Posted on 06/30/2023 4:32:18 AM PDT by FarCenter
North Korea is the first country that comes to my mind when discussing this type of ‘fertilizer’. Not sure Japan wants to be following them...
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They are following Milwaukee USA, where Milorganite has been manufactured since 1926 and widely sold
“They are following Milwaukee USA”
OMG!, even worse than following North Korea.
https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-information-about-biosolids
According to the EPA 25% of biosolids are used for agriculture; 18% are used for “Other (e.g., home garden, landscaping, golf course, etc.)” - scroll down for pie chart. That’s a total of 43% of biosolid use.
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This 2019 article from the Guardian states biosolid use at 60%.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/05/biosolids-toxic-chemicals-pollution
This “biosolid” sludge is expensive to dispose of because it must be landfilled, but the waste management industry is increasingly using a money-making alternative – repackaging the sludge as fertilizer and injecting it into the nation’s food chain.
In 2019, about 60% of sewage sludge produced by treatment facilities will be spread on farmland and gardens, as well as schoolyards and lawns. Sludge holds nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients that help crops grow, so the waste management industry lightly treats it and sells it cheaply to farmers who view it as a cost-saving product.
But in fact the excrement from which sludge derives has mixed with any number of 80,000 manmade chemicals that are discharged from industry’s pipes or otherwise pumped into the sewer system. By the time the mix lands in treatment plants, it can teem with pharmaceuticals, hormones, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, protozoa and parasitic worms, as well as heavy metals like lead, cadmium, arsenic or mercury. It often includes PCBs, PFAS, dioxins, BPAs and dozens of other harmful substances ranging from flame retardants to hospital waste.
“Spending billions of dollars to remove hazardous chemicals and biological wastes from water, only to spread them on soil everywhere we live, work and play defies common sense,” said David Lewis, a former Environmental Protection Agency scientist who opposed spreading sludge on cropland in the mid-1990s as the agency approved the use.
Previously treatment facilities burned sludge or dumped it in the ocean, but the federal government barred the practices because doing so violated clean air rules or created marine dead zones. The EPA now insists spreading the same toxic substance on farmland is safe.
In what biosolid testing the EPA has conducted, it identified more than 350 pollutants. That includes 61 it classifies “as acutely hazardous, hazardous or priority pollutants”, but the law requires only nine of those be removed. Moreover, the EPA and wastewater treatment plants don’t test for or otherwise analyze most of the 80,000 manmade chemicals.
In a scathing 2018 report, the EPA office of inspector general noted the agency couldn’t properly regulate biosolids, even if it sincerely tried, because “it lacked the data or risk assessment tools needed to make a determination on the safety of 352 pollutants found in biosolids”.
The Great Lakes water authority, which operates one of the nation’s largest biosolid programs, declined interview requests from the Guardian. Despite sludge’s chemical makeup, the wastewater industry bills biosolids as “green” and even sells it as organic fertilizer in stores like Walmart and Lowe’s, though packaging doesn’t indicate that it’s composed of human and industrial waste.
The waste management industry treats sludge in several ways before labeling it fertilizer – air drying, pasteurization and composting are among common methods. Lime is employed to raise the pH level to eliminate odors, and about 95% of pathogens, viruses and other organisms are killed in the process.
But Raine stressed that none of the thousands of chemicals known to be in biosolids, or tens of thousands of manmade chemicals for which the government doesn’t test, are removed.
“It has a technical song that sounds pretty good. However, nothing that is done to the sludge removes the chemicals,” Raine said. “They just spend a little money on PR to convince us it’s nice fertilizer and fail to mention all the other things that are in it.”
When I went to Korea in 58 they were using human waste to fertilize rice crops, and yeah it stunk. When we landed a Sargent on a speaker asked if anyone one was from Texas, an couple raised their hand , then he said welcome home.
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