Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (30 page)

“Each of those compounds has a high boiling point,” Scorziello continued. “They were condensing in our oxidizer and dripping out onto the floor.” With some tweaking, Scorziello lost the condensation. The company recently spent at least another $2 million on equipment changes, but some of the neighbors remained unimpressed.

Omar Freilla, program director of Sustainable South Bronx, which has been fighting NYOFCo for three years, thought the plant smelled “horrible.” “It’s beyond an ordinary sewage smell,” he said. “It’s in between sewage and fish, with a chemical odor thrown on top. It stinks from the inside. When I got back from a tour of the plant, people would not stand next to me, they sprayed me with Febreze. The smell comes with nausea and headaches and tightness of breath, if you’re asthmatic.”

“I’ve seen children throwing up from the smell,” said Eva Sanjuro, who runs a day-care center a few blocks from the plant. “Teachers have quit because of their asthma. When it’s bad, we don’t bring the kids outside. We call the plant, and they blame the water treatment plant or the chicken butcher.” When the DEP received complaints, the agency sent an inspector. But he or she never arrived in time, said Freilla, to finger the culprit.

Though warned against flushing anything but the basic materials down their toilets and drains, New Yorkers, like people all across the nation, routinely pour out bleach, paint, and nail polish remover, among other household toxics. Though industry was required to pretreat its effluent in New York City, the DEP annually cites hundreds of radiator repair shops, drum refinishers, paint manufacturers, metal platers, and circuit board manufacturers for dumping chemicals. Thirty years ago, more than 9,000 pounds of heavy metals entered the sewer system each day; today it’s down to about 2,900 pounds. Some of those toxins are neutralized in the wastewater treatment process, but treatment plants were designed with the Clean Water Act in mind: they preferentially remove contaminants from water only to concentrate them in sludge.

New York’s sludge contains the metals magnesium, cadmium, zinc, iron, mercury, selenium, lead, and copper. “Plants need copper, zinc, and calcium,” Scorziello told me. “It makes very green foliage. It increases drought resistance and helps soil retain water. At these levels, the metals are micronutrients.” According to the Government Accounting Office, sewage sludge nationwide also contains PCBs, pesticides, asbestos, DDT, and dioxin.

An EPA presentation on dioxin to a committee of the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, in April of 2002, indicated that land-applied sewage sludge is the second-largest source of dioxins in the United States, second only to backyard barrel burning. A Natural Resources Defense Council review of the scientific literature confirmed that dioxin is taken up by plants that are grown on sludge and is stored in the fat tissue of animals that graze on them. The environmental group, in 2003, unsuccessfully sued the EPA to limit dioxin in sludge. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering the influence of private industry in this country, the United States is markedly less stringent about regulating sludge than other countries.

Dioxin isn’t the only thing to be worried about. A large proportion of pollutants are assumed to bind tightly to soil particles, making them inaccessible to organisms feeding there. But in 2002, scientists from the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France, placed snails in cadmium-laced soil collected near a smelter. After two weeks, the scientists analyzed the snails’ tissue and found that about 16 percent of the cadmium they had absorbed was supposedly inaccessible. The finding suggests that other heavy metals may be more “bioavailable” than assumed and could be entering the food chain. According to the World Health Organization, long-term exposure to cadmium, partly from fertilizer and food, leads to kidney damage, cancers, and possibly birth defects. Other industrial by-products that end up in sludge have been known to cause neurological, immunological, and other problems in people and animals.

I asked Scorziello about hospital waste flushing through the city’s system. I was thinking about unused liquids from radiotherapy or laboratory research, and urine and excreta from patients treated or tested with radionuclides, which are used for in vivo diagnosis. “Our stuff could be radioactive,” Scorziello said casually. “But we don’t test for it.” In 1999, the city of Denver developed a plan to pump plutonium-contaminated water from a landfill—a Superfund site—into the municipal wastewater system. The treatment plant produced a “beneficial biosolid,” marketed as Metrogro, that was spread on farmland. A sewage industry board member blew the whistle on the scheme, but the sludge—with radioactivity levels higher than federal standards but lower than state—continues to be spread on fields that grow wheat that is sold to granaries worldwide. Though some plants can and do take up some radioactive isotopes, data from wheat grain tests performed by the US Geological Survey were “insufficient to determine any measurable effects from biosolids.”

The EPA didn’t require NYOFCo to test for dioxin, PCBs, or radioactivity, but it did require readings on lead, which leached from household pipes and ended up in sewage. The allowable level for Class A biosolids was fewer than 300 parts per million. “We’re usually at 150 to 200,” said Scorziello. “If I get a load with lead that’s too high, like 305, it’s okay. The average is over a month. I just tell the grower, and they know where to apply it.” I had a funny feeling about that. Farmers don’t apply an average when the truck pulls up: they apply the load that arrives in their driveway. And it was hard to believe that the laborers hired to spread those pelletized biosolids were keeping close track of where and when they spread each delivery of fertilizer. When the EPA assessed vegetables grown in soil amended with biosolids, it found no significant health effects from eating these vegetables when the trace metals in the biosolids had been applied at regulated rates. But who did the regulating? And how could a grower regulate if she didn’t know what metals, to say nothing of their levels, the fertilizer contained? NYOFCo’s Granulite label lists its nitrogen, phosphate, and soluble potash content, but not its lead or other heavy metals, their amounts and possible interactions. It warns users only to wear gloves when handling the product and to avoid ingestion and inhalation.

Of course, there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with returning nutrients from organic matter to the soil. Human and animal waste contains high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous—stuff that makes plants grow. Ancient cultures have long fertilized their farm fields and vegetable gardens with human and animal manure. But Granulite’s packaging describes the product as an “all natural organic” fertilizer. The words
sewage sludge
appear nowhere on the label. “Clearly inputs to sewage treatment plants in New York City, or anywhere, are not all natural and organic,” said Ellen Harrison, director of Cornell University’s Waste Management Institute, which has been critical of the EPA’s sludge regulations. “That qualifies as false advertising in my mind.”

With its very name, the New York Organic Fertilizer Company trades on the feel-good ethos of composting, of enhancing soil nature’s way. But in fact, federal law prohibits growers from using NYOFCo’s product, or any sewage product, on organic fields. It doesn’t matter if the municipality has a combined-sewer overflow system or not. “You just don’t know what’s in the sludge,” said Carol King of the Northeast Organic Farmer’s Association.

In 1999, Representative José Serrano, of the Bronx, introduced a bill that would require food products grown on sludge—including crops and livestock or poultry raised on land treated with biosolids—to be labeled as such. The EPA strongly denounced the bill, fearing it would spark unwarranted fears; the bill remains in limbo. Now and then, activists cry for honest labeling of biosolids; Milwaukee, whose wastewater treatment bureau has a million-dollar PR budget, was rumored to have threatened to sue the EPA if it required detailed labeling of Milorganite.

There have been threatened lawsuits from the other side, too. Across the country, people claim to have been sickened by sludge. Anecdotal evidence links Class B biosolids with abscesses, reproductive complications, cysts, tumors, asthma, skin lesions, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, nosebleeds, and irritation of the skin and respiratory tract that leave people vulnerable to infection. After Shayne Connor, a twenty-six-year-old New Hampshire resident, died in 1995 from a staph infection following the application of biosolids on a nearby field, his family sued Synagro, which owned the company that spread the sludge, for wrongful death. The company settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Parents of two children in Pennsylvania also alleged, in separate incidents, that the children had died of staph infections, in 1994 and 1995, after sludge was spread near their homes.

Farmers in Georgia are suing municipalities for improperly treating the sludge applied to hay fields: their cows became sick and died after eating the hay. A California town was cited for excessive sludge applications after thirteen cows on two farms died of nitrate poisoning. The Cornell Waste Management Institute alone has received more than 350 sludge-exposure complaints from communities across the country, and thousands of people have reported sludge-related health problems.

In 2003, seventy-three labor, environmental, and farm groups called for a ban on land application of biosolids. In January of 2004, the EPA denied their petition but announced it would reassess fifteen additional inorganic hazardous chemicals found in sludge, beyond the nine pollutants it currently regulates. If the studies warranted, the agency said, new regulations would be proposed.

Sludge activists don’t put much faith in EPA data: the scientific studies on which the agency based its original sludge regulations were performed by the sludge industry itself. And to investigate nineteen complaints of alleged sludge-related illnesses or property damage, the EPA gave grant money to the sewage industry’s main lobbying group, the Water Environment Federation. Within the last few years, the EPA inspector general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Research Council have all issued reports urging more research into the effects of sludge. Yet in May of 2003, the EPA microbiologist David Lewis, who had challenged sludge safety in the esteemed journal
Nature,
left the agency under cloudy circumstances. Lewis claims he was fired for questioning sludge standards; the EPA claims Lewis signed an agreement specifying that he would step down.

One of NYOFCo’s biggest customers was Lykes Brothers Citrus, in Lake Placid, Florida. The Lykeses used to be Tampa’s richest family. They got their start in business shipping cattle to Cuba during the Civil War, and in the early 1900s branched out into ranching in Texas. At one time, the family ran the largest US-flagged cargo fleet in the nation. The Lykeses were involved in overseas meatpacking operations, real estate, logging, banking, oil and gas, the insurance business, and a trucking company. Though the family had squabbled and divested in recent years, the Florida Lykeses still owned a fertilizer company, and they grew pine, eucalyptus, sugarcane, and citrus, and raised cattle. By spreading sludge instead of fancy fertilizer, growers like Lykes saved about $5,600 for every hundred acres.

My contact person at Lykes was Bill Barber, but our contact was brief. He said nothing when I told him my biosolids were feeding his fruit. When I asked how much of the stuff Lykes used, he announced, “We have a company policy not to talk about things like that.” I asked if he would at least confirm that Lykes used NYOFCo’s product. “I’m sorry, I’m not going to talk about that. We appreciate your call. Thank you.” Then he hung up.

It’s natural to wonder why all biosolids aren’t groomed for Class A status: Class A fertilizer seems a lot safer than Class B. But because Class B is less processed, it makes a far better fertilizer than Class A: it has a higher nitrogen value. There are tradeoffs: Class B is cheaper to produce, and you get more of it from a load of sludge than you do making Class A, but Class B is wetter and heavier, and therefore more expensive to transport. Class B also smells worse than Class A, which compounds its PR problems.

Scorziello was about as proud of his product as he could be. Because the pellets were forged in high temperatures, he told me, “it’s almost impossible to have nitrogen burn with them. They release their nutrients slowly.” I asked him what this wondrous material sold for, and when he gave me the answer my jaw dropped. NYOFCo gave their biosolids away for free! Not only wasn’t Bill Barber paying for his pellets, he didn’t pay for their delivery, either. NYOFCo picked up the shipping tab—between $15 and $45 a ton. “Yep,” Scorziello said. “We make our money from the city. They give us $131 a ton to process it. We’re a residuals management company,” he said. “We’re not a fertilizer company. We perform a service for the city.”

With that in mind, my entire perspective changed. NYOFCo wasn’t here to produce a valuable product and sell it to growers; the company’s mission was to take something that no one else wanted and move it somewhere else with minimal hassle. Such was the refrain of the waste industry.

It was early afternoon when we finished talking, and Scorziello offered to drive me to the train station. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m just going to wash up before we go.” “Good idea,” he said. “I will, too.” There was a shower stall in the women’s bathroom, and an enormous jug of antimicrobial soap.

Scorziello drove a new Volvo SUV, which had a small black gadget called an Ionic Breeze attached to the console. “My wife got it for me from the Sharper Image,” Scorziello said. The deodorizer trapped airborne particulates on an electrostatically charged ring. I supposed it was working, because the car still smelled pretty new (that is, like off-gassing PVC) despite having hauled its share of Granulite back home to Tarrytown.

“I use it every holiday on my tomatoes and flower garden,” he said. “You know, Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Memorial Day. My neighbor hangs over the fence and says, ‘You using that stuff again?’ But the smell dissipates in a day.” Until recently New York State had prohibited the use of sludge or sludge products on crops for direct human consumption; Scorziello had never paid the regulation any mind.