Most Recent Campaign Headlines
Virginia officials inspected more than 42 percent of all farm fields where sewage sludge was spread as fertilizer in the first half of 2008, the first year the Department of Environmental Quality was responsible for overseeing farms' use of sludge.
That inspection percentage is a drastic change from a paltry state inspection record of the practice a few years ago. In 2004, sludge was applied more than 1,100 times, but state officials conducted only 19 inspections.
On April 14, 2008, the Associated Press broke a story about a sewage sludge study in Baltimore, Maryland, that banked on kids eating the sludge. The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health defended its participation in the study in an opinion piece in the Baltimore Sun on April 28, 2008.
from Yahoo! News
It was a farm idea with a big payoff and supposedly no downside: ridding lakes and rivers of raw sewage and industrial pollution by converting it all into a free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. Then last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from the waste treatment plant here. His cows had died by the hundreds. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/wp-content/photos/0307_01.jpg
The woods off Horseshoe Road here in Middlesex County are still tainted by human intrusions from decades ago. They are the target of a Superfund project - a lengthy federal cleanup of a former chemical-processing plant that Mr. Spiegel, executive director of the Edison Wetlands Association, said was inadequately financed and too prolonged.
