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Municipal Groups Urge EPA to Reject Petition to Ban Use of Sludge on Land
Municipal organizations urged the Environmental Protection Agency in an Oct.
24 letter to reject a petition from a coalition of labor, environmental, and
farm groups calling on the agency to place a moratorium on the land application
of treated sewage sludge.
EPA announced its decision Oct. 17 not to regulate dioxins in sewage sludge,
citing numerous studies and peer-reviewed data showing the cancer risk was too
low to justify setting a numeric limit for dioxin concentrations in land-applied
sludge (202 DEN A-1, 10/20/03 ).
The final decision was officially published Oct. 24 in the Federal Register (68
Fed. Reg. 61,084).
The Center for Food Safety filed a petition Oct. 7 threatening to sue the agency
if it did not ban the practice of allowing treated sludge to be applied to
agricultural land as fertilizer.
The group said sludge contains hazardous compounds such as dioxins, heavy
metals, and other pollutants whose cumulative impacts are not known. The groups
also asked the agency to undertake a formal rulemaking to change the regulation
(40 C.F.R. 503) so that land application as a method of disposal would be
prohibited.
Mayors, Cities Support EPA Decision
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, the Association of
Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, and other municipal groups said the petition
should be denied because "the beneficial use of properly managed biosolids
through land application to farms, reclamation of disturbed lands, and use in
turf maintenance and home gardening is a safe and time-tested recycling
practice."
Among other factors, EPA based its decision not to regulate on a model that
looked at the potential effects on a hypothetical farm family, which it
considered to be the "most highly exposed" people because they consumed food
raised on the land where sludge was applied. The agency estimated a maximum of
about 11,000 people fit this model, and of those, only 0.22 new cases of cancer
could be expected over a lifetime of 70 years.
Geoffrey H. Grubbs, director of science and technology in the EPA Office of
Water, cited a different situation--that of a Georgia dairy farm on which 300
cows died. A jury awarded damages to the Boyce Family Farm after the city of
Augusta was sued.
The Center for Food Safety petition linked the deaths to the fact that sewage
sludge had been used on the land where the cows grazed, a fact disputed by the
municipal groups.
"The scientific evidence presented to the Georgia court showed no significant
amounts of metals in the pastureland or cattle," the municipal groups said in
their letter.
The petitioners base their claims on "misinformation and fears that have not
materialized over decades of successful land application of biosolids," the term
used for treated sludge, the municipal groups said.