> 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.

> 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