Toxic Waste in Fertilizer — And Your Food
Did you know that many toxic wastes are “recycled” into fertilizer and spread on land used to grow food? I didn’t before reading an interesting book, Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret, written by Duff Wilson, formerly a reporter for The Seattle Times and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper series that preceded the book.
The book tells the story through the experience of Patty Martin, the mayor of Quincy, a small farming town located in central Washington state. After several farmers experience unexpected crop failures, a horse breeder’s animals mysteriously die eating locally-grown feed, and people in the town begin developing unexplained chronic illnesses, Martin and a small group of other residents trace the effects to the local Cenex fertilizer distributor. Cenex had disposed of toxic waste (heavy metals, pesticides, and other unidentified materials) stored in a large rinsing pond on its property by mixing it with fertilizer sold to local farmers.
However, as Martin and the others soon learn, the practice of recycling toxic waste into fertilizer, was (and still is) not limited to Quincy. It’s a nationwide, and even worldwide, practice. In fact, recycling of toxic waste into fertilizer …
… is encouraged by many regulators, as a way of reducing landfill burdens. Of course, for the toxic waste generators, paying a middleman to take possession of the waste, to be later sold to general fertilizer manufacturers, represents a significant cost savings versus disposing the waste in a landfill (potentially hundreds of dollars per ton).
Landfill costs had gone up tenfold in the past ten years. The cost, insurance, liability, and environmental laws were all pushing heavy industry to keep its hazardous wastes out of landfills — to recycle and market them any way they could.
Waste Sources
Primary potential hazardous waste sources include:
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Companies producing and recycling metals, such as:
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steel
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aluminum
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copper
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zinc
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Cement kilns
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Coal-fired power plants, which produce fly ash, a waste product “collected from filters, scrubbers, and other pollution-control equipment…The ash [contains] mercury, molybdenum, selenium, and dioxins.” The ash is sold as a liming agent to raise the alkalinity of the soil in heavily farmed areas.
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And more …
In true doublespeak, these wastes are sometimes referred to as “bulk soil amendments”:
“Call contaminated fly ash a soil amendment and you avoid even the loose rules that apply to licensed fertilizers. And when the liming effect ends, as it always does, with time and water, unless you add more and more, then the heavy-metal poisons become active in the soil. It was a time bomb, a Trojan horse, and one feature of heavy metals is that they stay in the topsoil, where plants grow.”
As long as the wastes contain useful fertilizer ingredients, like zinc and iron, the rest of the potentially hazardous ingredients are often ignored.
Evidence
As detailed in the book, one of the affected Quincy farmers wrote a paper titled, “Lead in Your French Fries?”, that showed elevated lead levels in locally-grown potatoes. Northwest farmers produce 80 percent of all french-fried potatoes. That paper quickly got the attention of industry, which reacted strongly in its own defense. Even most of the farmers in Quincy, afraid of a food scare that could ruin their own livelihoods, pressured Martin and her group to stop pursuing the issue.
Instead, Martin persisted. She and her small group connected with Wilson to help investigate and tell the story of toxins in fertilizers on a larger scale.
The contamination was clearly undeniable. Several people in Quincy, including Martin and her family, sent hair samples to Doctor’s Data lab in Illinois for analysis. Hair testing is recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a good indicator of some heavy metal exposures. The results were shocking to both the residents and the lab:
Aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, uranium — all of them unnaturally elevated. Something was wrong. The lab had to stake its good name on the findings. Doctor’s Data had twenty-five years’ experience in environmental toxicity and forty-five corporate clients. The technician checked the lab equipment and reran the samples. Everything checked out.
“High lead and cadmium like this would be found in a welder,” the head biochemist said. “When you start seeing these things in children you know aren’t welding, you know they’re coming from the environment.”
In California, a group of California bureaucrats and businessmen, called the Heavy Metal Task Force, tested four fertilizers. Two of them failed:
They contained ten times more than the hazardous-waste limits for arsenic, cadmium, copper, chromium, lead, thallium, mercury, and selenium.
Luckily for the manufacturers, [the Task Force] said toxic metal standards applied to wastes, not products. There were no limits in fertilizer products. Had there been, a lot of the products would have to be disposed of in hazardous-waste landfill instead of a food-growing operation.
The Magic Silo
Wilson interviewed Dick Camp Jr., owner of one of the top hazardous-waste-to-fertilizer dealers in the country, Bay Zinc. Wilson learned the story of how Camp’s father was one of the first people to use steel company flue dust in fertilizer and turned it into a great business:
Dick Camp Sr. made money coming and going.
Today in the United States, 60 percent of junk cars are recycled in electric furnaces. Every ounce of steel west of the Rock Mountains is used, secondhand, recycled material …
… Every time the steel is melted to purify its main ingredient — iron — the contaminants are concentrated into toxic waste. The zinc, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, lead, and dioxins go to fume at a lower temperature than iron melts. Up the chimney they rise, every impurity unwanted by steel recyclers. To prevent pollution, the electric arc furnace dust is cooled and collected in a structure called a baghouse.
The dust is typically 10 to 20 percent zinc from galvanized parts of the car, like the door handles. It’s about 3 percent lead, 0.5 cadmium, and sky-high in dioxins from incinerated plastic. In the end, about 1.5 percent of the weight of the recycled steel ends up in the baghouse. The forty-five million tons of scrap metal leaves 650,000 tons of hazardous waste a year.
The Camps got paid to take the hazardous waste from the steel recyclers, and then got paid again to sell it to farms after it had been “converted” into fertilizer. One anonymous Bay Zinc worker said, “Basically we’re like McDonald’s getting paid to take the hamburger meat and then selling it. There’s good money to make in that.”
The founding of the EPA in the mid-1970s led to oversight for the handling and disposal of hazardous waste, which, in turn, led to a twentyfold increase in landfill disposal costs over the next ten years. The EPA’s mantra was “reduce, reuse, recycle.”
Of the many ways to recycle waste, the EPA was most alert to disposal on the ground. The agency watched for companies trying to use recycling for surrogate dumping. The EPA said they had to make a viable product, stabilized and safe. Otherwise it was sham recycling. That was rarely enforced.
The EPA proposed a rule in 1978 to strictly limit arsenic, cadmium, and lead in soil conditioners and require labeling, but that rule never saw the light of day. By 1988, the EPA finally had drafted a complete set of hazardous waste rules. George Bush Sr., then Vice President under Ronald Regan, chaired a panel on regulatory relief. Soon thereafter, the EPA eliminated the hazardous waste enforcement office.
Bay Zinc and other fertilizer manufacturers didn’t stop there, though:
They even got the EPA to add a new loophole: electric arc furnace dust K061 … would — despite hexavalent chromium, lead, and cadmium — simply not be considered a hazardous waste if it was used to make fertilizer.
The K061 exemption required a chemical change to the material, but I would later learn the change was cosmetic. Bay Zinc simply mixed sulfuric acid and water with the hazardous waste to turn a powdery dusty into solid granules. Camp said this followed the federal law. But obviously, in the end, when the granules dissolved in the soil, they released all the toxic metals that had been collected in the steel-mill chimneys …
… Camp said he always wanted to “take the bad things out” of the steel-mill flue dust, but he and his father could never figure out an affordable way to do that. They relied on dilution with the land to render the toxic chemicals harmless …
… From Camp’s perspective, a ton of hazardous waste from a steel mill represented seventy-five or one hundred dollars in Bay Zinc’s bank account. A trainload — four hundred tons — was thirty thousand or forty thousand dollars. By adding acid and water, he could roll the ash into granules and sell it as fertilizer for one hundred to two hundred dollars a ton. The industry grew from that exemption.
Wilson neatly sums up the situation:
At the steel mill, it was hazardous waste. In the railcar, it was hazardous waste. Going into the top of the silo at Bay Zinc, it was hazardous waste … Then it changed … When it came out of the bottom of the silo, it was no longer considered hazardous waste, but a fertilizer material.
And this practice continues today, despite the fact that general fertilizer products into which products like Camp’s are mixed are, according to federal law, illegal:
Once something is declared a hazardous waste, you cannot make it unhazardous just by diluting it. Anything made from a hazardous waste is considered a hazardous waste.
What Other Countries Do
Canada has been the only country to closely monitor fertilizer toxins, limiting nine of them to amounts that would no more than double background soil levels over forty-five years.
Canadian law also required anyone selling waste or micronutrients in fertilizers to provide four samples every six months, to identify all known contaminants, and to cite scientific reports focusing on food and environmental safety and worker protection.
Darlene Blair of Agri-Food Canada summarizes the difference in approach:
“In the U.S. we hear, ‘Okay, how much can we apply until we get to the maximum that people can stand?’ … It’s like, ‘Way to go! Way to recycle!’ And I say, like, ‘Excuse me, but that recycled stuff isn’t good for us. That’s our food material.”
Some European countries and Australia limit cadmium, but don’t look at other metals.
In 1998, a ban on all movement of hazardous wastes from richer countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to less industrialized nations was signed. Yet, transfers are still allowed between OECD countries (e.g., the U.S., Mexico, Canada), between non-OECD countries, and from non-OECD countries to OECD countries.
U.S. Regulation
Thus far, a few states, including Washington, California, Texas, and Minnesota, have introduced laws requiring greater disclosure of heavy metal content in fertilizers.
And, yet:
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Toxic products, such as Ironite, which contains high levels of arsenic and lead and is banned in Canada, remain widely available for both consumer and commercial use in most states.
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There are no federal laws regulating the toxicity of fertilizers. Fertilizers are only subject to the EPA’s Land Disposal Restrictions, which regulate zinc-containing fertilizers containing toxic wastes and how they are treated before being disposed of in heavily-regulated, lined landfills — not put into fertilizer. The LDRs are not risk- or health-based regulations.
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There still is no federal regulation requiring labeling listing the amounts of toxic components, such as heavy metals, in fertilizers.
The State of Minnesota has put together a good summary of the metal content of many fertilizers(PDF).
Conclusion
Polluting industries saved millions of dollars sending hazardous waste to fertilizer makers. The toxics in the waste were neither limited by law nor tested by government nor disclosed to users. Farmers and gardeners were buying products containing unknown, hidden levels of unsafe toxic chemicals. If they did not know about the risks, then they could not take precautions. Those chemicals persisted in topsoil for years. They flew in the dust, were breathed by children, were absorbed by plants, and entered our food, according to careful studies by leading scientists.
Wilson’s book, published in 2001, is eye-opening. Really worth reading if you have the time. The summary doesn’t do it justice. The book includes many other interesting examples and stories.
Also, be sure to check out Wilson’s 1997 article series in the Seattle Times that broke the story (Fear in the Fields: How Hazardous Waste Becomes Fertilizer).
Heavy metal toxicity, whether via food or other sources, is a serious and legitimate concern. As Wilson notes:
Heavy metals do their insidious harm not in days for weeks, but in decades. Nobody can prove cause and effect.
If you or others you know think you may have been affected by heavy metals, there are definitely steps that can be taken to attempt to safely recover.
June 25th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
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