“Climate friendly” Fertilizers Are Killing Livestock
Sewage, which has been used to make biosolid fertilizers for years, contains a ubiquitous class of chemicals called PFAs that are highly toxic and carcinogenic at low doses. When biosolids are separated from wastewater and processed into fertilizer pellets, PFA concentrations are made exponentially larger than background levels in our everyday environment and inevitably leech back into the environment and bioaccumulate at these higher concentrations as the organic matter making up the biosolid fertilizers degrades. Despite having advanced notice of PFA contamination of sewage derived fertilizers over 2 decades ago in a meeting with representatives from 3M and from their own toxicologists, the EPA continued to push PFA ladened sewage fertilizer as a “climate friendly” alternative to synthetic fertilizers. After one EPA employee, David Lewis, sounded the alarm about the toxicity of sewage fertilizers in the late 90s and early 2000s the agency eliminated his job.
Farmers that use sewage fertilizers or who are situated adjacent to farms that do also find that it kills their livestock. Several ranchers and farmers in Johnson County, TX, outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, filed suit against one of the manufacturers of sewage fertilizers, Synagro, after their cattle and horses were killed by acute exposure to high concentrations of PFAs that accumulated in their stock ponds from adjacent fields. Necropsies of dead animals on affected farms and ranches revealed PFA levels measurable in hundreds of parts per billion and as high as parts per million. The toxic effects of PFAs are noticeable in the single digit per trillion range.
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It doesn’t take decades to figure out that PFAs become a lot more concentrated in the biosolid sludge separated from wastewater and in the process of turning them into pellets than they are in untreated sewage. It's not difficult to foresee how PFA concentrations that might be relatively “low” in untreated sewage might become exponentially higher after the sewage is processed into biosolid pellets. In 2019, a wastewater treatment plant in (Deer Park) Boston Harbor found that biosolid fertilizers made with their treated sewage contained 3 types of PFAs at 18 PPB. At the time the EPA recommended limits of 70 PPT in drinking water; it is now 4 PPT. That is 257x higher than the maximum concentration for drinking water. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a non-profit run by former and current EPA toxicologists, found that biosolid fertilizers produced from sewage treated by Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant in D.C. had slightly higher PFOA concentrations of 21 PPB and PFOS concentrations of 26 PPB. In 2023, a study conducted by a research team at Drexel University’s College of Engineering found that microbial decomposition can further raise PFA concentrations in biosolid fertilizers. Among their biosolid samples that had undergone one of three types of treatment processes at a treatment plant (aerobic digestion, anaerobic digestion or composting) and placed in a controlled environment for 3 months, they found that samples with the highest level of microbial activity also demonstrated the highest level of PFAS leaching out of the biosolids as microbes broke down the organic matter. Given this information, it's not difficult to see how piles of biosolid fertilizer can leech PFAs into nearby water sources that can bioaccumulate at concentrations high enough to quickly kill animals as was seen in Johnson County, Texas.
Edit: About a week after I posted this the EPA finally decided to stop lying and obfuscating the truth about biosolid fertilizers which are still commercially available.