The Trump administration has repealed proposed regulations that would have spread Pfas-contaminated sewage sludge on farmland as fertilizer, a practice that sickened farmers, destroyed livelihoods, killed livestock, contaminated water supplies, and poisoned meat and food sold to the public.
The proposed regulations would nearly eliminate the use of sludge, also known as biosolids, in the nation’s food system. But the Environmental Protection Agency has scrapped the two-year-old scientific study that served as the basis for the proposed regulations. It justified its decision by declaring that sludge is not a widespread threat to the public, as it is primarily used on farms and represents only a small portion of cultivated land.
But in comments published in the Federal Register, the EPA advised Americans to “research” sludge companies to protect themselves from toxic chemicals that contaminate household fertilizers widely sold for use in home gardens.
Laura Dumais, a lawyer with the nonprofit organization Environmentally Responsible Public Employees (Pia), said the decision was “a little strange.”
“It’s shocking that EPA conducted a scientific evaluation and then simply throws it out,” Dumais said. “Basically what they’re saying is: Farmers’ lives don’t matter.”
PFAs are about 16,000 compounds that are called “eternal chemicals” because they do not break down naturally and accumulate in the human body and the environment. These chemicals have been linked to a variety of serious health problems, including cancer, liver disease, kidney problems, high cholesterol, birth defects, and weakened immunity.
Sludge is a mixture of human and industrial waste and is a byproduct of processing waste that is routed through the nation’s sewerage system. Because it is expensive to dispose of and rich in plant nutrients, the EPA in the early 1990s began allowing its application on cropland.
But public health advocates have condemned the practice. That’s because countries spend billions of dollars each year treating water, only to extract harmful byproducts that get mixed into the food supply and recontaminate water. Regulators in Maine and Michigan found Pfas in every sample they tested, as did a 2001 federal study of sewage sludge across the country.
Although biosolids can contain large amounts of 90,000 man-made chemicals, EPA regulations currently require monitoring of only nine heavy metals. Pier sued the EPA for failing to regulate Pfas in sludge under the Clean Water Act.
In the final days of the Biden administration, the EPA issued a “Draft Health Risk Assessment” for some PFAs in sludge, finding that concentrations above parts per billion (ppb) increased cancer and other health risks for farmers.
Most sludges contain less than 1 ppb of Pfas, a threshold low enough that, if finalized and implemented, it would significantly limit the use of the substance.
The proposed regulations include risk assessments for Pfoa and Pfos, two of the most common and toxic Pfas compounds. The assessment was based on cancer and health risks to farmers, but did not examine how the chemicals could affect the public through contaminated produce, dairy or meat.
In comments submitted to the EPA, the Southern Environmental Law Center pointed to studies showing risks to farmers and their families, as well as the public. Included in that calculation was the increased risk to children drinking milk from farms sprayed with sludge containing levels of 9.4 ppb of Pfoa. Pfoa levels in sludge tested in Maine exceeded 9.4 ppb.
More than 36 out of 1,000 children who drink one or two glasses of contaminated milk each day are at risk of developing cancer later in life from drinking that milk alone, researchers found. They are also more than 319 times more likely to develop health problems other than cancer.
The EPA’s decision “puts polluters first, and the consequences will be borne by farmers and rural communities,” said Gene Chuan, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
“The current administration is abandoning a comprehensive, science-based assessment of the dangers of Pfas and replacing it with a flimsy, thin document that minimizes the real harm,” Zhuang said.
The waste management industry, which profits from sludge, strongly opposes the regulation and is lobbying the EPA on the issue.
In a new assessment, the EPA claimed that sludge was being sprayed on just 1% of farmland, but no government agency at any level is tracking where the sludge has been sprayed. Although most states do not test land where sludge has been sprayed, it has been found to migrate to surrounding land and contaminate water sources.
The government also has not conducted meaningful testing of food grown in Pfas-contaminated sludge. In Maine, more than 100 farms have been found to be affected by contaminated sludge, including organic farms where farmers were unknowingly growing crops in chemical-laden soil, where chemicals sprayed decades ago are still found to be contaminating the land.
“It’s shocking that the EPA is willing to throw all these people under the bus. The EPA’s solution here is ‘look it up for yourself. We’re not going to regulate anything, so if you think it’s dangerous, figure it out for yourself,'” Dumais said.
