ASK YOUR GARDEN CENTER
DOES THIS MULCH CONTAIN BIOSOLIDS?
In 1978, a soil scientist working in EPA’s Office of Water (OW) by the name of John Walker advised deputy assistant administrator Henry Longest, “The application of some low levels of toxic substances to land for food crop production should not be prohibited.” Walker had transferred to EPA several years earlier from a USDA laboratory run by Rufus Chaney, an agronomist studying land application of treated sewage sludges, called biosolids.
And so began what I would argue is the worst conceivable plan EPA could have ever come up with for containing and disposing of the nation’s industrial and municipal pollutants. That plan was to discharge “pretreated” hazardous industrial wastes into sewer systems, treat the sewage sludges that settle out at wastewater treatment plants with chemical and biological processes to reduce pathogens and odors, and then market the treated sewage sludges as cheap fertilizer products.
To appeal to consumers, EPA and the wastewater industry refer to land application of biosolids containing industrial chemicals as “recycling.”1 But, as the international symbol for recycling illustrates, recycling is a cycle. To reduce wastes, products made of metal, glass, and plastic are recycled to make other metal, glass, and plastic products. They go back to manufacturing plants where they started, and are remade into more of the same kinds of products. Cycles are perpetual—you keep using the material over and over.
So, if you really want to recycle industrial chemicals in biosolids, take your biosolids back to Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Merck, and Ciba-Geigy and ask them to make some more pharmaceuticals and pesticides out of it.
EPA does not require that composted sewage sludges containing pharmaceuticals and other industrial pollutants be labeled. Hence, companies selling mulch products omit this information on their websites and product labels. They entice customers with deceptively named products, such as Earthfood, Meadow Life, and Nutra-Green. They claim that biosolids are natural organic products; unlike synthetic fertilizers, they purify the soil with millions of microorganisms and produce more nutritious vegetables.
There’s nothing natural, however, about Prozac and other synthetic chemical pollutants in composted sewage sludge. And the type of aerobic bacteria naturally found in garden soils would be better off without loading them up with anaerobic bacteria from sewage sludges. In a study published in Nature, we found that, unlike commercial inorganic fertilizers, sewage sludges could increase the persistence and toxicity of the degradation products formed when pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and other pollutants break down in soil.2
Environmental scientists are concerned about synthetic chemicals, such as Prozac, because nature has not had much time to adapt to them. Nitrogen in the form of ammonium and potassium nitrates found in commercial fertilizers, however, has been part of nature as long as proteins and other forms of organic nitrogen. It makes no sense to market composted sewage sludge on the basis that the kind of inorganic nitrogen found in commercial fertilizers isn’t natural. And, it’s deceitful to sell composted sewage sludge—probably the richest source of complex manmade chemicals on Earth—on the basis that it’s natural.
At the 2012 annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in Long Beach, California, Professor Rebecca Klaper presented her research on traces of Prozac in effluent from wastewater treatment plants. She found that as little as one part per billion scrambled, as environmental reporter Brian Bienkowski put it, how genes in the brains of developing fish turn on and off.3
Reproduction rates fell, and males, which became more aggressive, killed some of the females. Klaper, according to Bienkowski, said, “There appeared to be architectural changes to the young minnows’ brains.”4 Bienkowski quoted a chemist at Los Angeles’ wastewater treatment plant, who commented that Tegretol, another antidepressant in Klaper’s study, enters the plant and comes out at nearly constant levels, meaning that the city’s treatment processes have no effect on it.
Tegretol is one of many neurotoxic chemicals found at ppm-levels in most sewage sludges. In 2009, EPA published its results from eighty-four samples of sewage sludge collected from seventy-four wastewater treatment plants across the county. It found Prozac (fluoxetine) in seventy-nine of the samples, which ranged from 12.4 to 3,130 parts per billion. That’s twelve to over three thousand times higher than the minimum concentrations that caused the brain damage observed in Klaper’s study. Like many drugs, Prozac is soluble in body fat. So, it tends to concentrate in sewage sludges, which contain a lot of animal fat. Chemicals increase in neurotoxicity with increases in fat solubility.5 Sewage treatment plants, therefore, concentrate the most neurotoxic pollutants in sewage sludges.
Most waste treatment plants just add lime to their sewage sludges to reduce odors and pathogens, and give it away for application to farms, forests, school playgrounds, and other public and private lands. I mention playgrounds because, in 2007, Milwaukee Public Schools closed thirty fields and playgrounds after the city discovered that its “Class A” biosolids were highly contaminated with PCBs. Until the topsoil could be removed and buried at a hazardous waste site, the city fenced off fields where over sixteen thousand youths and adults played softball, soccer, and kickball. Milwaukee is one of the few cities that monitors its biosolids, which it calls Milorganite, for PCBs.
In 2002, a research group I assembled at the University of Georgia documented the first cases of biosolids-related illnesses and deaths in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.6 We evaluated both affected and unaffected residents living within approximately one-half mile (1 km) of land application sites. Most complained of irritation (e.g., skin rashes and burning of the eyes, throat, and lungs) after exposure to winds blowing from treated fields. Approximately one-fourth of fifty-four individuals exhibited Staphylococcus aureus infections of the skin and respiratory tract, including two mortalities from septicemia and staphylococcal pneumonia.
Below are a few excerpts from a speech by Joanne Marshall, whose son developed difficulty breathing and died. He and most residents in their neighborhood in Greenland, NH experienced burning lungs and difficulty breathing as soon as an endless procession of trucks began dumping biosolids near their homes.7
As days and weeks went by we became sicker and sicker. Not just my family, but our whole immediate neighborhood. We all shared the same symptoms; first nausea and vomiting followed by severe stomach cramps and migraine headaches. Then fever and flu-like symptoms, more respiratory. There was a continual battle of thick mucous, one that made it hard to swallow and discharge. At times it appeared as if our reflex system had slowed because you would gag on the mucous and sometimes choke to dispel it. Often it would wake you because your breathing passages were blocked by it.
[On] the evening of Thanksgiving, I kissed my son, Shayne of 26 years, goodnight for the last time. Around four a.m. that morning, I was awakened to a frightful scream from my other son, who was home from college during the holiday. When I ran to the room, Shayne appeared unconscious, yet he seemed like he was gasping. 911 was called and all I could do was hug him and wait for the paramedics. We spent what seemed like an eternity in the hospital waiting room, only to be told my son was dead.
Nature applauded our work in an editorial and news article, calling EPA’s biosolids program an institutional failure spanning more than three decades—and the presidential administrations of both parties.8 It cited a 2007 study confirming the link we reported between exposures to biosolids and gastrointestinal and respiratory symptoms.9 Symptoms included excessive secretion of tears, abdominal bloating, jaundice, skin ulcers, dehydration, weight loss, and general weakness. Reports of bronchitis, upper respiratory infection, and giardiasis were also statistically significantly elevated.
Thus, EPA encourages land application of biosolids, which contain concentrated (ppm and higher) levels of the same pollutants that the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts prohibit industry from dumping in our waterways and spewing from smoke stacks. The reason is simple. There is no Clean Soil Act. Some hazardous wastes are pretreated before they are discharged. Most hazardous wastes, however, don’t have to be pretreated, and pretreatment can create many more problems than it solves. That’s because pretreating hazardous wastes with chemical and biological processes transforms them into even more complex mixtures of new pollutants for which we have no analytical methods and no scientific data regarding their effects.
What scientists do know about the degradation products of pollutants, regardless of whether they originate from pretreatment or natural environmental processes, is that they can be as harmful, if not more harmful, than the parent compounds.10 The only way to make complex organic chemical pollutants become non-carcinogenic, non-mutagenic, and nontoxic is to use extreme heat to break them down to their simplest building blocks, that is, CO2 and water, and then recycle or immobilize any residual heavy metals and radionuclides.11
Far-Reaching Implications
When problems with EPA’s biosolids program have surfaced in the past, EPA called it “the little program that gets a lot of attention.” This program is anything but little, and it needs a whole lot more attention. It embodies the reason EPA was created, and forms the underlying premise for the agency’s overall approach to environmental protection. So what was EPA going to do with all of the pollutants that Congress decided should be removed from our air and water? Put them in our soil, of course. Of the four classical elements of nature—earth, water, air, and fire—earth was the only place Mother Nature had left where cities and factories could still dispose of their chemical and biological wastes cheaply. But choosing the cheapest option in the beginning often turns out to be the most costly in the long run. A much better choice would have been to use fire to break pollutants back down to their most basic elements.
The toll EPA’s approach may have on public health and the environment in the long run is immeasurable. Different genetic variants of plants, animals, and microorganisms vary widely as to the kinds of chemical pollutants they can tolerate in air, water, soil, and food. Spreading mixtures of all of the chemical pollutants produced in the city Los Angeles, for example, on land—thus contaminating the soil, air, and water with virtually every known and unknown environmental pollutant—runs contrary to common sense.
The chances that any one species will be seriously harmed by environmental traces of any one of the chemical pollutants produced by modern industrial societies may be small. But the chances that serious adverse effects will occur from exposing any living organism to a complex and unpredictable mixture of tens of thousands of chemical pollutants at parts-per-million (ppm) levels is likely a virtual certainty. This is particularly true for exposures that occur during developmental stages, and over multiple generations.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, for example, can cause cancer, birth defects, and other developmental problems at parts-per-trillion (ppt) levels.12
Wastewater treatment plants are particularly problematic because they magnify the concentrations of fat-soluble pollutants, which have the highest potential for causing adverse health effects over time. Just compare the concentrations of fat-soluble carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and neurotoxins in private wells on farms, for example, with the concentrations of these same chemicals in sewage sludges at any waste treatment plant.13 Industrial and municipal pollutant concentrations are oftentimes a million-fold higher in biosolids compared with their levels in drinking water (parts-per-million versus parts-per-trillion).
To be exposed to biosolids on a regular basis, you don’t have to live in rural areas where tons per acre are regularly applied for agricultural use. Every city and town is connected to a waste treatment plant, and over half of America’s sewage sludge is land-applied. To get rid of their sewage sludges, cities spread them on every available spot of land, from public parks and school playgrounds to golf courses and the medians of interstate highways. Sewage sludge is sprayed on forests and sold in composted mulch at local nurseries. EPA even promotes spreading it on poor, inner-city neighborhoods to reduce the risks of lead poisoning in children who eat it. And, if you don’t live near a big city with lots of industrial wastes being discharged into sewers, you still have cause for concern. Some of the composts you buy at your local garden center, such as Milwaukee’s product, Milorganite, can contain complex mixtures of pharmaceuticals and other chemical wastes.
Unless you believe in magic, there’s nothing safe about spreading pollutants on land in concentrations higher than what is known to be unsafe in air and water. When someone drinks water from a private well contaminated with biosolids applied to surrounding land, or inhales air blowing from a school playground treated with biosolids, it doesn’t matter whether the chromium VI and endocrine disrupters originated with the air or water, or the biosolids that contaminated them.
The percentage of sewage sludge that is spread on land, compared to what is incinerated or landfilled, is steadily increasing. That’s because EPA continues to fund the Water Environment Federation, the North East Biosolids and Residuals Association (NEBRA), and other lobbying and industry trade organizations to aggressively promote the “recycling” of biosolids as safe and environmentally beneficial. EPA and some of these organizations it funds appear to intentionally mislead the public concerning what’s actually in biosolids, and the risks it poses (see Appendix I: Ten Myths About Biosolids). NEBRA, for example, states on its website:14
Pretreatment regulations were developed under the US Clean Water Act. Similar requirements are applied in some Canadian provinces. These regulations ban the discharge of any toxic substance that might . . .
• hinder the wastewater treatment process
• pass through the wastewater treatment plant and contaminate the plant’s receiving waters, or
• concentrate in the biosolids and affect the ability to recycle them.
Contrary to what NEBRA is telling the public, even EPA published a long list of pollutants found in most, if not all, sewage sludges, which are known to cause serious adverse health effects. In its Targeted National Sewage Sludge Survey (TNSSS) of seventy-four wastewater treatment plants across the United States, EPA, for example, reported the following pollutants at concentrations reaching parts-per-million (ppm) levels:15
Heavy metals, e.g., chromium (6.7–1,160 ppm), nickel (7.5–526 ppm), lead (5.8–450 ppm), molybdenum (2.5–132 ppm), mercury (0.2–8.3 ppm)
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and semi-volatiles, e.g., bis (2-Ethylhexyl) phthalate (0.7–31 ppm), Benzo(a)pyrene (0.06–4.5 ppm)
Polybrominated diphenyl ether congeners (PBDEs), e.g., BDE-209 (0.15–17 ppm), BDE-47 (0.07–5 ppm), BDE-99 (0.06–4 ppm)
Pharmaceuticals, e.g., ciprofloxacin (Cipro) (0.07–48 ppm), carbamazepine (Tegretol, Equetro) (0.01–6 ppm), fluoxetine (Prozac) (0.01-3 ppm)
Steroids and hormones, e.g., androsterone (0.02–1 ppm), estrone (0.03–1 ppm)
Environmentally triggered neurological and autoimmune diseases and disorders are rapidly increasing in prevalence in industrialized areas of the world. This includes, for example, autism spectrum disorders, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. Scientists generally agree that traces of environmental pollutants play an important, if not the most important, role in triggering these horrific maladies in genetically susceptible individuals. All of the groups of pollutants found in ppm-levels in most or all sewage sludges in EPA’s 2009 survey are in the top ten groups of environmental pollutants linked to autism.16
The Poop on EPA’s 503 Sludge Rule
The 503 sludge rule, which EPA promulgated in 1993, regulates land application of treated sewage sludges. Of all the vast numbers of municipal and industrial pollutants present in sewage sludges, it regulates only nine heavy metals and two nutrients—nitrogen and phosphorus. It does not regulate pharmaceuticals, pesticides, growth hormones, flame retardants, and other potentially harmful pollutants, which EPA strictly regulates in air and water. Many of these chemicals are carcinogenic, mutagenic, neurotoxic, or otherwise harmful to public health and the environment in trace amounts.
In May 1992, the 503 rule failed to pass an internal peer review in EPA’s Office of Research & Development (ORD). ORD assistant administrator Erich Bretthauer, however, agreed to let it pass after EPA’s Office of Water (OW) promised to fund ORD $2 million per year for five years to address six major gaps in science identified by peer reviewers. The OW promised to revise the rule accordingly. John Walker and others at the OW, however, had no intention of funding opponents to change the rule.
Five months before President Clinton took office, Walker and one of his superiors, Michael Cook, established a cooperative agreement with the Water Environment Federation (WEF). Cook directed a component of the Office of Water called the Office of Wastewater Management.17 This agreement provided a mechanism for millions of dollars in congressional earmarks to flow from EPA to the wastewater industry’s biggest trade association to support a National Biosolids Public Acceptance Campaign.
Upon entering office in 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Robert (Bob) Perciasepe as assistant administrator for the OW, and the 503 rule was promulgated in February of that year. After leaving EPA in 1998, Perciasepe ran the National Audubon Society’s Washington, DC, office, and later served as its CEO. President Barack Obama brought him back as deputy EPA administrator in 2009, and appointed him acting administrator at the beginning of his second term in 2013, until Gina McCarthy’s confirmation that July.
Under Perciasepe, the EPA-WEF cooperative agreement was amended in 1996 to include a Biosolids Cooperative Research & Development Coordination Project.18 Its objective was to create a national database of all biosolids-related research projects. Sources of the information included (1) WEF member association leaders and/or biosolids committee chairs; (2) biosolids regulatory agencies; (3) deans of schools of agriculture, engineering, and public health for land grant universities in each state; (4) federal agencies (e.g., USDA, USCOE, USEPA); and (5) other organizations (e.g., AMSA, and the US Composting Council). WEF deputy executive director Albert C. Grey stated: 19
A letter will be sent to the appropriate contact requesting the name, phone, address and affiliation of the principal investigators. Each letter will also request a short synopsis of the research program if possible. If there is no response to a letter after six weeks, one or more telephone calls will be made to the contact to follow up.
Other data to be included consisted of information on the principal investigators’ coworkers and affiliations. Grey explained that the final product would be a “compendium of recently completed and ongoing research germane to biosolids.”20 Twenty-five copies would be internally distributed, and the compendium would be promoted by the WEF and sold to others.
According to the amended cooperative agreement, this database was needed to support several milestones of the National Biosolids Public Acceptance Campaign. One was the “development of facts sheets to document and critically examine negative reports regarding the health or environmental impact of biosolids practices in the United States.”21 Apparently, the compendium was used to identify scientists who publish negative reports about biosolids, give EPA and the WEF the opportunity to “out” them and their institutions, and discredit their reports.
In other words, the compendium was a taxpayer-funded, national blacklist of scientists who publish negative reports concerning biosolids and raise concerns about EPA’s 503 sludge rule. I imagine people in the biosolids business would pay good money for a list of every scientist doing research on biosolids, who their coworkers are, which institutions they are affiliated with, and whether their work is favorable or unfavorable to government and industry.
In the Decision Memorandum submitted to Michael Cook, the EPA-WEF Cooperative Agreement was described as an “important project” needed to gain “acceptance of the science and the substance of the Part 503 Rule” and overcome “misinformation” spread by opponents.22 The WEF stated that its purpose was to “provide scientifically credible results that can serve as the basis for future rulemaking efforts by EPA and state agencies.”23 Walker’s branch chief, Robert E. Lee, promised that the project would make “beneficial use of biosolids non-controversial by the Year 2000.”24
Why this agreement was ever approved by EPA’s Grants Office is a mystery to me. In my opinion, it clearly violated the Federal Grants and Cooperative Agreement (FGCA) Act of 1977, which prohibits the use of federal grants and cooperative agreements to directly benefit the government. Although violating the FGCA Act is punishable by fines and imprisonment, it has been no deterrence to EPA, USDA, and other federal agencies using massive amounts of taxpayer money to fund grants and cooperative agreements designed to support government policies and silence opposition within the scientific community.
Although it was not apparent at the time, EPA and the WEF planned to achieve public acceptance of the “science and substance” of EPA’s 503 sludge rule by almost any means necessary. Their overarching goal was to overcome any “barriers” by the Year 2000.25 In retrospect, it’s clear now that overcoming barriers meant four things: (1) covering up pre-1993 studies that documented adverse effects; (2) discrediting post-1993 “biosolids horror stories”; (3) defunding scientists who oppose the 503 rule; and, finally, (4) creating a body of supportive “science,” which EPA scientists call “sludge magic.” The first two effects are dealt with below, and the last two are covered in the next two chapters.
Covering Up the Past
Prior to 1993, when EPA passed the 503 sludge rule, numerous studies documented serious adverse health effects and environmental problems from land application of treated sewage sludge. Covering them up wasn’t difficult because EPA and USDA had already buried them in internal government reports rather than publishing them in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. For example, EPA’s Office of Research & Development (ORD) funded a comprehensive, long-term field study at the University of Florida in the late 1970s to early 1980s.26 It clearly demonstrated that sewage sludge containing heavy metals at levels allowed under EPA’s current 503 sludge rule cause liver and kidney damage in farm animals.
The University of Florida project was a five-year study testing the effects of heavy metals and pathogens in treated sewage sludges from Florida and Illinois on cattle, swine, and poultry. The authors concluded that “certain metals, including cadmium, lead, nickel, and chromium, [are] accumulative in animals consuming forage or grain from sludge-amended soils and therefore have potential hazard to animal health and mankind.” Arsenic and molybdenum, which are also now regulated by the 503 rule, were not evaluated in this study. Mean cadmium, chromium, and nickel concentrations in some of the sewage sludges were well below limits of the current (503) sludge rule. They also found that cattle grazing on fields treated with the sewage sludges acquired parasites commonly found in sewage. This study was never published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Based on EPA’s handling of another government-funded project described below, called the Oak Ridge study, I assume that EPA never released the Florida study for publication because the results challenged the agency’s policies on biosolids.
In the late 1990s, scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) conducted similar long-term field studies funded by EPA-ORD.27 They concluded that even single applications of biosolids could cause long-term ecological damage to forest ecosystems. Despite FOIA requests submitted by environmental activists, EPA kept the study out of the public domain until 1998, when NH Senator Judd Gregg obtained a copy of the Final Report in response to a letter from Caroline Snyder of Citizens for Sludge-Free Land. In 2002, EPA’s Office of Inspector General was told that the report existed only in draft form, and was not endorsed by EPA.
In short, the report’s authors assessed the effects of treated sewage sludges applied to soils in four major forest ecosystems across the United States. They concluded:28
There is a substantial uncertainty associated with estimates of the quantity of elements that remain in surface soils after a number of years (or for different periods of time in the case of multiple applications). . . . The bioavailability of elements that were applied in sewage sludge to soils decades ago is not easily estimated. An ecological risk assessment of cumulative loading limits for the application of municipal sewage sludge in forests and rangeland would not be very definitive at this time.
A risk assessor could attempt to estimate protective cumulative loading limits based on multiple lines of evidence (single toxicity, ambient media toxicity, and field surveys), but such estimates would also not be definitive. These lines of evidence come from different ecosystems, soils, sludges, application rates, and organisms, and any estimate of protective loading limits would not be very precise.
In other words, ORNL concluded that the uncertainties associated with long-term bioavailability of heavy metals in sewage sludges are so numerous that it’s not possible to precisely determine what levels are safe for land application. In laymen’s language, the safety of land application of treated sewage sludge is a shot in the dark. So, it’s not surprising that EPA wouldn’t release this report for publication.
What is surprising, even shocking, is that EPA officials apparently lied to the Office of Inspector General when they said that the report was never peer reviewed, and existed only in draft form. According to the actual report (page ii), ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division transmitted the Final Report to G. Tracy Mehan, EPA assistant administrator for water, sylvia K. Lowrance, acting EPA assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance, and Henry Longest, acting assistant administrator for ORD, on September 30, 1998. Moreover, a peer review team consisting of fourteen national experts reviewed the study in 1995 and 1997.
Biosolids Horror Stories
Another major barrier to public acceptance was the growing number of adverse health effects being reported as land application increased. The EPA-WEF cooperative agreement refers to such cases as “biosolids horror stories.” An amendment approved in 1994 states:29
This amendment to the Cooperative Agreement will involve a critical examination of 10 or more unsubstantiated horror stories which have been attributed to the use of biosolids and the development of an inventory of beneficial use practices and projects from across the United States.
Unsubstantiated claims of horror stories that have been attributed to the use of biosolids are an important weapon of groups that are opposed to the use of biosolids. WEF will assemble and evaluate information that fully explains what really occurred and translate this information into facts sheets that are readily understandable to the general public.
An internal EPA memo obtained by EPA’s Office of Inspector General indicated that Bob Brobst, the EPA coauthor of the Gaskin study described below, did investigate so-called horror stories.30 The memo states:
Biosolids Horror Stories. We asked Bob for real life examples of adverse environmental effects from biosolids. Bob sent us a list of sites with groundwater contamination.
As with the Oak Ridge Study, EPA officials refused to provide the Inspector General’s office a copy of the final report on the basis that it was under internal review. Tables of field data attached to the memo, however, indicated that groundwater contamination with nitrates and heavy metals occurred at multiple sites in the following nine states: California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
The Gaskin Study
In 1998, I began investigating a growing number of anecdotal reports of illnesses and deaths linked to biosolids. Around 1995, Henry Longest left the Office of Water to become deputy assistant administrator for ORD. Longest, who developed EPA’s policies on biosolids in the Office of Water, was now in charge of managing EPA’s research scientists, who were critical of those policies.
As part of a settlement agreement in one of my Labor Department cases, Longest transferred me to the University of Georgia (UGA) in 1998 to await termination. Coinciding with this transfer, Bob Perciasepe created a Biosolids Incident Response Team (BIRT) in the Office of Water to investigate a growing number of reports of adverse effects linked to land application of biosolids, including cattle deaths on two dairy farms near Augusta, Georgia. The dairy farms, which had been owned by the McElmurray and Boyce families since the 1940s, were two of the most productive dairies in Georgia. Andy McElmurray explained what happened:30
We allowed the City of Augusta to apply their sewage sludge to our farmland for 11 years. After several years we began to notice problems, but we could not pinpoint the cause. Two years later, the problems became more serious: a precipitous drop in milk production, sick cattle and excessive cattle mortalities. In 1998, we hired experts to help figure out what was going on with our herd. The experts concluded that the forage which was grown on our sludged fields was contaminated by toxic metals and other industrial pollutants, which were poisoning our cattle.
[It’s] impossible to manage sludge safely. Over the long term, cattle that graze or consume forage grown on sludged land will suffer from different illnesses because of undisclosed hazardous waste, including heavy metals and mineral imbalances in the forages. The animals will most likely suffer from immune deficiency syndrome, which will not allow them to fight normal cattle diseases. All of this could be very expensive and more than offset any perceived financial gain from sludge application.
BIRT was comprised of Robert Brobst, who is an EPA scientist in Boulder, Colorado, and two Office of Water employees at EPA headquarters, John Walker and Robert Bastian. According to Perciasepe, BIRT’s mission was to investigate “alleged problems associated with biosolids . . . to provide additional assurances to the public about the integrity and soundness of biosolids management in the United States.”32
To reassure the public that Augusta’s biosolids were safe, Brobst arranged a cooperative agreement with UGA to investigate problems with Augusta’s biosolids on the two dairy farms. The Office of Water provided Julia Gaskin, a land application specialist at UGA, with $12,274 to fund the project. Robert Brobst, who headed BIRT, gave her a summary of data (later shown to be fabricated by the City of Augusta) to include when Brobst and Gaskin published their results in a scientific journal.33 The data provided by Brobst indicated that levels of heavy metals and nitrogen in Augusta’s biosolids dropped substantially after EPA passed the 503 sludge rule in 1993.
Together, Gaskin and Brobst published their study in the Journal of Environmental Quality in 2003, concluding that Augusta’s biosolids “should not pose a risk to animal health.”34 In a national press release issued by UGA, the study’s lead author, Julia Gaskin, stated, “Some individuals have questioned whether the 503 regulations are protective of the public and the environment. This study puts some of those fears to rest.”35
In 2002, BIRT member Robert Bastian provided a draft copy of Gaskin’s study to the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council (NRC), which used it in a report to conclude that there is no documented evidence that the 503 regulation has failed to protect public health and the environment.36 The NRC panel was convened in response to congressional hearings into EPA’s retaliations against me and other scientists for documenting problems with the regulation.37 In 2008, Judge Anthony Alaimo of the US District Court, Southern District of Georgia, found that a plant manager at Augusta’s Messerly Wastewater Treatment Plant, Allen Saxon, had fabricated the environmental monitoring reports, which Robert Brobst summarized in Table 2 of the Gaskin study.38 Judge Alaimo wrote (p. 17):
JUDGE ANTHONY ALAIMO (2008):
There is also evidence that the City fabricated data from its computer records in an attempt to distort its past sewage sludge applications. . . . In January 1999, the City rehired Saxon to create a record of sludge applications that did not exist previously.
This fabrication occurred just days before Brobst and fellow BIRT member Robert Bastian visited the plant in January 1999. The nexus between Allen Saxon’s fabrication of environmental monitoring reports and the arrival of Brobst and Bastian to collect these records suggests that the data, which Bastian provided to the NRC panel, may have been fabricated specifically for publication in the Gaskin study, to support the efficacy of EPA’s 503 sludge rule and to dismiss any link between biosolids and the cattle deaths on the two dairy farms.
Falsifying data required under the Clean Water Act is a criminal violation punishable by fines and imprisonment. However, the Justice Department showed no interest in prosecuting anyone over the fabricated data. Attorney Ed Hallman also represented two of the dairy farmers and me in a qui tam case.39 In my sworn testimony in this case, I recalled that in 2003 I testified as an expert witness at public hearings before the City and County Council of Honolulu, Hawaii. The council was considering whether to move forward with a contract submitted by Synagro Technologies, Inc., the same company that spread Augusta’s biosolids in 1999 during the Gaskin study.
I recommended that the council have the University of Hawaii perform some simple tests to determine the presence and potential for regrowth of pathogens in samples of Synagro’s product before approving the contract. The purpose was to validate the company’s claims that its product was sterile and presented no risk of infection. These tests would require delaying the contract approval for several weeks. Alex Strauss, a division director for EPA Region 9 in San Francisco, responded by threatening Honolulu with over $5 million in fines for each day it delayed Synagro’s contract.40
Muzzling the Messenger
As indicated above, Henry Longest, EPA’s acting assistant administrator for ORD, and other EPA officials accused me of violating the Hatch Act and government ethics rules by publishing my 1996 Nature commentary, “EPA Science: Casualty of Election Politics,” and criticizing EPA’s sludge rule in editorials published by a local newspaper.41 Longest also cut off my internal EPA funding, and offered to transfer me to the University of Georgia for four years if I would agree to retire afterward. I agreed because it was my only option for continuing my research on biosolids.
When I published a research article in Nature in 1999 that raised new concerns about EPA’s sludge rule, EPA assistant administrator Norine Noonan ordered the removal of my EPA laboratory director for approving the article. Then, in 2001, the director of EPA’s Office of Wastewater Management, Michael Cook, and one of his employees, John Walker, met with two Synagro executives, Alvin Thomas and Robert O’Dette, over lunch to discuss another research article I wrote, which was undergoing an internal review at EPA.42 It linked Synagro’s biosolids to illnesses and deaths at multiple sites across the United States. Walker also met separately with O’Dette over breakfast, and asked Synagro to provide information he could use against me in his internal EPA peer review of my research article.
Synagro followed up several months later by emailing Cook, Walker, and other EPA officials a “white paper” containing allegations of research misconduct against me and one of my coauthors at UGA. Specifically, Synagro alleged that EPA had never approved my research papers on biosolids, and that my work on biosolids was not peer-reviewed. Walker knew the allegations were false. In his peer review, he stated:
I have attached my review of this manuscript along with a completed peer-review form. Unfortunately this paper has received an OK for publication by Mr. Lewis’s supervisor. . . . As Alvin Thomas explained at the WEF meeting in Anaheim, California, one year earlier, this meant that I was misusing federal and state funds—potentially a federal crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. Walker immediately forwarded Synagro’s white paper to a waste disposal company in Atlanta, Georgia, for public distribution under EPA headquarters letterhead.43 Synagro filed its allegations with UGA as a formal petition to investigate research misconduct, and hired Georgia senator Kasim Reed, now mayor of Atlanta, to pressure UGA not to dismiss the petition.44
It was discovered later that Walker’s peer-review comments were written by a USDA scientist associated with Rufus Chaney’s efforts to promote biosolids.45 Walker copied the lengthy review verbatim and passed it off as his own. Fortunately, the other peer reviewers recommended publication. So, the paper passed two internal peer reviews, first in the Office of Research, and then in the Office of Water. Published in BMC Public Health, it was the first paper to document illnesses and deaths linked to biosolids in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.46
Synagro and NEBRA published Synagro’s white paper on their websites; then Synagro and the WEF began writing letters to EPA administrator Christie Whitman and others requesting that EPA investigate me for research misconduct and potential criminal misuse of federal and state funds.47 In 2003, Synagro filed its white paper allegations with UGA as a formal petition to investigate research misconduct, and UGA forwarded it to EPA.
In 2013, the Justice Department collected $35,000 to settle over $61,000 in court costs, which the dairy farmers and I owed to defendants in our qui tam lawsuit.48 The assistant US attorney in Macon, Georgia, informed my attorney, Ed Hallman, that EPA specifically asked him to collect the court costs from me, saying, “We think David Lewis has money.” This probably explains why the Justice Department demanded that I, and only I, estimate the current value of all of my assets. EPA, in other words, used the Justice Department to send a powerful message to scientists who may be thinking about filing qui tam lawsuits over research fraud that any of its employees may commit in the line of duty.
The $35,000 represented only a small portion of over $250,000 UGA paid private law firms to defend against a qui tam lawsuit that the dairy farmers and I filed.49 The purpose of our lawsuit was to compel UGA to withdraw the fabricated data that EPA and UGA published for a study that EPA and the National Academy of Sciences used to dismiss biosolids as having caused cattle deaths on the two dairy farms near Augusta. In July 2013, we sought information on the amount EPA paid private attorneys to defeat our lawsuit and avoid having to withdraw the fabricated data.50 Nine months later, we’re still waiting on EPA to process our FOIA request.