Thursday, April 10, 2008
Sewage-Based Fertilizer (Biosolids / Sludge) Safety Doubted
It was a farm idea with a big payoff and supposedly no downside: ridding lakes and rivers of raw sewage and industrial pollution by converting it all into a free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. Then last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from the waste treatment plant here. His cows had died by the hundreds.
The Associated Press also has learned that some of the same contaminants showed up in milk that regulators allowed a neighboring dairy farmer to market, even after some officials said they were warned about it.
About 7 million tons of biosolids - the term that waste producers came up with for sludge in 1991 - are produced each year as a byproduct from 1,650 waste water treatment plants around the nation. Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is cheaper than burning or burying it, and the government’s policy has been to encourage the former.
In 1999, the agency awarded a $12,274 grant to the University of Georgia to study the problem of sludge's negative impacts on the environment. That research would result in a study published in 2003 in the Journal of Environmental Quality finding that the city’s sludge was safe and that EPA’s regulations were working.
More from here
The Associated Press also has learned that some of the same contaminants showed up in milk that regulators allowed a neighboring dairy farmer to market, even after some officials said they were warned about it.
About 7 million tons of biosolids - the term that waste producers came up with for sludge in 1991 - are produced each year as a byproduct from 1,650 waste water treatment plants around the nation. Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is cheaper than burning or burying it, and the government’s policy has been to encourage the former.
In 1999, the agency awarded a $12,274 grant to the University of Georgia to study the problem of sludge's negative impacts on the environment. That research would result in a study published in 2003 in the Journal of Environmental Quality finding that the city’s sludge was safe and that EPA’s regulations were working.
More from here
Labels: Agricultural-Engineering, Energy-Environment-Engineering
PermaLink - Sewage-Based Fertilizer (Biosolids / Sludge) Safety Doubted posted by Ecacofonix : 7:51 AM
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