NEW BRUNSWICK, CANADA (WGME) -- A mounting environmental crisis in Maine is leading to major concerns for our neighbors to the north in Canada.

As our state struggles to dispose of biosolids, also known as wastewater sludge, truckloads a day are now being shipped to the province of New Brunswick. That increase in imports is leading to questions about capacity there and if there's any risk for contamination.

"It's easy to get into trouble, especially in an environmental sense, and it's a lot harder to remediate it," Harvey Station, New Brunswick sheep farmer Ted Wiggans said. "I follow the precautionary principle, which means you don't do something until you're pretty sure the ramifications."

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BY SAMMY FRETWELL AND SUSAN MERRIAM UPDATED JULY 15, 2023 9:00 AM

For years, farmers across South Carolina have used sludge from factories and sewage plants to fertilize the fields where crops grow and cattle graze.

Applied to thousands of acres since the 1990s, the sludge is billed as a cheap way to enrich the soil. But increasingly, chemicals suspected of causing cancer, high cholesterol and other health problems are being found in the mucky waste.

Scientists, environmentalists and some farmers worry that the pollutants in sludge, called PFAS or forever chemicals, are contaminating drinking water, poisoning crops and sickening people.

“We’re talking about cancer-causing chemicals that can get into surface water and, therefore, into drinking water systems or in fish people eat,’’ said environmental lawyer Ben Cunningham, who has pushed the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control to tighten state oversight of sewer sludge.

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by SHANNON KELLEHER

Highlighting a practice that compromises farmland nationwide, a new report finds that sewage sludge spread as fertilizer on New York state fields contains toxic chemicals that sicken farmers, contaminate crops, and threaten consumer health.

The report, published Thursday by the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, suggests that the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has failed to prevent dangerous per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from entering the environment through the practice, and urges the state to put a stop to the contamination.

“What we are talking about here is the active permitting… of PFAS-contaminated sewer sludge being spread over farmland to create food that we then consume,” New York state assembly member Anna Kelles said in a press briefing. “It’s literally creating a mechanism to get PFAS to bioaccumulate in human tissue.”

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Watch Vice News Special Report 'Toxic Farmland'

Watch Vice News Special Report 'Toxic Farmland'

Fertilizer containing sludge being applied to farmland. (Courtesy North East Biosolids and Residuals Association)

The Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant is a pollution success story. Over the last several decades, it transformed Boston Harbor from a nationally embarrassing cesspool into a swimmable bay.

The treatment plant takes everything the people of Greater Boston send down their sinks, toilets, showers and washing machines — plus industrial waste — and treats it. The treated water is clean enough to let out into the ocean. The remaining sludge gets recycled into fertilizer that’s used in nearly 20 states.

But now that fertilizer is raising fresh concerns. That’s because wastewater treatment plants like Deer Island were not built to handle the toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS.
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Soiled