How EPA Began to Destroy America’s Health
30th May 2017
Wastewater treatment plants operate on the same principle that drove Rachel Carson to organize the effort that led to EPA’s creation. In Silent Spring, she documented how DDT and other water insoluble chemicals are biomagnified up the food chain as they concentrate in the body fat of birds and other animals. Wastewater treatment plants remove trace amounts of these pollutants by concentrating them in the animal fats contained in sewage sludges, which collect in settling tanks.
The question was what to do with sewage sludge. It contains, at millions of times higher concentrations, all of the pollutants EPA strictly regulates in air and water. Since Congress passed Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, but no Clean Soil Act, EPA simply deregulated virtually all pollutants in sewage sludge and encouraged municipalities to reduce odors with lime and apply treated sewage sludges to any available land, from farms and forests to school playgrounds.
EPA’s only challenge was to explain how trace amounts of petrochemicals and other industrial wastes it strictly regulates in air and water become harmless when mixed with sewage sludge at far higher concentrations, and tons per acre of it are spread on land where animals graze and children play. The answer EPA’s Office of Water came up with was to fund research projects at land grant universities across the United States to “support the science and substance” of its 503 sludge rule, and “overcome misinformation spread by opponents.”
EPA uses this same approach of buying scientists and silencing its critics in every other area, including climate change. The tragedy is that EPA could actually solve environmental problems by working with industry to develop commercially attractive approaches to dealing with environmental problems. For example, sewage sludges can be converted into valuable soil amendments and cheap fertilizers using pyrolysis to destroy toxic chemicals, bind heavy metals to activated charcoal, and return carbon to the soil instead of adding it to the atmosphere.
May 31st, 2017 at 07:39
“…Richard Dixon…”??!?
TWC? (typing without coffee)
May 31st, 2017 at 09:31
Yeah, well, I’m sure Richard Dixon was a jerk too.