The Big Necessity (26 page)

Nancy has the focus and energy of a zealot, because despite her calm manner and her sweet tea, she is running on fury. She talks about endocrine disruptors, chemicals found in pesticides and plasticizers, for example, that mess with human hormones. She fulminates about E. coli spinach outbreaks. She tells me that one in a hundred American children is now born with autism, and that environmental chemicals are probably the cause. She quotes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “body burden” study, which tests for the presence of 128 chemicals in the human body. Lead is down; mercury is up.

Her conversation zaps like a TV remote from levels of lead to autism, from PCBs to prions, tiny protein particles that can cause brain diseases such as BSE (mad cow disease). Funeral home waste in the sewage stream, she says—think about that. “If they embalm someone with Alzheimer's, God help you. In order to kill prions you have to turn the body into carbon. That is at 1,800 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.” She talks about how treating sludge means that of all those antibiotics in the wastewater, only the strongest and fittest survive. If we wanted to create superbugs, we couldn't do better.

Nancy's caramel accent is leisurely, but her pace is relentless. She says, “It's so complex. Municipalities are overwhelmed,” and I'm beginning to know how they feel. “There's all this research, but nobody's connecting the dots.” She's trying to persuade the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health to undertake a study that would link all the studies. And off she goes again, on another stream of indignant investigation.

 

People who promote and supply biosolids, depending on how courteous they are, tend to dismiss opponents as anything from overemotive to hysterical. Cranks. NIMBYists. The most outspoken of all is Alan Rubin, a former EPA chemist who helped to write the Part 503 rules.
When we speak by phone, he tells me he enjoys “crossing swords,” and that he will talk “from the inside of my soul.” He is a true believer in biosolids, though he thinks the name is silly. “It got accused of being greenwash. Biosolids, sewage sludge—we all know what it is.” He believes that the Part 503 rules take care of risk, and that if biosolids do transmit toxic elements to land, they are held firm either in the sludge or the soil. Let's take dioxin, he says. “It's the most toxic organic chemical and the most persistent. It's everywhere. It's in our bodies.” To calculate the levels of toxins and heavy metals allowed by the EPA, Rubin and colleagues used a hypothetical individual who lived in sludge for seventy years. “Like a farmer who works with this stuff every day, whose kids go and eat two tenths of a gram of sludge every day for two to three years. This individual doesn't exist. But we showed that they would get ten percent of the background exposure of dioxin.” Regular people would get 1/10,000th of it. “God forbid that anyone should get cancer but you'd literally have to be immersed in this stuff to show you can get it from biosolids.”

Are biosolids safe? It's an impossible question to answer. As Ellen Harrison writes, “There is no such thing as ‘safe.' Is it safe to drive your car? Nearly all that we do entails some risk, so the question really is, ‘Is the risk acceptable?'” And risk perception is subjective. Chris Peot makes this point with a bottle of generic multivitamins, which contains several of the heavy metals regulated in sludge. He uses the example of selenium. “You'd have to eat 212 pounds of our Blue Plains biosolids in a year in order to get just what your body needs.” It sounds comforting. But criticism of the biosolids program has come from quarters that not even the fiercest sludge supporter could call emotional.

 

In 1975 the chief of the EPA's Technology Branch of the Hazardous Waste Division, William Sanjour, sent a memo to his director wondering how the agency could classify sewage sludge as fertilizer, when “industrial wastes account for twenty-five percent of municipal sewage nationally and can be almost one hundred percent in some localities.” Transforming this waste into fertilizer, he continued, was “the most efficient means—short of eating the sludge—of injecting toxic
substances directly into the human body. Three years later, Sanjour wrote another memo querying why hazardous wastes used as fertilizer aren't allowed to contain cadmium, but sludge was, when nothing had yet proven it to be less hazardous. A few days afterward, he was fired.

In a deposition to a Senate committee in 2000, Robert Swank of the EPA's Office of Research and Development, which is supposed to approve all EPA rules, said his office “didn't think [the Part 503 rules] passed scientific muster.” He testified that the agency was assuming that toxic chemicals and pesticides leaching out of sludge would be captured by the soil, and stay put. He called this theory “sludge magic.” “I can tell you there was very little work actually done that looked at either threats to groundwater or threats to surface water from either toxins, pathogens, or metals that I would have called credible.” (A similar magic must be at work when Class B biosolids, which in 2000 were judged by the CDC to pose a risk to healthy adult sewage workers, are judged risk-free even when applied to fields near young children, the elderly, and the immuno-compromised.)

The next salvo was launched by Dr. David Lewis. A senior EPA microbiologist, he had made his name by discovering that HIV could be transmitted in lubricants used in dental devices, research that led to new sterilization guidelines worldwide. In the early 1990s, scientists working on the Part 503 rules asked Lewis's lab for its scientific opinion. Lewis was unimpressed, and in a powerful editorial in the prestigious British journal
Nature
, complained of scientific rules pushed through by political considerations before they had the proper scientific backup. This implied slight of the sludge program was followed by testimony before Congress where he said it outright. To promote sludge, he testified, the EPA was using unreliable and fraudulent data. He began to act as an expert witness in sludge-related health complaints. He told reporters that “in my opinion, the land spreading of sludge is a serious problem. We have mixed together pathogens with a wide variety of chemicals that are known to enhance the infection process. It makes people more susceptible to infections.” Taking excrement from hundreds of thousands of people, mixing it, and spreading it on land is simply “not a good idea.”

In return, the EPA cut Lewis's funding, sidelined him, forbade him
to consult with other scientists, and distributed a 27-page document that questioned his credibility, though two years later he was credible enough to be awarded the EPA's Science and Technology Achievement Award from the agency's Office of Research & Development. The EPA's handling of Lewis was judged discriminatory by a Department of Labor investigation, but he was still fired.

Treatment such as Lewis's causes Ellen Harrison to call the wastewater industry “intimidating.” She finds it odd that dissent is not encouraged. “They should want to know. It's not everyone who's getting sick, so what's the risk?”

Nancy Holt, who does get sick, didn't know what sludge was in the beginning. “We called it that stinking fertilizer.” But now she knows, and the more she knows, the more her head hurts. “We are the lab rats. I think we ought to be paying more attention to the care of humans. I know I get rabid about this, but how can we not be concerned?” She stops, after two hours of talking without a break. “So that's where I am. Shall I serve the gumbo?”

 

At the end of my visit to Alexandria, Paul Carbary had asked me a question. “People don't generally stick around, so can you tell me how I can improve the presentation? We don't know how to convince people who are hostile. Do you have any ideas?” I don't. The camps are too divided, the positions too dug in.

Responding to a
Washington Post
article querying the safety of sludge, the Water Environment Foundation declared that “the vast consensus of the scientific community holds that land application as prescribed by EPA regulation is currently the safest science-based alternative for recycling biosolids.” I read things like this and think of a different century when engineering and science began to have total certainty, and how this confidence was expressed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette during an 1870 inquiry into the pollution of the Thames provoked by the vicar of Barking. The clergyman and 123 of his neighbors had objected to Bazalgette's practice of discharging all London's sewage into the river near Barking. One witness said he used to drink the water but now he could hardly look at it. Another said, “I only know I have been connected to
the fish business all my lifetime and I should think myself a madman if I brought a cargo of live fish up to Barking now.”

Bazalgette, called to the inquiry, showed himself to be as unbending as the biosolids promoters of today. The possibility that the river was being polluted was, he asserted, “entirely imaginary and contrary to fact.” Eight years later, the
Princess Alice
steamboat collided with a dredger near the outfall, and over six hundred people died. Survivors reported that they could not swim in such noxious waters, and that they vomited copiously. The outfalls were closed twenty years later. Settlement ponds were installed to filter out the solids, one of the first attempts at sewage treatment, and the sludge was removed to the Black Deeps, at the river's mouth, safely distant. It is not recorded whether Bazalgette ever admitted he had been wrong.

Shouldn't all certainty be finite? PCBs were considered safe for decades. So was DDT. When General Motors employees who bottled liquid lead for gasoline began to die, the company called lead a “natural contaminant.”

In the absence of scientific agreement, the fate of the biosolids industry may be decided in the courts. Judges in Kentucky, California, and Oregon have ruled sludge odors a public nuisance. An $18.4 million class action lawsuit has been filed against Synagro in Virginia. And in 2006, a Georgia court awarded half a million dollars to a dairy farmer who had sued for damages when 30 percent of his cattle died after eating sludge-applied hay, ten times the normal mortality rate in dairy herds. An Associated Press investigation found that levels of thallium—a metal that can cause nerve damage—in the herd's milk were 120 times those allowed in drinking water. This year, Judge Anthony Alaimo, a district judge in Georgia, found that another dairy farmer's land had been acutely contaminated by sludge. Scientific data supplied by the municipality of Augusta that claimed to prove the safety of biosolids were, the judge declared, “unreliable, incomplete and in some cases fudged.” Independent tests found arsenic and cadmium levels two to three times those allowed by law.

Already, food giants like Heinz and Del Monte will not accept crops grown on sludge-applied land, and the National Farmers Union policy states that “the current practices of spreading Class B biosolids on land
surfaces . . . should be discontinued.” Alan Rubin thinks land application has peaked anyway. “If people are complaining, and there are endless permit hearings with all the griping, municipalities and states might want to go with processes that are less trouble politically. A nice incinerator right in the wastewater treatment plant, with no need for trucks to haul it out of state.” The United States' biosolids future may be already happening in Europe. Switzerland, which used to land-apply 40 percent of its sludge, banned the practice in 2003 because of the presence of PCBs and dioxins, and because farmers were already refusing the fertilizer for fear of it harming their soil. The Netherlands has banned agricultural use of sludge, and France's, Germany's, and Sweden's national farmers' associations are against it. (The UK, however, applies over 70 percent of its sludge to farmland and has no plans to do otherwise, because it is united with the United States in soldiering and sludge.)

 

It's time to leave Nancy Holt. My stomach is stuffed with gumbo, cornbread, and cobbler, and my brain is buzzing. I feel tired and spooked, perhaps due to the prospect of another six-hour drive back to Washington, D.C., on a dark and boring highway. It's also because once, Nancy stopped talking midsentence as if she had been switched off, and her husband carried on reminiscing about stock car racing although his wife looked like she was barely living. Partly it's because Nancy told me that the holes in her brain are so rare—children are born with them, but adults rarely acquire them—that when she dies the University of Maryland will collect her brain, slice and dice it and deliver it to 620 medical centers around the world “who want to look at that sucker,” and I realized that she's probably going to die sooner not later, but I don't have the nerve to ask when. So I leave the Holts' bungalow in the late afternoon, wiser and none the wiser. As I pull out of the drive, I look at the field facing me. There is no visible sign of its “guff-proof fertilizer”—as Milorganite is described—sinking slowly into the soil. There is nothing to see but an innocent field, like thousands of others, unremarkable in the darkening light.