilizers made sewage farming uneconomical, but the principle was sound. Properly treated, sewage could have a place in the nutrient cycle. Food feeds humans whose waste feeds food.

  But by end of the century sludge contained far more than pure human excrement, and hardly any of it good. Anything that gets into the sewers can end up in sludge. U.S. industry is estimated to use 100,000 chemicals, with 1,000 new chemicals being added every year. These chemicals can include PCBs and phthalates, dioxins, and other carcinogens. Sludge may contain pathogens from all sorts of sources. Hospital and funeral waste can include SARS, TB, or hepatitis. Sick people excrete sickness, and it all ends up in the sewers. The HarperCollins Dictionary of Environmental Science defines sludge as “a viscous, semisolid mixture of bacteria and virus-laden organic matter, toxic metals, synthetic organic chemicals and settled solids removed from domestic industrial waste water at a sewage treatment plant.” The Clean Water Act keeps it simple and calls it a pollutant.

  I have to use words like if and may because no one actually knows what’s in sludge. Technically, industries are supposed to pretreat hazardous chemicals and waste, but oversight is minimal. And anyway, no one regulates how thousands of chemicals might react with one another or with the pathogens floating alongside them. The most optimistic view of sludge is that it is a soup of unknowns. Others think it’s toxic and can’t be anything else. Cleaning water is done by removing contaminants and concentrating them in sludge. The better the wastewater treatment process, the worse the sludge.

  So its transformation into fertilizer was going to be a hard sell, but there was little alternative. There are five options for sludge disposal: landfill, incineration, gasification, disposal at sea, and land application. The first three are costly, and ocean dumping is illegal. Land application is legal and cheap. It was not a difficult choice. Also, there was precedent. In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) has been selling its sludge as fertilizer since 1925, with discreet labeling. Only someone who knew what MMSD stood for would realize Milorganite is derived from a human body.

  The sludge and wastewater industry looked at Milorganite and saw the light. No one would want to live near farms where sewage sludge was applied. But people might want to live near fields that were covered in a fertilizer called something else. The transformation of sludge into “biosolids” was brilliantly documented in Toxic Sludge Is Good for You by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The book was about “the lies, damn lies” of the PR industry in general, but the maneuvers of the Water Environment Federation (WEF), the U.S. sewage industry association, were impressive enough to provide the authors with their title. The EPA, they write, was conscious even in 1981 of the need to persuade the public to accept sludge farming. A Name Change Task Force was formed, and suggestions solicited through a WEF newsletter. The 250 suggestions received included “bioslurp,” “black gold,” “the end product,” “hudoo,” “powergro,” and—my favorite—ROSE, standing for “Recycling Of Solids Environmentally.” Biosolids won, probably because it was the blandest. Maureen Reilly, a prominent sludge opponent and the producer of the prolific SludgeWatch newsletter, calls this “linguistic detoxification.”

  _______

  Chris Peot thinks the name change was common sense and nothing more. He uses Jell-O as an example. “It’s called Jell-O for a reason. It’s not called gelatinous red goo because no one would buy it. Of course you’re going to try and have a name for your product that is palatable. This is a product that helps the farmers, that is valuable. We’d be insane to call it sludge.”

  Peot’s was the other name suggested by the National Biosolids Partnership. He runs the biosolids program at Washington, D.C.’s Blue Plains plant. He’s on a conference call when I arrive at his office, so I pass the time reading the Positions Available advertisements in the lobby. A young man is filling in an application form, and I wonder if it’s the announcement for a Wastewater Treatment Plant Operator, a job that will require him to “troubleshoot operational problems including process microbiology” and “perform laboratory analysis.” Wastewater personnel keep effluent clean. Because effluent ends up in drinking water sources, even low-level employees are the guardians of the nation’s safe drinking water. To qualify for this weighty responsibility, the Operator is required to have a high school diploma and lift fifty pounds.

  Blue Plains is so big it has road signs. (I like Solids Road best.) Despite its vastness, it is totally automated and directed from a command center that looks like mission control, with three enormous plasma screens and several banks of monitors. The place is impressive, and so is Peot, when we finally coincide. He is handsome, like Alexandria’s Paul Carbary, tall and lean and dressed in normal clothes—hiking boots, comfortable trousers—not a sui
t. I’m beginning to wonder if all biosolids managers are designed by Gap.

  He is also languid and likable, but the calmness shouldn’t deceive. He is in charge of an operation worth $20 million a year. He has a $250,000 annual research budget. I start with the most obvious question: Why do people hate biosolids so much?

  He thinks it’s all about smell. “We’re all preprogrammed to be afraid of our own waste.” Cave people who didn’t avoid the potentially pathogenic matter that was their own excrement probably got sick and died out. “Maybe they slipped and fell in it, then they went back into the cave and made a sandwich and they culled themselves from the gene pool. Everyone who was sensitive to the sulphur odors, which is the trigger, avoided it. So you have a population that’s extremely sensitive to sulphur odors.” Sulphur has been shown to produce anxiety, he says. “That’s exactly what we’re producing from biosolids. So we have a hypersensitive population which is here only because they knew how to avoid the fecal-oral cycle. They’re getting this smell of sulphur and then when they find out it’s human it’s even worse.” Women are the most vocal protesters because they are the protective ones. It’s primal.

  This is a good argument because it is hard to argue with it. Odor can be measured with olfactometry machines—which can bag an odor and then have it smelled by testers—but it’s hard to be definitive about a largely subjective reaction. In 2004, the grand jury in Orange County, California, in a report titled “Does Anyone Want Orange County Sanitation District’s 230,000 Tons of Biosolids?” noted that biosolids proponents described their product’s smell as “musty” or “earthy,” whereas opponents preferred words like “noxious, horrible, putrid, nauseating, eye-watering and sickening.” The jury quoted a list published by the National Academy of Sciences of odorous compounds found in sludge. These included hydrogen sulphide (which smells like rotten eggs); dimethyl sulphide and carbon sulphide (decayed vegetables); thiocresol (skunk-like odor); methylamine, dimethylamine, and trimethylamine (fishy); pyridine (“disagreeable and irritating”). In all fairness, they concluded, “acetaldehyde is reported to smell like apples.” The report writers could “only imagine what odor might emanate from a concoction of these compounds. ‘Musty’ or ‘earthy’ doesn’t come to mind.”

  Peot has regular olfactometry panels to test the palatability of his biosolids. He says that if there’s something wrong with them, he wants to know about it. He speaks the language of cooperation. He sits on a panel with Ellen Harrison, director of the Waste Management Institute at Cornell University and a known skeptic about biosolids. He is funding research by Dr. Rob Hale, a microbiologist at the University of Virginia who discovered that organic chemicals found in flame retardants persist in sludge despite treatment and end up in the food chain.

  Peot regularly attends public meetings where the safety of biosolids is debated, usually ferociously. He thinks it’s important to show the friendly face of biosolids. “If it’s Synagro [in attendance] or some other big public behemoth, people aren’t going to believe it.” He is more believable, he says, because he has less at stake. “I’m a public servant. I’m doing this because I think it’s helping to save the planet in my little corner of the world.”

  In another little corner of the world, Peot’s routine would persuade no one. In this corner, a brown field covered with Class B biosolids sits a hundred feet or so from Nancy Holt’s white bungalow. The field is a six-hour drive from Washington, through Virginia and into North Carolina, through an invisible border where all the radio stations turn into country music ones, off Route 85 to a quiet hamlet near the town of Mebane.

  I arrive sweaty and dazed by jingles and guitar jangling to be greeted by a warm woman who gives me a hug and a wet rag for my forehead. Her accent—treacly southern—soothes, too. Nancy lives here with her husband, Bruce, who wears his white hair long and Willie Nelson–like, and blue topaz on his fingers. Family photos of pretty granddaughters and handsome sons are placed around the tidy household. On a car outside, there are antiwar stickers. This is picture-postcard rural America. Except some things aren’t visible in the picture, such as the effects of the farmer’s fertilizer over the road, and what Nancy thinks it has done to her and her neighbors, which is nothing good and possibly lethal.

  Nancy has lived in this hamlet all her life, and her family has farmed land in these parts for 250 years. She wasn’t interested in farming the land, though she still lives on it. Instead, she became a nurse, then moved into medical equipment sales. She serves iced tea, and then some more, then sits me down at the kitchen table and prepares the weapons of the grassroots protester: piles of files, dossiers, reports, and a scientific vocabulary she has accumulated along with frustration and disbelief. She begins by saying that the year before, sludge was applied for thirty-three days straight to the field in question. “Based on the number of 6,000-gallon tankers that came to apply it, we came up with the best guess that 9.75 million gallons [were] spread on 160 acres. They were doing it twelve hours a day and a truck would arrive every ten minutes.” That was when she went blind.

  She wasn’t a well woman to begin with. When I’d called to make the appointment, she’d apologized for misunderstanding something by saying, “I have holes in my head.” I took it as a joke, but she does have holes in her head, after surgery for an ailment that she doesn’t describe but which left her with metal clamps in her brain. One time when the sludge was applied—it’s been arriving twice a year, spring and summer, for thirteen years—the arteries in her brain swelled, pressed on her optic nerve, and temporarily took away her sight. The diagnosis was giant cell arteritis, but no cause was proven. Nancy is sure the cause was sludge, and she now spends much of her life trying to prove it.

  The stuff on the field over the road is not the fancy Class A EQ pasteurized and digested stuff coming out of Alexandria’s expensive treatment processes. Class A may be biosolids’ public face, but most of the three million dry tons of sludge applied to American farmland is Class B, whose face is uglier. Under the Part 503 rules, Class B has to be stabilized somehow (adding lime is common) and that’s it. Though an EPA study in 1989 found twenty-five groups of pathogens in sludge—E. coli, salmonella, worms, and fungus—it decided to regulate only nine heavy metals. The power of soil, sun, and general degradation, it was thought, would take care of the rest. Soil is a complex and delicate ecosystem, and there is much about it that is still unknown. But by other countries’ standards, the EPA’s were lax.

  When Cornell University scientists Ellen Harrison and Murray McBride appraised the Part 503 rules in a 1999 paper, they compared the U.S. regulations to a more precautionary policy prevalent in many European countries. There, farmers shouldn’t add to the levels of heavy metals already in soil. The United States, by contrast, uses a risk-based approach. It calculates what soil—and people who live near and work on the soil—can handle. In practice, according to Harrison, farmers can apply sludge until their crop yield is reduced by 50 percent. In other words, they can proceed until harm is shown to have been done. Harrison attributes this philosophical difference to land and time. The United States is bigger. “We’re used to being able to screw it up and just find a new piece of land. Europe is more densely developed. There’s no outback. They have to take a precautionary view.” And Europeans know that lead used by Romans two thousand years ago is still in their hills. They can’t afford to calculate that soil can handle risk; they prefer not to risk that it can’t.

  The EPA has stated that its Part 503 rules make the application of biosolids “an appropriate choice for communities” as long as certain limitations are followed. These regulations include buffer zones and other “management practices” that are supposed to determine how, when, and what quantity of sludge can be applied to soils. In North Carolina, land which is used to grow crops that touch the top of the soil—cucumbers, melons, tomatoes—must not be planted for 14 months after sludge application. For crops that grow beneath the soil it’s 38 months. At best, says Nancy, t
hese regulations are unrealistic. “I’m from a farming family. Everyone around here knows about farming. And I don’t know a single farmer who’d let his land lie fallow for thirty months. They can’t afford to. Most are on the edge.” Biosolids promoters also emphasize the financial attraction of their product. Chris Peot calculated that using sludge can save farmers $40,000 a year, because they don’t have to spend money on artificial fertilizers, and because crops supposedly yield better and more (though sludge critics maintain that any improvement in yield is always temporary).

  Nancy tells me that she and Bruce traveled around North Carolina asking farmers whether they followed the rules. The responses were shocking. “Of the ones we talked to who were growing food crops—sweet potatoes, peanuts, melons, squash, cucumbers—not a single one had waited.” They were taken aback when she showed them her copy of the state’s permit for applying biosolids, with its quotas and limits. Even if she conceded the Part 503 rules were safe, the safety is confined to paper when the rules are not followed.

  “There are so many variables,” says Maureen Reilly of Sludge-Watch. “In practice haulers don’t follow the regulations. The sludge comes out with contaminants at illegal levels. There’s overapplication. Animals graze it when they’re not allowed to. It’s an unassessable situation.” The environmental activist Abby Rockefeller, a firm believer in nutrient recycling in principle, calls biosolids “unmonitorable, unregulatable and irremediable.”