In March, Michelle Obama delighted locavores when she planted an "organic" vegetable garden on the White House's South Lawn. For years, Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and other sustainable food activists had been pushing the idea as a way to reseed interest in do-it-yourself agriculture. Less than two months later, the National Park Service disclosed that the garden's soil was contaminated with toxic lead, and the plot's educational value took on a new flavor as the New York Times and other papers discussed how to make urban backyards that are laced with old lead-based paint safe for growing kale and cauliflower. But those stories might have fingered the wrong culprit.

Starting in the late 1980s and continuing for at least a decade, the South Lawn was fertilized by ComPRO, a compost made from a nearby wastewater plant's solid effluent, a.ka. sewage sludge. Sludge is controversial because it can contain traces of almost anything that gets poured down the drain, from Prozac flushed down toilets to lead hosed off factory floors. Spreading sludge at the White House was a way for the EPA to reassure the public that using it as a fertilizer for crops and yards (instead of dumping it in the ocean, as had been common practice) would be safe. "The Clintons are walking around on poo," the EPA's sludge chief quipped in 1998, "but it's very clean poo."

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Monday, June 15, 2009
Paul Egan and Leonard N. Fleming / The Detroit News

Detroit --A Detroit businessman pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to paying more than $6,000 in bribes to an unnamed Detroit City Council member in a plea deal that promises the government will not bring charges against his brother.

"I conspired with others to provide money to elected officials in exchange for favorable votes before the City of Detroit," Rayford W. Jackson, 44, of Detroit told U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn.

The council member Jackson admitted to bribing is not identified in court documents, which use the term "Council Member A."

However, federal agents have electronic surveillance evidence linking City Councilwoman Monica Conyers to receiving alleged payments in connection with a $1.2 billion Synagro Technologies Inc. sewage contract, persons familiar with the investigation have told The Detroit News.

Fish from river may be tainted
Published: Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 6:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, June 12, 2009 at 11:40 p.m.

Numerous reports in the Decatur Daily recently about problems caused by Teflon by-products in sewage sludge that was spread on farmland in Morgan and Lawrence counties that polluted ponds, wells and soil and contaminated cattle living on the farms piqued my curiosity about what impact it might have had on fish in the Tennessee River.

Several industries in the Decatur area use the chemical PFOA or perfluoroonctanoic acid in their manufacturing process. When the industries discharge PFOA-tainted waste into the Deactur's sewer system, the sludge is contaminated. I suspected that the waste water from the sewage treatment plant that is discharged into the Tennessee River might also be contaminated.

Press Release
6/4/2009
Carolina Concerned Citizens
(919)563-3670 fg325@aol.com
For more information or scientific links and studies--contact Nancy Holt.

Sewage treatment plants were never designed to produce fertilizer. What is being spread on farmlands now and called biosolids or free fertilizer is the concentrated residuals of whatever comes into the sewage treatment plant from all sources: homes, businesses, industry, hospitals, laboratories, nursing homes, funeral homes, and street run-off. This thick viscous concentrated residual called sludge is what remains after the sewage water is treated to be discharged back into rivers or streams.

We are told that sewage sludge/biosolids are recycled organic human waste, which is true. What is not told is that from 80 to 100,000 chemicals are used in products for personal and home use, in industry, and medical and laboratory facilities. Any drugs or chemicals going down the drain into the sewer system may wind up on the land intact or as chemical mixtures never anticipated or tested for toxicity. The treated sludge also contains bacteria, viruses and intestinal worms and parasites. Class B sewage sludge can have 2 million fecal coliform indicator bacteria (thermotolerant E. coli) per gram (size of a sugar cube) which means there’s pathogenic bacteria in the sludge—but not what type or amount and this will be sprayed or spread on farm fields which will grow human and animal crops and grass for cattle. The waste water treatment plant has to follow EPA and state regulations for processing sewage sludge but this process does not remove the drugs, chemicals, toxic metals, or all of the bacteria, viruses, or parasites.

Jim Bynum, VP, & Gail M. Bynum, Ph.D
Revised 5/27/2009
Help for Sewage Victims
Contact: bynjam@aol.com

by Kate Melville

In the first study of its kind, University of Michigan researchers have established that wastewater treatment plants are providing a perfect environment for the emergence of antibiotic-resistant superbugs that eventually end up in neighboring streams and lakes.

Date:5/19/2009

MADISON, WI, MAY 18, 2009 Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) carried in biosolids (i.e., treated sewage sludge) may reach surface waters or groundwater when these materials are applied as fertilizer to agricultural land. During the high flow conditions created by land application of liquid municipal biosolids (LMB) the residence time of solutes in soil macropores may be too short for sorption equilibration which increases the risk for leaching. Physically based solute transport simulation models are widely used in environmental risk assessment for pesticides. These models may also be applicable for PPCPs when their physical and chemical properties and soil dissipation characteristics are available. However, these models do not account for non-equilibrium sorption in soil macropores. The model MACRO is one of the models used in environmental risk assessments for pesticides and may have potential as an environmental risk assessment tool for PPCPs.

A terrible waste gets long look

People are asking why a boy died after riding his bike over some sludge

Sunday, June 11, 2000

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

OSCEOLA MILLS, Pa. -- The hurt is deeper because Tony Behun was so healthy -- an 11-year-old boy who loved life in the perpetual motion universe of an 11-year-old boy.

At her dining room table, his mother holds a stack of family photos, the chronicle of a young life.

There's the scrubbed, sandy-haired boy in his baseball uniform. The grinning youngster at creek-side, fishing. The tame dirt bike he rode across the mountaintops, where Centre and Clearfield counties come together.

Six years ago, life did what life isn't supposed to do to baseball-playing, dirt-bike-riding boys.

It slipped away.

On Oct. 12, 1994, Tony rode his dirt bike across hills coated in a sludge of treated sewage, the soup of waste and nutrients that the state lets strip miners use to coax life back into used-up mines.

In two days, he had a sore throat and headache. Six days later, he was in a hospital emergency room, his fever climbing, doctors calling a helicopter to fly him 110 miles through the night to Pittsburgh.

"Before the helicopter came, he was actually excited about the ride. He said, 'I'll get to tell the kids at school about this,' " said Tony's mother, Brenda Robertson. "Those were our last goodbyes, at Clearfield Hospital."

Tony died at 7:54 the next morning in Allegheny General Hospital.

Doctors determined he was killed by a blood infection, the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus. How he got it was a soul-searing question with no hint of an answer.

Until last year. Brenda Robertson happened to see a newspaper story about a state permit to spread sludge on another idle strip mine. The state Department of Environmental Protection was responding to talk that a local youngster had ridden through treated sludge and died of a bacterial infection.

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Originally created 10/22/99

By Staff Writer

Claims that sewage sludge used as fertilizer was actually hazardous waste emerged too late to be considered in two pending federal lawsuits, a lawyer representing the city of Augusta argued Thursday.

Jim Ellison, who is defending Augusta against lawsuits by two farms claiming sludge poisoned their land and cattle, asked that portions of an Aug. 12 report by plaintiffs' consultant William Hall be suppressed.