Congress plans to hold hearings on the land application of sewage sludge in Baltimore neighborhoods, a Senate source said.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairs the Environmental and Public Works Committee, and the hearings are expected to be held by the end of the summer.
The Maryland and Baltimore City branches of the NAACP have also called for federal and state criminal investigations into sludge spreading in Baltimore.
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Johns Hopkins University spread Class A sludge ? which is treated to eliminate pathogens ? around volunteers? homes in Baltimore to see whether it reduced high lead levels in the soil, a result of paint chipping off houses.
“That?s ridiculous. I couldn?t believe it,” said Gerald Stansbury, head of the Maryland NAACP, who sent letters Monday to Attorney General Douglas Gansler and U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski calling for criminal investigations.
Mikulski will look into the study before making an announcement later this week, a spokeswoman said.
The study found that sludge reduced the lead levels and helped grow grass, which reduced the possibility that dirt with high lead levels could be tracked into houses.
“Compost offers great promise for people to help themselves protect their children at low cost,” according to the study.
Rufus Chaney, a USDA researcher from Greenbelt who helped conduct the department?s Baltimore research, said the greatest health risk in inner cities comes from lead paint in and on houses, not the soil where sludge has been spread.
“Research studies show that homeowners can reduce the risk of soil [lead] to their children without waiting for government to come up with the much higher cost of removing and replacing the soil,” Chaney wrote in an e-mail.
Johns Hopkins referred comment to the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which helped find the studies? participants. Bryan Stark, spokesman for the institute, said the Class A sludge is the same type of fertilizer sold in hardware stores.
About half of the biosolids created in the U.S. are land-applied, but as more residents speak out against sludge, more sludge is spread on vulnerable communities that lack money and political clout, according to reports by former Environmental Protection Agency scientist David Lewis and his University of Georgia colleague David Gattie.
“One outcome of local bans is that land application of sewage sludge is being forced out of areas where residents have the political and economic resources to oppose the practice and into economically depressed areas,” Lewis and Gattie wrote in a 2004 report in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
“Whether this is intentional or not, sewage sludge is being dumped more and more into those communities least able to have their complaints heard, and where residents are least capable of relocating or obtaining medical treatment.”
