Dear Friends,
Sorry that I have been so quiet. We have been putting together briefings and white papers but I felt it would be premature to share them.
However, our team just completed one on the issue of sewer sludge. It might be an "Oooh, yuck" but please read on anyway. I learned so much that I am guessing most of my readers don't know either, and the information could be really important to you.
Sewage sludge is anything that families and factories choose to flush down their pipes. I had always assumed that sewage was carefully processed to remove toxic materials, but that is not the case at all. Instead, it is minimally processed, and then it has to be discarded. Somewhere.
Until the 1980s, New York City was dumping their waste into the ocean! and EPA had made them go further and further out till they were over 100 miles offshore. This reminded me of how the government had gotten rid of old stores of leaky bins filled with chemical weapons, by putting them on board old ships. The ships set out from Earle Naval base, just south of New York City, near Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and when the ships got out far enough out, the ships were scuttled and the chemical weapons – well we don't know what damage they did or what happened to them. Or how many remain intact, ready to be discovered by some other army. This practice was ended in 1972.
I just went to look up a citation for this chemical weapon story, and google's AI (the introductory AI, not its advanced AI) denied that it had happened. However, I found a Congressional Research Report that confirmed it really did happen, here. I am certain these AI's have been programmed to hide certain narratives and push others. Why would anyone trust them?
Back to sludge. EPA was sued for allowing this ocean dumping of whatever is in the sewage mix, and so a terrible "win-win" solution was found. What to do with all this waste? We couldn't tell companies to stop polluting the sewage with chemicals.
So with minimal processing at the water treatment plant, which did not remove the vast majority of toxic products or break them down, sludge was renamed BIOSOLIDS and it magically became fertilizer. No kidding. They dried it, bagged it, and now you are buying a mix of human wastes and chemicals, microplastics, PFAS (forever chemicals that are endocrine inhibitors and carcinogens), flame retardants, etc. at the garden store to fertilize your garden. Many of the bags use terms like "organic." When the Sierra Club tested 9 bags of commercial fertilizers, it found all had PFAS and 8 had toxic levels.
Does this remind you of how industrial waste fluoride (expensive to dispose of) found its way into drinking water?
EPA only limits the amount of a few heavy metals and ignores the rest of the mess that could be in the biosolids.
So that is what might be in your organic garden. What about your farmer's fields? It turns out that permits have been issued for spreading this stuff on 20% of US farmland. Over and over. A recipe for contaminated groundwater, waterways, soil and food. Dairy and meat are the most contaminated foodstuffs.
And this brilliant idea was not only approved by EPA but was hailed as a huge success in repurposing and sustainability. But maybe the tide will turn. USDA Sec. Brooke Rollins' mother is fighting to ban sewage sludge applications in Texas, where she is a member of the legislature.
Below is an article you might want to look at. It summarizes a >100 page draft report on sludge as fertilizer issued by the EPA on January 25. Buried in the report are some real risks from this stuff. So now just might be when this crazy practice can change.
Problem is, where will they put our wastes next? We made some suggestions, but I won't go into the nitty gritty now. Do you think we can get industry to manage its own waste products? What would that take?
Thanks for sticking with us!
Meryl and the Door to Freedom Team
