Sewers, Sewage Treatment, Sludge: Damage Without End BY Abby Rockefeller

The fall 2001 conference at the Boston University School of Public Health, "Sewage Sludge on Land: Public Health and Environmental Impacts," was called to discuss the danger to human health and the environment in the spreading of sludge on land. This article's argument is that sewage sludge should not be spread on land because its contents are at any moment so vastly various and so constantly changing as to be far beyond the analysis adequate to establish safety. Sludge is the residue created in the attempt to retrieve clean water from sewage. The water is to be made clean by extracting from it the vast array of pollutants which it is the very purpose of sewers, hence sewage, to receive. The more thoroughgoing the attempt to clean the sewage, the more thoroughly noxious the residue- the sludge-will be. It is the very purpose of sewage treatment to make it so. And in this purpose, sewage treatment succeeds: it creates a mix so dense with the noxious as to be a very hazardous material. Indeed, given the certain presence in sewage of toxic materials on a vast scale, sludge properly understood should be classified as a hazardous waste.

Read the rest of Abby Rockefeller's article here

Background

The Organic Consumers Association emerged out of a massive 1998 grassroots campaign called "SOS-Save Organic Standards," spearheaded by Ronnie Cummins and a powerful alliance of organic activists. SOS successively mobilized hundreds of thousands of organic consumers to stop corporate agribusiness, the nuclear lobby, the sewage sludge industry, Monsanto, and the USDA from seriously degrading organic standards and opening the door for a corporate agribusiness takeover of the organic food and farming sector. After five months of controversy and grassroots pressure the USDA agreed to ban genetically engineered crops, irradiated foods, and municipal sewage sludge from organic production.

Unfortunately, however, GMOs, irradiated foods, and sewage sludge - although banned under National Organic Standards - have fast become the norm in industrial agriculture and conventional food processing. If you read the essays and news articles on this page, you'll understand why OCA is concerned and alarmed about sewage sludge, and why we're determined to replace sludge with truly organic composting practices. OCA will be educating and mobilizing its national network and calling on federal and state governments to classify sewage sludge as hazardous waste, to ban its application on farms and ranches, and stop allowing sludge companies to market it as "organic" fertilizer. As an alternative to sewage sludge and polluting and climate destabilizing chemical fertilizers, OCA is determined to make safe, productive, greenhouse gas-sequestering organic composting the norm in US and global agriculture and gardening, and not simply the green alternative.

Links

RILES

Healthlink

Sludge News

Resources & Info

Sewage Sludge Victims

Fertilizer Products for Organic Gardening

Reading A Fertilizer Label

Clean, Green and Organic, in the Middle of the City

 

Articles

Antibiotic-Resistance Spreads to Fertilizer

Civilization & Sludge: Notes on the History of the Management of Human Excreta

EPA Releases New Report on Toxins in Sewage Sludge - The EPA's report

The Sludge Hits The Fan