Sustainable Fertilizer or Pervasive Pollution? Metabolic rift and the wicked problems of PFAS in biosolids

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Pollution, Materials, and Metabolic Rift

Abstract

The application of human waste, or night soil, on agricultural fields to improve nutrient availability and crop yields is a form of closed-loop nutrient cycling practiced globally for centuries. The rise of industrialization, capitalism, urbanization, and synthetic fertilizer in the 1850s prompted the decline of night soil and the proliferation of industrial agriculture. Today, approximately 20% of U.S. agricultural land relies on modern night soil, or biosolids, produced at wastewater treatment plants. While heralded by some as a component of regenerative agriculture that closes the metabolic rift of industrial agriculture, land-applied biosolids pose significant hazards to public health. Biosolids application puts the food security of American farmland at risk of contamination and closure, with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) recently drawing national attention. This article develops a theoretical framework for examining agricultural chemical contamination through an ecological Marxist analysis of the metabolic rift in soil health, the chemical regulatory pathways that contaminate biosolids, research on how crops and livestock uptake and bioaccumulate toxic PFAS, and the public health risks from PFAS on agricultural land. This work contributes to the literature on widespread PFAS contamination and offers a framework for interrogating whether modern biosolid use genuinely repairs the metabolic rift or merely reshapes it amid emerging environmental and public health threats.

Author

• Emily Alissa Opal Haberlack, Northeastern University