Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

Texas Farms Sue Baltimore County Company over PFAS in "Biosolids" Fertilizer Texas Farms Detail PFAS Contamination in Lawsuit Over Biosolids Fertilizer

With regulation of sewage-sludge fertilizer mostly unsettled nationally, a pair of Texas farms are suing the waste recycling and biosolids company Synagro for selling fertilizer that the farmers allege has affected their health, contaminated their water supply and left their fields and livestock with dangerous testing levels of "forever chemicals."

The farms involve five individuals who live or own property on the same county road near Grandview, Texas, about a half hour south of Fort Worth, Texas.

Their lawsuit, filed in Baltimore County, Maryland, where Synagro is based, alleges that their farms were contaminated after Synagro provided a neighboring farmer with a biosolid fertilizer that contained potentially dangerous levels of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS chemicals. The lawsuit alleges the volumes of PFAS chemicals "poisoned them, killed their livestock, polluted their water and rendered their property worthless," according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which arranged laboratory testing of the farms' soil, water and dead livestock.

The PFAS levels on both farms involved in the lawsuit are significantly higher than EPA drinking water standards. Both farms have stopped selling meat because they are concerned about the effects on human health.
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Kyla Bennett, PEER's science policy director, pointed out that Maine outlawed land application of biosolids after more than 60 farms were found to have unsafe levels of PFAS contamination. She also pointed to the need for EPA to issue rules that will protect farmers and consumers from toxic exposure. "This lawsuit against Synagro will likely be the first of many," she said.

EPA, earlier this month, announced a proposal to list at least nine PFAS chemicals as hazardous materials. Along with protecting drinking water supplies, the rules would focus on cleaning up soil and groundwater contamination.

The lawsuit details that Synagro has a contract with the city of Fort Worth, Texas, to take sewage sludge and convert it to a fertilizer application. Synagro produces about 26,000 tons of fertilizer, which is then sold to landowners in 12 counties. Synagro built a $59 million biosolids processing facility in the area to further process the sewage sludge into compost, fertilizer pellets or soil conditioners.

It's not clear to me whether the biosolids involved in the contamination of the farm fields originated in Austin, or the the Synagro facility on Back River, Baltimore's private sewer river.  My guess would be that given the relatively low value of the shit, and the high cost of transport, that it comes from the more local Austin facility. 

It seems to me that concern over PFAS is new enough that one can easily imagine a company like Synagro being unaware of the potential threat. In the absence of an EPA rule, though, I don't know if I see an easy legal solution.

 

Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

 The Balmer Sun, Federal grant to support compost and food scrap sites at Baltimore universities

Baltimore City will spend a federal grant on new food scrap drop-off locations at universities.

The Department of Public Works received a $264,840 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the pilot programs designed to reduce and divert food waste from landfills and incineration.

The drop-off sites will be at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland Baltimore, and Loyola University Maryland.

The goal of the program is to increase access to compost for agricultural producers, improve soil quality, and divert food waste from landfills, according to a news release Tuesday from the Department of Public Works.

The drop-off site at Hopkins’ Homewood Campus on Bowman Drive behind Mudd Hall will be open Tuesdays from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. while its site at 1651 E. Jefferson St. will be open Thursdays from 8:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

At the University of Maryland Baltimore, drop-off sites will be open at the campus center at 621 W.Lombard St. on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and at the community engagement center at 16 S. Poppleton St. on Wednesdays from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Loyola University Maryland will open an offseason drop-off site at the Govans Farmers Market at 5104 York Road, where it hosts a drop-off site during the summer months.

The programs are funded by a two-year grant expiring in June 2025, according to the release, and the grant will also give $10,000 to nonprofits 4MyCity and Bmore Community Food to purchase recycled cardboard boxes and compostable food bags.

I'm a little curious about how the $265k will actually be spent. Staff salaries for the collection stations? That would buy a lot of interns, assuming interns would be interested in collecting food waste. Site rentals, materials for storage? 

Of course, there are other uses for composting. As the Peacock reported, Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend "Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk."

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

The Remains of Holly Maddux discovered
 in a trunk encased in stryform

Hey kids, it's "Earth Day"From Ed Driscoll at Instapundit: NBC: EARTH DAY LEADER KILLED, COMPOSTED GIRLFRIEND. That's one way to do it.

Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the "composted" body of his ex-girlfriend inside a trunk.

A self-proclaimed environmental activist, Einhorn made a name for himself among ecological groups during the 1960s and '70s by taking on the role of a tie-dye-wearing ecological guru and Philadelphia’s head hippie. With his long beard and gap-toothed smile, Einhorn — who nicknamed himself "Unicorn" because his German-Jewish last name translates to "one horn" —advocated flower power, peace and free love to his fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. He also claimed to have helped found Earth Day.

But the charismatic spokesman who helped bring awareness to environmental issues and preached against the Vietnam War — and any violence — had a secret dark side. When his girlfriend of five years, Helen "Holly" Maddux, moved to New York and broke up with him, Einhorn threatened that he would throw her left-behind personal belongings onto the street if she didn't come back to pick them up.

Every day is "Earth Day" in North Korea!

And so on Sept. 9, 1977, Maddux went back to the apartment that she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia to collect her things, and was never seen again. When Philadelphia police questioned Einhorn about her mysterious disappearance several weeks later, he claimed that she had gone out to the neighborhood co-op to buy some tofu and sprouts and never returned.

It wasn't until 18 months later that investigators searched Einhorn's apartment after one of his neighbors complained that a reddish-brown, foul-smelling liquid was leaking from the ceiling directly below Einhorn's bedroom closet. Inside the closet, police found Maddux's beaten and partially mummified body stuffed into a trunk that had also been packed with Styrofoam, air fresheners and newspapers.

After his arrest, Einhorn jumped bail and spent decades evading authorities by hiding out in Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and France. After 23 years, he was finally extradited to the United States from France and put on trial. Taking the stand in his own defense, Einhorn claimed that his ex-girlfriend had been killed by CIA agents who framed him for the crime because he knew too much about the agency's paranormal military research. He was convicted of murdering Maddux and is currently serving a life sentence.

Also from Ed Driscoll this timely checklist of Earth Day predictions from 1970:

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”-  Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” - George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” - Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” - New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” -  Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” -  Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” -  Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” - Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.” - Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'” - Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” - Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” - Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Is Recycling Worth the Effort?

It's complicated. A surprisingly even-handed article from the New York Times: The Reign of Recycling

If you live in the United States, you probably do some form of recycling. It’s likely that you separate paper from plastic and glass and metal. You rinse the bottles and cans, and you might put food scraps in a container destined for a composting facility. As you sort everything into the right bins, you probably assume that recycling is helping your community and protecting the environment. But is it? Are you in fact wasting your time?
. . .
Here’s some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.

Even those statistics might be misleading. New York and other cities instruct people to rinse the bottles before putting them in the recycling bin, but the E.P.A.’s life-cycle calculation doesn’t take that water into account. That single omission can make a big difference, according to Chris Goodall, the author of “How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.” Mr. Goodall calculates that if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.

That alone should tell you how precarious the balance between worthwhile and worthless is.

The national rate of recycling rose during the 1990s to 25 percent, meeting the goal set by an E.P.A. official, J. Winston Porter. He advised state officials that no more than about 35 percent of the nation’s trash was worth recycling, but some ignored him and set goals of 50 percent and higher. Most of those goals were never met and the national rate has been stuck around 34 percent in recent years.
. . .
Then why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint. It is less an ethical activity than a religious ritual, like the ones performed by Catholics to obtain indulgences for their sins.

Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily. But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy.

The recycling program in Calvert County here is pretty strong. You can take any paper, cans, bottles and plastics to the local transfer station for recycling. They also have provisions for motor oil, fluorescent lights, electronics, and bulk metal. I would estimate we recycle about 75% of our trash by weight (with most of the weight being paper, and most of that, the Washington Post). We compost our own lawn and garden waste (if throwing it onto a huge heap until it decomposes counts for the big stuff). We have on one occasion actually taken a load of metal to the metal recycling plant, and made $11, most of which was for a bucket of lead containing wheel weights and old fishing lures.

Can Compost Heaps Save the Bay?

While I think composting is a good thing to do, if you have space (we do it, for example), I think this article is a gross exaggeration of it's significance.

Composting Is Key To New Business Sector And Protecting The Chesapeake Bay

Composting is a major job creator, according to a new report released by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance nonprofit think tank in Washington, DC, in conjunction with International Compost Awareness Week. According to the report, Pay Dirt: Composting in Maryland to Reduce Waste, Create Jobs, & Protect the Bay, 1,400 new full-time jobs could be supported for every million tons of yard trimmings and food scraps converted into compost that is used locally. Collectively, these jobs could pay wages ranging from $23 million to $57 million.

That's about a 20-40k per year job.  Nothing to sneeze at, but hardly a windfall. 

With compostable materials making up almost half of what Americans set out at the curb, this is good news for communities seeking to balance environmental concerns with the need to create good jobs. “When sent to a landfill or trash incinerator, banana peels, broccoli stalks, and other leftover food scraps are a liability. But when composted, they are a valuable asset,” stated Brenda Platt, lead author of Pay Dirt and director of ILSR’s Composting Makes $en$e project.

Based on a survey of Maryland composters, Pay Dirt found that, on a per-ton basis, composting sustains twice as many jobs as landfilling and four times the number of jobs as burning garbage. On a dollar-per-capital-investment basis, the number of jobs supported by composting versus disposal options was even more striking: 3 times more than landfills, and 17 times more than incinerators. Many of these jobs are skilled jobs such as equipment operators, with typical wages in the $16 to $20 per hour range.

"And what does your daughter do for a living?"

"Why, she pushes banana peels around with a bulldozer."

"Well bless her heart."