With summer approaching, home garden enthusiasts are looking for an efficient way to increase their harvest. And out in the Bay Area, Francesca Vietor is there to help.

Vietor is executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, the nonprofit arm of celebrity chef Alice Waters’ natural foods restaurant Chez Panisse. The foundation’s mission is to create “edible schoolyards” where kids grow, prepare and eat food from their own organic gardens.

Vietor is also vice president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), which distributes to local schools, businesses and homeowners what it describes as “organic compost.” The dirty secret is that Vietor’s much-touted compost is made from sewage sludge.

In an investigative report by Anna Werner of San Francisco’s CBS affiliate, the SFPUC defended the practice of distributing the sludge-based fertilizer to schools by citing the fact that it passed EPA standards. But as EPA Senior Analyst and whistleblower Hugh Kaufman points out, “Only 1 percent of the hazardous materials in sludge are regulated.”

Most national and local gardening shops around the country sell sludge-based fertilizers. One option is Milorganite, a fertilizer advertised as “organic biosolids.” Say what?

“Biosolids” is a euphemism for sewage sludge. It was created in the early 1990s by the “Name Change Task Force” of the Water Environment Federation (WEF). Once known as the Federation of Sewage and Industrial Wastes Associations, WEF is the sewage industry’s main lobbying and public-relations organization.

The deceptive wording has not changed one startling fact: Sewage sludge contains hazardous materials, such as dioxins, PCBs, phthalates, brominated flame retardants and toxic heavy metals. But “biosolids” certainly sounds nicer than “toxic waste.” The propaganda campaign was a success: “Biosolids” now appears in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

In Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton argue that America would have benefited from completely rethinking waste treatment. Beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing today, combined sewer systems-where storm water, household sewage and industrial waste are mixed together-discharge massive amounts of polluted water, most of it “treated,” into rivers, lakes and oceans. When the wastewater is “treated,” toxic sludge-a product of wastewater treatment-is produced. Not putting human waste into the sewer in the first place would have allowed its use as a fertilizer to enrich agricultural soil.

In 1972, riding the wave of new environmental activism, Congress passed the Clean Water Act. The law mandated “upgrades” in sewage treatment. This resulted in expenditures of over $70 billion between 1973 and 1999, but an unforeseen product of the “upgrade” was the near doubling of the production of sewage sludge. The question quickly became: What to do with sludge?