Toxic Waste as Fertilizer: PFAS in Land-Applied Sewage Sludge

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

Abstract

Wastewater treatment in the United States is designed to protect public health, but it also produces sewage sludge, a residual waste product that concentrates per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other toxic contaminants. More than 50% of sludge is spread on agricultural land as fertilizer, a practice long promoted by the EPA and wastewater industry as the "beneficial use of biosolids." Scientific evidence documents how PFAS in land-applied sludge can persist long-term in soils, leach into groundwater, and accumulate in plants and livestock. As such, sewage sludge creates a significant and largely untracked exposure pathway for PFAS. In this paper, we describe an interdisciplinary research effort to map locations where PFAS-contaminated sludge has been land-applied; and we analyze the institutional, regulatory, and epistemological barriers encountered along the way. We report findings from two complementary data projects. First, after conducting systematic outreach to state environmental agencies in fifty states, we compile and characterize the existing scope of sludge permitting and land-application records maintained across the country. Second, we undertake a comparative analysis of state-level sludge definitions, and we explicate how individual states define “biosolids” and “sewage sludge” differently, and why that matters. Through these findings, we identify four key barriers to addressing this problem: definitional fragmentation; gaps in the availability and accessibility of state-level sludge data; the economic and institutional entrenchment of land application as a disposal mechanism; and ethical tensions that arise when mapping can lead to property devaluation. Drawing on the “late lessons from early warnings” framework and agnotology (the study of ignorance), we argue that these barriers are mechanisms through which the problem is sustained. We frame our findings as interventions that help reveal what kinds of regulatory reform, environmental data infrastructure, and community engagement are needed to assemble a better system of sludge management and disposal.

Authors

• Grace M Poudrier, Northeastern University

• Emily Alissa Opal Haberlack, Northeastern University

• Michael Lengefeld, Northeastern University

• Michael Haedicke, University of Maine

• Phil Brown, Northeastern University

• Alissa Cordner, Whitman College