Yeah Bret, here's your feedstock for ethanol production. I told you
the bacteria would have to be wearing a blue suit with a red cape or
whatever. I wonder what thallium and PCBs do to internal combustion
engines.

quote

Sewage-Based Fertilizer Safety Doubted
By JOHN HEILPRIN and KEVIN S. VINEYS Associated Press Writer
Mar 6th, 2008 | AUGUSTA, Ga. -- It was a farm idea with a big payoff
and supposedly no downside: ridding lakes and rivers of raw sewage and
industrial pollution by converting it all into a free, nutrient-rich
fertilizer.

Then last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to
compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from the waste
treatment plant here. His cows had died by the hundreds.

The Associated Press also has learned that some of the same
contaminants showed up in milk that regulators allowed a neighboring
dairy farmer to market, even after some officials said they were
warned about it.

In one case, according to test results provided to the AP, the level
of thallium -- an element once used as rat poison -- found in the milk
was 120 times the concentration allowed in drinking water by the
Environmental Protection Agency.

The contaminated milk and the recent ruling by U.S. District Judge
Anthony Alaimo raise new doubts about a 30-year government policy that
encourages farmers to spread millions of tons of sewage sludge over
thousands of acres each year as an alternative to commercial
fertilizers.

The program is still in effect.

Alaimo ordered the government to compensate dairy farmer Andy
McElmurray because 1,730 acres he wanted to plant in corn and cotton
to feed his herd was poisoned. The sludge contained levels of arsenic,
toxic heavy metals and PCBs two to 2,500 times federal health
standards.

Also, data endorsed by Agriculture and EPA officials about toxic heavy
metals found in the free sludge provided by Augusta's sewage treatment
plant was "unreliable, incomplete, and in some cases, fudged," Alaimo
wrote.

EPA-commissioned research by the University of Georgia based on the
Augusta data was included in a National Academy of Sciences report and
served as a linchpin for the government's assertion that sludge didn't
pose a health risk.

In his 45-page ruling, Alaimo said that along with using the
questionable data, "senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to
quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of EPA's biosolids
program."

Benjamin H. Grumbles, EPA's assistant administrator for water
programs, said Thursday that the judge's order underscored the
significance of what he called strong national standards on sludge
rather than undercutting the giveaway program.

"This unfortunate instance of poor recordkeeping and biosolids
sampling techniques on the part of one plant reiterates the importance
of our national biosolids program," Grumbles said in a written
response to AP questions about the ruling.

About 7 million tons of biosolids -- the term that waste producers came
up with for sludge in 1991 -- are produced each year as a byproduct
from 1,650 waste water treatment plants around the nation.

Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is
incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is
cheaper than burning or burying it, and the government's policy has
been to encourage the former.

Alaimo's decision was a bittersweet victory for McElmurray, whose
silos and dairy barns sit mostly empty since his herd was wiped out.
He contends the cows were done in by grazing on sludge-treated hay for
more than a decade, beginning in 1979.

Interviewed before the ruling, McElmurray crossed his arms, scowling
at the empty pastures and idle equipment where his prize-winning herds
once grazed here in eastern Georgia. "This farm never would have
looked like this if we hadn't used the city's sludge," he said
angrily.

The city of Augusta recently settled a lawsuit with him over the dead
cows for $1.5 million. Another nearby dairy farmer, Bill Boyce, won a
$550,000 court judgment against the city on his claim that sludge was
responsible for the deaths of more than 300 of his cows.

The deaths of McElmurray's and Boyce's cows in the 1990s and their
suits against Augusta raised a red flag with officials at EPA, which
since 1978 had been promoting the use of sludge as a fertilizer.

In 1999, the agency awarded a $12,274 grant to the University of
Georgia to study the problem. That research would result in a study
published in 2003 in the Journal of Environmental Quality finding that
the city's sludge was safe and that EPA's regulations were working.

Cities' sewage and industrial pollution had spewed untreated into
lakes, rivers and oceans until 1972, when Congress passed the landmark
Clean Water Act.

Back then, cleaning up waterways was the first target of the newly
created EPA. The agency oversaw a multibillion-dollar grant program
that Congress set up to help cities and counties build wastewater
treatment plants that would filter out pollutants.

Alaimo, citing data from an environmental engineer hired by
McElmurray, found that the Augusta plant was sending out hundreds of
truckloads of sludge daily with dangerously high levels of cadmium,
molybdenum and chlordane.

The engineer, William Hall of Atlanta, had been a project manager at
seven Superfund cleanup sites and had extensive experience with toxic
chemicals and heavy metals. His tests found polychlorinated biphenyls
or PCBs in the Augusta sludge at levels 2,500 times higher than the
EPA standard, thallium levels 25 times the legal limit, and arsenic
levels twice the government's health standard.

William Miller, a University of Georgia soil scientist who co-authored
the 2003 study commissioned by EPA, stands by the conclusions it drew
on how much sludge had been applied to McElmurray's and Boyce's land
and the composition of it.

But in a draft of the paper obtained by The Associated Press, he wrote
a note by hand saying the authors should "fess up" that they didn't
know those things.

"Now, we didn't really know exactly how much sludge and we didn't know
the quality of sludge," Miller told the AP in an interview. Despite
the discrepancies, he maintained the study was valid. "It does not
include fake data," he said.

Boyce told the AP that in January 1999 he informed Georgia dairy
regulators and EPA that tests he had ordered on the milk from his cows
had come back showing high levels of thallium, molybdenum and cadmium.

A top state official alerted the Food and Drug Administration, but
Boyce said no one ever told him to stop selling his milk or mentioned
a possible threat to public health.

"We were a little startled," Boyce recalled. "They concluded that our
permit was good, and we could continue to sell milk. So we did."

EPA lists thallium as a toxic heavy metal that can cause
gastrointestinal irritation and nerve damage, but the agency has no
standard on the metal's presence in milk. Neither does the Agriculture
Department, even though it regards thallium as one of the most
dangerous agents of potential bioterrorism against the nation's food
supply.

State and EPA officials followed up by testing Boyce's milk, but he
said they wouldn't share all their results with him or McElmurray.
There is no evidence that those officials took any further action.
Boyce said he decided finally to reveal the milk contamination to the
AP to illuminate a broader issue.

"The real problem was the state and federal regulatory agencies did
not do their jobs," he said, adding that EPA and Augusta officials
"tried to say we were just a disease-infested herd. Well, that's just
a bunch of bullhockey."

Charles Murphy, then head of Georgia's dairy program, said he notified
FDA's Administration's office in Atlanta of Boyce's contaminated
samples. "I know I talked to them some, shared some of that
information with them," he recalled. "I don't think they sent anybody
out."

Murphy said he was persuaded by evidence provided to him by Boyce and
McElmurray to seek broader state testing of dairy cows, but there
wasn't enough money.

FDA officials in Atlanta and Washington said they had no record of
Murphy's account.

But over the Super Bowl weekend in 1999, two senior EPA officials,
Robert Bastian and Bob Brobst, huddled with the two dairy farmers and
their lawyer, Ed Hallman, to talk about sludge.

"They showed us some data," Bastian recalled. "I don't ever remember
seeing any milk data."

Boyce and McElmurray insist they shared all of their data with the two
EPA officials, including separate tests they ran on milk pulled from
store shelves in Charleston, S.C. That milk, which came from other
farms in the Southeast, suggested more widespread contamination, they
said. It had heavy metals similar to those found in Boyce's milk.

There are no records that anyone became ill because of milk tainted
with heavy metals or other contaminants that could have come from
sludge.

end quote