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'Sludge' Fertilizer Used in Low-Income Neighborhoods

Posted on: Monday, 14 April 2008, 13:00 CDT

Fertilizer made from human and industrial waste was spread in the neighborhood yards of poor, black communities so that scientists, working off of federal grants, could determine whether the sludge might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil.

The families were told that the sludge was safe but were never informed of any harmful ingredients it contained.

Researchers tilled the sewage sludge into the yards and planted new grass in a row of houses belonging to nine low-income families in Baltimore. The families were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department.

The documents were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and the researchers were interviewed, yet no one involved with the $446,231 grant for the two-year study would identify the participants, citing privacy concerns.

There is no evidence there was ever any medical follow-up.

Similar research studies were conducted by the Agriculture Department and Environmental Protection Agency in low-income, black neighborhood in East St. Louis, Ill.

Researchers said the sludge put the children at less risk of brain or nerve damage from lead, a highly toxic element once widely used in gasoline and paint. Other studies have shown brain damage among children, often in poor neighborhoods, who consumed lead-based paint that had flaked off their homes.

For three decades, federal researchers have toyed with the idea that sludge—the leftover semisolid wastes filtered from water pollution at 16,500 treatment plants—can be turned into something harmless, even if swallowed.

A 1978 memo from the EPA said sludge "contains nutrients and organic matter which have considerable benefit for land and crops" despite the presence of "low levels of toxic substances."

However, the government began underwriting studies such as those in Baltimore and East St. Louis using poor neighborhoods as laboratories to make a case that sludge may also directly benefit human health.

There has also been little research into the possible harmful effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals and disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge.

Thomas Burke, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says epidemiological studies have never been done to show whether spreading sludge on land is safe.

"There are potential pathogens and chemicals that are not in the realm of safe. What's needed are more studies on what's going on with the pathogens in sludge - are we actually removing them? The commitment to connecting the dots hasn't been there," Burke said.

But the subjects of the Baltimore and East St . Louis research were not told this.

According to Rufus Chaney, the co-writer of the study, the researchers provided the families with brochures about lead hazards, tested the soil in their yards and gave assurances that the Orgro fertilizer was store-bought and perfectly safe.

He said the families were told that it was composted biosolids that are available for sale commercially in the state of Maryland. “I don't think there's any other further disclosure required,” Chaney said. “There was danger before. There wasn't danger because of the biosolids compost. Composting, of course, kills pathogens.”

"They were told that their lawn, as it stood, before it was treated, was a lead danger to their children," said Chaney. "So that even if they ate some of the soil, there would not be as much of a risk as there was before. And that's what the science shows."

Cheney said the Baltimore neighborhoods were chosen because the area qualified for tax incentives. He says the families were not told about occurring safety disputes and health complaints over sludge.

The study in Baltimore concluded that phosphate and iron in sludge can increase the ability of soil to trap more harmful metals including lead, cadmium and zinc, causing the combination to pass safely through a child's body if eaten.

It called the fertilizer "a simple low-cost" technology for parents and communities "to reduce risk to their children" who are in danger of lead contamination.

The study in East St. Louis investigated whether sludge might inhibit the "bioavailability" of lead - the rate it enters the bloodstream and circulates to organs and tissues. The research was conducted on a vacant lot next to an elementary school made up of 300, mostly black students—almost all of them coming from low-income families.

A newsletter from the EPA-funded Community Environmental Resource Program assured local residents it was all safe.

The newsletter said: "Though the lot will be closed off to the public, if people - particularly children - get some of the lead contaminated dirt in their mouths, the lead will just pass through their bodies and not be absorbed. Without this iron-phosphorus mix, lead poisoning would occur."

Murry McBride, a soil chemist and director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute, said he doesn't doubt that sludge can bind lead in soil.

But he is skeptical about whether the sludge could be safely consumed. "It's not at all clear that the sludge binding the lead will be preserved in the acidity of the stomach," he said. "Actually thinking about a child ingesting this, there's a very good chance that it's not safe."

McBride and others also questioned the choice of neighborhoods for the studies and why residents were not told about other, possibly harmful ingredients in sludge.

"If you're not telling them what kinds of chemicals could be in there, how could they even make an informed decision? If you're telling them it's absolutely safe, then it's not ethical," McBride said. "In many relatively wealthy people's neighborhoods, I would think that people would research this a little and see a problem and raise a red flag."

The study in Baltimore used a compost of sludge mixed with sawdust and wood chips packaged as "biosolids," the term for sludge preferred by government and the waste industry.

"What we did was make the yards greener," said Pat Tracey, a Johns Hopkins University community relations coordinator who helped with the project. "They were bald, bad yards. It was considered sterile fertilizer."

Glenn Ross, an environmental activist in Baltimore, said choosing poor neighborhoods destined for demolition makes it hard to track a study's participants. "If you wanted to do something very questionable, you would do it in a neighborhood that's not going to be there in a few years," he said.

Mark Farfel, the study's lead author, has pursued several other studies of lead contamination including the risks of exposure from urban housing demolitions and the vacant lots left behind.

Farfel has denied repeated requests for interviews and referred questions to Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute, the children's research facility that was the recipient of HUD grants with Farfel as project manager. He now directs the World Trade Center Health Registry surveying tens of thousands of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.

According to Joann Rodgers, a spokeswoman for Johns Hopkins, a review board within its medical school approved the study and the consent forms provided to families that participated. "The study did not test children or other family members living in the homes," she said.

Some of Farfel's previous research has been controversial.

Maryland's highest court chastised him, Kennedy Krieger and Johns Hopkins in 2001 over a study bankrolled by EPA in which researchers testing low-cost ways to control lead hazards exposed more than 75 poor children to lead-based paint in partially renovated houses.

Two children were alleged to have suffered elevated blood-lead levels and brain damage and their families sued the institute and later settled for an undisclosed amount.

The Maryland Court of Appeals likened the study to Nazi medical research on concentration camp prisoners, the U.S. government's 40-year Tuskegee study that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the illness and Japan's use of "plague bombs" in World War II to infect and study entire villages.

The court statement said: "These programs were somewhat alike in the vulnerability of the subjects: uneducated African-American men, debilitated patients in a charity hospital, prisoners of war, inmates of concentration camps and others falling within the custody and control of the agencies conducting or approving the experiments."

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On the Net:

Baltimore study

East St. Louis project

Maryland lead lawsuit

National Academy of Sciences' report

Associated Press

Source: redOrbit Staff and Wire Reports

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