The Center for Food Safety, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, plans to file a lawsuit against the federal government, demanding an end to the land application of sewage sludge, Executive Director Andrew Kimbrell said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency denied in 2004 a petition that the center and 72 other food, farm and labor organizations had submitted, calling for an end to the land application of sludge, the semi-solid result of what is flushed down toilets and washed down drains after being treated at a wastewater plant.
But, with a federal judge earlier this year calling records used to support the sludge program “incomplete” and “fudged,” the center in the next few months will file a lawsuit, Kimbrell said.
“In the wake of the current inability of the EPA to protect our food supply and environment from the impacts of sewage sludge application to our farmlands, we think it appropriate for Congress to fully investigate this issue and to then take appropriate action,” he said.
Countless people have claimed sludge caused them to contract illnesses, but the EPA said no link has ever been proven. The Examiner reported in April on Lin Eyer, of Havre de Grace, who became infected after she rode her horse through freshly spread sludge in Susquehanna State Park. She had to have all of her teeth pulled.
An EPA scientist linked in 2000 the death of 11-year-old Tony Behun, of Osceola Mills, Pa., to sewage sludge after he rode a dirt bike through sludge.
State and federal officials, however, have disputed that scientist’s reports and said sludge had nothing to do with the boy’s death.
In Maryland, more than 700,000 wet tons of wet sludge is created each year, and about 50 percent is spread on farmland, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.
Judge Anthony Alaimo, of the U.S. District Court in Georgia, ruled in the case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture because sludge ravaged a Georgia dairy farmer’s land and killed his award-winning cattle.
Land samples taken eight years after the sludge dumping showed that levels of cadmium, which can lead to flu-like symptoms and, at worst, cancer in humans, and molybdenum, which can irritate people’s eyes and skin, were 37 percent to 1,400 percent higher than permitted, according to the ruling.
Alaimo wrote in his opinion that the case’s sludge records, which the EPA had used to support its program, were “incomplete and “fudged.”
“Senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent and any questioning of the EPA’s biosolids program,” Alaimo wrote. “Biosolids” is the word sludge supporters coined for sludge.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee was to hold a hearing this past Thursday on the land application of sludge, but it was canceled.
