Sewage Sludge
What is this stuff????
Sewage Sludge - the solid waste that's removed from the water that ends up at the sewage treatment plant from homes, factories, hospitals, and anywhere you can think of that has a sink, a shower, a garage floor drain, a toilet....in fact everything that can be flushed "away."
But
it doesn't really go "away." It is collected at waste water treatment
plants. It's removed from the water, so that the water can be returned
to the aquifers, streams and rivers with a lot less poison and
pollutants in it. But what is left behind, with most of the water
removed, is called sewage sludge, or "sludge cake." A good portion of
the sludge is made up of human fecal matter. But it also can contain
any number of over 100,000 toxins, pathogens and poisons, such as heavy
metals, PCBs, pathogens, carcinogens, pesticides, industrial
solvents...you name it. If it got flushed, it gets collected in the
sludge.
Until the mid 1990s sewage sludge was being
land-filled or dumped at sea. Then it was discovered that the stuff was
creating a huge dead zone off the coast, and ocean 
dumping
was legally
prohibited. The federal Clean Water Act required the sludge be removed
from water before it was returned to nature, so removing it, and then
just dumping it right back in the water seemed, well, an expensive bit
of hypocrisy.The better the process of treating the water to be
released, the more toxic the product which is left behind, sewage
sludge. The "solution" devised by the waste industry for the disposal
of that
toxic residue, and sold to municipal governments looking for a place to
flush what had already been flushed...was to re-brand sewage sludge
with a shiny new name and give it for free to farmers, while claiming
the newly christened waste was now actually a valuable agricultural
fertilizer. They called it "biosolids." Biosolids. A rose by any other
name....
Illnesses and even deaths were soon reported in association with the "land application" (dumping) of the swill in rural communities. The truth about the threat to people and the environment was pocketed by the sludge industry and government regulatory agencies who see the waste hauling corporations as their "clients." Amid firings of EPA researchers who wouldn't stay
quiet about the health and 
environmental risks of land applying sewage
sludge, and coercive state laws that forbade rural communities from
banning the practice, communities in Pennsylvania began working with
the Legal Defense Fund to draft and adopt ordinances that challenged
state preemptions by asserting the right of people to exercise local
self-governance to protect their environment, health, safety, welfare
and quality of life. Since 2002, more than 80 communities in
Pennsylvania have banned corporations from engaging in the land
application of sewage sludge, and in the past three years communities
began to include new provisions in their ordinances that:
- Enumerate the rights of the community and its members
- Recognize the inalienable right of natural communities and eco-systems to exist and flourish
- Remove illegitimate claims that corporations have "rights" or can exercise court-bestowed privileges that harm the rights of people and nature
