Some common brands of compost contain a potentially toxic
material misleadingly labeled as "biosolids."
Spring is so close we
can almost taste it. If you’re a gardener, you’ve already counted how many
weeks until the last frost, ordered your seeds, and perhaps even began starting
your seedlings indoors.
And if you’re like
some gardeners, once it’s warm enough, you’ll take them outside and plant them
in sewage sludge.
Yes, that’s right. I
said sewage sludge.
“I would never do
that!” you might think, with a disgusted look on your face. But would you? How
would you know?
They probably even
thought they were telling the truth. After all, the ingredient lists on the
bags said they contained “compost.” Not stated: They contained composted sewage
sludge.
How does the sludge
make it into the gardening aisle at your local store?
The story started long
ago when we began mixing together all of our waste — including industrial waste
— with water and disposing of it through the sewer to sewage treatment plants.
They do their best to separate the water from everything else. The “everything
else” is the sludge I mentioned. Then they have to get rid of it.
Cities used to just
dump the sludge in the ocean, but — it turned out — that was bad for the fish.
Unfortunately,
responsible and sanitary disposal of sludge can be expensive.
The solution? Call it
fertilizer and put it on farmland. (Over the years, this has been a popular way
to deal with industrial waste. Some of the first pesticides were arsenic-based waste products from the dye industry.)
But how would industry
get Americans to accept using sewage sludge on farms and even in gardens? Step
one: rename it. The Water Environment Federation lobby and PR group
actually held a contest. Entries included “bioslurp,” “the end
product,” “geoslime,” and “hu-doo.” The winner was “biosolids.”
The Environmental
Protection Agency took it a step further. They gave out a $300,000 grant to the
main lobby group for the sewage treatment industry to “educate the public”
about the “benefits of sludge.” And they codified the term biosolids into law.
If you unwittingly get
a bag of sludge at your local garden store, it will contain Class A Biosolids.
Both the government and the manufacturer will assure you that it’s highly
regulated. And it is — sort of.
Out of the thousands of toxic chemicals that are found in that sludge, they
strictly regulate exactly 10 heavy metals and two pathogens.
And it’s nice that
they regulate lead, mercury, and Salmonella. But you’re still left with
everything else: flame retardants, nanoparticles, pharmaceuticals, endocrine
disruptors like triclosan, cancer-causing dioxins, and a long list of other
nasties you don’t want in your garden. Or in your body.
The public relations
efforts to convince us that sludge is good for our gardens can be quite
powerful. So much so that it even fooled Eliza Barclay of NPR’s program The
Salt. When I wrote her to give her the facts, she replied that the
sludge-as-fertilizer scheme is actually a program to “recycle precious
nutrients.”
Right. But — as I
wrote back to her — would you eat a salad laced with toxic chemicals just
because it’s full of nutrients too?
If you’re with me on
this one, you can avoid food grown in sewage sludge by eating organic or buying
gardening materials that are listed
by the Organic Materials Review Institute.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author
of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do
to Fix It. OtherWords.org