What Lies Beneath:
The science behind the biosolid industry and what it means for your kitchen table.
There is a moment when riding a roller coaster of quiet panic, where the cart is slowly inching up that first, rising spire. A moment when the ground starts to shrink and the cacophony of screams below start to fade and all you can hear is the slow, methodic clink of the chain that is incrementally pulling you forward towards that gut-sinking cataclysmic drop. It’s a moment of anxious anticipation and excitement. You know the drop is coming. Your body tenses up as you reach the peak and you let out a shrill call to the sky, both happy and afraid. Despite how dangerous and perilous your situation is, you’re still cemented to the tracks, locked in and safe. However real life doesn’t always stay on the tracks you plan for and as our cart slinks its way up that momentous hill, perhaps we should ask ourselves what awaits us over that final ledge, before it’s too late. While readers may come away from the situation in Perry County with a sense of apathetic pity, what they might not realize is the situation in the southwest of the state inevitably has already impacted their own household and is resting in their refrigerator.
Rick Rockwell is one of the founders of Ohio Citizens Against Biosolids, a group that spawned out of the EPA and Quasar’s push to construct a biosolid lagoon in his home town of Madison Township. Together with other founding members, including water specialists like Bill Wilson, often referred to as “cowboy,” they have attempted to push back against the Ohio EPA and Quasar knowing full well the risks involved.
The current Perry county lagoon represents one of the largest constructed in the area. The 25-million-gallon pit that sits precipitously over their aquifer and is a clear and present risk to their livelihoods. According to Wilson and Rockwell, the primary concern surrounding the lagoons operation comes down to the contents of the waste, namely polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. Dubbed the forever chemicals due to their inability to breakdown, PFAS are highly toxic fluorinated chemicals used in things like fire retardants, jet fuel and more. These chemicals find their ways into the sewer system and water supply and inevitably into the solid waste which makes up the contents of the biosolids currently dumped into the pits the EPA calls “lagoons.” While the risks to PFAS exposure is well known and documented, according to Rick Rockwell, the EPA is actively turning a blind eye to other potential contaminants floating around in the biosolid mixture.
“The EPA isn’t really testing for these things in a meaningful way,” Rockwell said. “The EPA itself put out a list of 500 chemicals found in biosolids but it is not regulated. They put out this study and a list of chemicals but there is no change in the regulations or any authoritative body that has said what the detrimental level to encounter is or what the hazardous level is.”
According to Rockwell, the contents of the biosolid mixture includes just about anything flushed down the toilet or expelled from the body. From narcotics and antibiotics to illegal drugs and plasticizers, anything that finds its way in a toilet bowel, inevitably ends up mixed in with the biosolid contents.
While members of the EPA’s regulatory commission of biosolids, mostly made up of former employees of the biosolids industry, report that the “biodigestion” process kills off most of the harmful contents of the mixture, a thorough understanding of the whole process indicates such claims are full of shit.
According to Rockwell, the standard process of biosolid handling starts in local wastewater treatment. As the contents at the wastewater facilities are separated and filtered out, the water heads to a water treatment facility to be recycled back into municipal water systems while the solid material can be handled one of two ways. Either the waste treatment facilities can dump it into a landfill, a practice the EPA currently frowns upon, or it can be sold to a company like Quasar. Under the auspices of “green energy” initiatives, companies like Quasar, Renergy and Dovetail have cropped up around the state and are paid to take the solid waste, and then place said waste into a structure called a “biodigester,” which your tax dollars paid for by way of EPA grants. These silo-like structures heat the material to around 98 degrees and use the excess gas to generate miniscule amounts of energy, which are sold off to local energy grids before the remaining solid waste, categorized as either Biosolid class A or class B, must be discarded somewhere. The inevitable location for this mixture is in dug out pits called “lagoons” which are open air pools of human waste containing everything from PFAS, plasticizers, antibiotic excretions, mutagenic compounds and a host of bacteria that the anaerobic digestors could never hope to kill off.
The EPA knows and has admitted in documentation that biosolids contain an inexhaustible amount of chemicals with known deleterious health effects to both humans and the environment, which is why they have steered wastewater companies away from simply dumping it into landfills. The opinion of the EPA is that absorption of the material into the ground could pose deleterious effects to the environment and to ground water or future generations exposed to it. Putting aside for a moment the issue of why placing it in a covered pit is better than an open air pit, we must answer one nagging question: What happens when the lagoons begin to overflow? Knowing as we do, that people do not ever stop evacuating nor does the sky stop raining, eventually those lagoons will overflow unless emptied out somewhere else. According to Madison Township trustee Shawn Glenn, companies like Quasar have been playing a game of “musical lagoons” to deal with it on a temporary basis. They are moving the waste from one pit to another until it becomes too burdensome and they simply empty it onto the one place it should never come into contact with under any circumstances- vegetable crops.
Farmers across the state who are enticed by the promise of free or cheap fertilizer are currently registered in contracts for biosolid field spraying. The waste treatment companies simply hose town their fields with the biosolid material that has become too burdensome to store in the open-air lagoons.
“The lagoon is just a holding area” Rockwell said. “It’s only allowed to be there for two years and then it has to be turned over every couple of years or they use it for fertilizer. They are spreading it in our fields.”
For a company like Quasar, it is an incredibly lucrative business model. They are paid to take the solid waste from the wastewater facilities, they are paid by the EPA to build the digestors they put the waste in and then they are paid again by the energy companies for the pittance of “green” energy they generate. The only real problem is what to do with the excess material. According to the EPA, getting it into your food supply is the most environmentally sound option. The real question one might need to ask is why the EPA, which attempts to pretend it is a protector and steward of the environment, feels feeding you crops loaded with the very chemicals they have previously admitted are present and dangerous is such a good idea. One might question whether or not they are aware of its ability to enter into food supply at all, and one might be surprised to know they are very much aware due to the department of agriculture having been sued over it
In 2008, the US Department of Agriculture was sued by McElmurray dairy farms when their cattle had become contaminated by a number of mutagenic and toxic chemicals found in biosolid based fertilizer applied to the land. Cows became infected after being fed crops grown with the material, which killed many and polluted the milk of others. In the ruling, federal judge Anthony Alfred Alaimo had said that the science the department of agriculture was basing their argument on, science published by the EPA, was “fudged, faulty and fabricated.”
Perhaps the judge had seen a number of concerning studies on how heavy metal contaminants contained in biosolid material had significant uptake in vegetables grown in the human fertilizer. Or perhaps the judge was aware of the multitude of cases of contaminated beef coming from cows fed crops grown with human biosolid fertilizer, or contaminated milk coming from various other cattle. The problem has become so vast in the state of Maine that the state has issued a complete moratorium on the practice and demanded testing of over 500 different locations dating back to the 1970’s where the biosolid material was applied to the land to test the soil and water of the areas and determine the extent of the damage. In terms of true environmental impact, the true range could be catastrophic.
In terms of general environmental damage, animals and the weather have no grasp or understanding of how and when to steer clear of or limit the impact of a biosolid lagoon or to avoid fields and crops grown using this mixture. Across northeast Ohio chronic wasting disease, an affliction like Mad Cow Disease is rampaging through the deer population and many are beginning to link its deadly effects to biosolid contamination. While PFAS have already been found in deer, meaning their exposure to the material is already happening, some are raising the red flag on the potential exposure to prions, which lead to neurodegenerative ailments like Chronic Wasting Disease, Mad Cow, and ailments not unlike Alzheimer’s, dementia and more.
In simplified terms, neurodegenerative ailments like Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s are caused by the process of misfolded protein strands called prions entering into the brain. These structures are pathogenic are in many cases, highly contagious. Multiple studies have found that prions associated with ailments like chronic wasting disease are shed by animals in their feces, showing that exposure goes beyond simple consumption of contaminated meat and that those infected leave traces behind. Deer that are asymptomatic carriers of the ailment causing prions shed it in their waste. Even local park services are aware of the potential hazards to humans and other animals in coming into contact with these prions.
Could this be the explanation for the rise in infected animals currently sweeping through the state? With such significant overlap with the prions that cause CWD, Alzheimer’s like ailments and more, are we also tacitly acknowledging it as a potential culprit in the rise in Alzheimer’s and dementia diagnoses across the state as well? Would it be enough to frighten even the staunchest of nihilists to tell them the food they eat and water from their tap is possibly contaminated with a host of chemicals known to cause cancer, liver disease, mutations to their DNA and organ failure? Would it shock those apathetic among us who are content to say “well everything causes cancer these days” to also know that the very vegetables and meat in their refrigerator could be contaminated with neurodegenerative prions, leading them precipitously towards brain death and complete debilitation? Prions cannot ever be killed off. If they are fermenting in this biosolid waste, then our exposure is simply compounding through uptake into the food supply and leading to shedding from infected individuals back into the sewer system, cycling back to your municipal water and spread over the food you feed your family again and again.
We as a society are at the tip of the spire. We are locked in the train car and looking down over the precipice of a massive drop that is starting to take shape before our eyes. These findings go beyond simple ignorance or “being asleep at the wheel.” Our regulatory agencies are captured entities and practice a code of plausible deniability. They have violated the public trust and social contracts. When the EPA is using your own tax dollars to help poison your land, water and food with no recourse what options do you have?
One can only hope knowledge of this issue can help galvanize the population into stark action before it is too late. Should we fail to halt this destructive action, we could be facing a true public health crisis the likes of which we have never seen.
The practice of using biosolids as fertilizer was popularized in western Europe, where nations like the Netherlands had engaged in the practice under similar “green” initiatives. However, the country has since halted its practice, selling off its remaining stockpile of the toxic sludge to the nearest buyer and vowing to burn its solid material for the foreseeable future. One must wonder why if the left-leaning governments of western Europe have halted this practice, why aren’t we? Companies like Quasar have found themselves in a perfect financial niche, receiving easy money from multiple sides and sinking their collective claws into the regulatory agencies, polluting them as badly as the food you place at your kitchen table. In a world where our governmental institutions are actively against us, local action is the only recourse.
Residents and officials in Perry county are pushing back and some are finding new strategies to get the message out. While Rockwell and Wilson’s group are currently filing appeals against the EPA’s permits, Madison Township Trustees like Shawn Glenn are going directly to farmers. At the moment, the EPA keeps record of territories currently being sprayed with biosolids on an easily accessible map. Many of these farmers sell their contaminated crops locally and may be completely unaware of the potential health risks in using this product. According to Glenn, informing them of the dangers and impact of using this product has changed their outlook and led to the farmers cancelling their contracts with the waste companies.
“We started going around to our farmers and informed them of what is in it,” Glenn said. “We have a few farmers that sell locally and we told them we are going to go to the businesses that you sell to and tell them that these animals were fed these crops and raised on this and they stopped using it. They weren’t happy about it, but they stopped.”
Starve the beast and it will have to find alternatives or collapse entirely. At the present time, discarding this filth over our fields and food is the only cheap recourse the industry has to rid itself of it. If the local populations deny them this outlet by cancelling their contracts for human feces fertilizer and refuse to buy products that use the sludge, the industry will have to find another way or risk collapsing entirely. The cart has peaked over its precipice and we are racing down the tracks at terminal velocity. Should we fail to free ourselves from the cart and leap to safety, the results will be unfathomable for our children and what we leave behind in our wake.
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