Last month’s news was the White House organic vegetable garden soil contained 93 parts per million levels of lead. There was a lot of speculation of where the lead came from. Lead paint? By product of vehicle exhaust when lead in gasoline was allowed?
An article in Mother Jones online speculates it came from fertilizing the lawn during the Clinton years. Fertilizer derived from sewage sludge was used on all of the lawn at the White House during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
ComPRO fertilizer, now renamed Orgro, was applied on the lawn. ComPRO is a compost made from a nearby wastewater plant’s solid effluent, also known as sewage sludge. Sludge is controversial because it can contain traces of almost anything that gets poured down the drain, from Prozac flushed down toilets to lead hosed off factory floors. Spreading sludge at the White House was a way for the EPA to reassure the public that using it as a fertilizer for crops and yards (instead of dumping it in the ocean, as had been common practice) would be safe. “The Clintons are walking around on poo,” the EPA’s sludge chief quipped in 1998, “but it’s very clean poo.”
Andrew Kimbrell of the Huffinton Post also weighs in on the sewage sludge controversy.
The current levels of lead (93 ppm) are within the EPA acceptable levels. No word on if the vegetables glow in the dark or if they taste weird…
7/2/09 Update and Counterpoint: Eddie Gehman Kohan, editor at obamafoodorama.com writes on Huffington Post that both Andrew Kimbrell and Mother Jones are irresponsible for raising alarm about lead levels in the White House garden with no proof of their accusations and assumptions of where it came from.
Hydroponics Dictionary
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Sewage sludge and composted sewage sludge can and do contain heavy metals. What is less well discussed is the level of pathogens and their genetic fragments as found in sewage sludge, hence composted sewage sludge.
Many pathogens require high-level disinfection, examples are the gut pathogens found on endoscopes. From the gut they reach the sewer. Few if any sewer plants can attain this level of disinfection. Sewer plants mainly reach low-level disinfection and that is not good enough, especially with the newly emerging infectious diseases. Consequently, live pathogens are found in sewage sludge and their genetic information is found in composted sewage sludge.
That this level of disinfection (high level) is an issue may be seen from the news of March 26 in Miami– Congressional leaders called for an investigation, the VA medical center after learning that equipment used in colonoscopies was not properly sterilized. Point here is to show hos difficult it is to kill these pathogens.
There are several good papers discussing pathogens in sewage sludge as well as antibiotic resistant pathogens. Sewer plants are industrial sized generators of antibiotic resistant pathogens. Merely go to Google and then to Pubmed, put in the key words sewage and antibiotic resistance and you will find 368 abstracts of scientific papers on the subject. The interesting thing is that some of these works go back into the 1960s. Thus the question, this information has been around for decades, why have the regulators chosen to ignore this long-standing body of literature? Who is watching for the public health—-certainly not EPA.
Sara Firl’s paper (The Importance of Municipal Sewage Treatment in the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance) should be read as also the work by Amy Pruden, who received a Presidential award for her work on antibiotic resistant genes (ARGs)and sewage (see citations below).
ARG are not affected by typical levels of chlorine used in wastewater or drinking water and thus are found for example in drinking water. One of the things that aids all of this is the lack of effectiveness in filter systems used in water treatment (waste or drinking).
The sewage sludge is a byproduct of sewage treatment, it is the removed solids. What ever goes down the sewer is capable of being found in the sludge (biosoilds). This includes any number of industrial waste that are allowed to be sewered; it also includes untreated mortuary waste and hospital waste. The latter two are major sources of pathogens.
It will be very difficult to get the EPA to deal with this because it is promoting the land application of sewage sludge. How could that agency both promote the land application of sewage sludge and at the same time admit that sewage sludge is a major source of antibiotic resistance? I was on one of the EPA scientific panels and other scientists besides myself brought up this topic of transmission of antibiotic resistance via sewage sludge, this without any measurable response from the agency.
The genetic information in compost and sewage sludge that allows for pathogenesis is capable of being transferred to soil bacteria, thus self-perpetuating lending libraries can be established. The pathogens can track up into the flesh of crops, thus no amount of surface washing has any effect.
The regulators under Bush devised several processes to assure that this subject was not well circulated.
Dr Edo McGowan
Citations:
Sara Firl—-The Importance of Municipal Sewage Treatment in the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance
106th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology
May 21-25, 2006, Orlando, Florida
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061025185930.htm
http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?0615216
http://www.naturalnews.com/020702.html
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/nrc/cjm/2004/00000050/00000008/art00012?crawler=true
Association of pathogens and antibiotic resistance in sewage byproducts.
McGowan E.
J Environ Health. 2009 Mar;71(7):64. No abstract available.
PMID: 19326673 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Articles
2:
Comment on “antibiotic resistance genes as emerging contaminants: studies in northern Colorado”.
McGowan E.
Environ Sci Technol. 2007 Apr 1;41(7):2651-2. No abstract available.
PMID: 17438829 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Articles
3:
Reducing bioaerosols dispersion from wastewater treatment and its land application: a review and analysis.
McGowan E.
J Environ Health. 2006 Jan-Feb;68(6):83; author reply 83. No abstract available.
PMID: 16483089 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Related Articles
The sludge compost was spread on the White House lawn – not once but about 5 times) was supposeds to make the lawn greener. But it also added toxic metals – along with whatever other contaminant payload was in the sludge compost. The Obama’s, in a fabulous gesture to support gardening and organic agriculture, now have to wrestle with the toxins left behind in the soil that is now their garden.
Is the garden toxic? I don’t know. The only soil test we have been told about is 93 ppm lead. That is certainly elevated. There is no ’safe’ level of lead. All the lead people ingest increases the likelihood of neurotoxic impacts. And kids in DC already have lead in the drinking water supply – so lead clinging to leafy greens or lead tracked into the home on running shoes and subsequently ingested in ‘hand-to-mouth’ will add to the body burden.
And aside from sludging up the lawn of the White House – the Washington DC Water and Sewer Authority WASA – was covering up the high concentrations of lead in DC drinking water:
“The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority knew in the summer of 2001 that its water contained unsafe lead levels, but it withheld six high test results and said the water was fine, records show. When it tested over the next two years, records show, WASA dropped half of the homes that had previously tested high for lead and avoided high-risk homes.
The EPA, which cited WASA for violations in June, called the utility’s practices unprecedented and a “serious breach” of the law.
Documents show that water systems across the country have used similar practices.”
Do you see a pattern here?
I phoned up the the ‘experts’ quoted by Eddie in her attempt to refute the sludge story. But the quoted expert I talked to said that the kids needed to be careful to wash their hands from the soil – careful to wash the vegetables – and was not accurately quoted in Eddie’s Obama Foodorama Blog.
So much for Eddie’s scholarship or writing integrity.
Dr. Stanford Tackett, professor emeritus of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Chemistry Department, warns that “one application of sewage sludge to the land adds more lead per acre than 50 years of driving with leaded gasoline.”
The point is that putting sludge composts or pellets – with their elevated levels of toxins – puts contamination in our precious soils. And if we allow our soils – whether they are home gardens, lawns, public parks, or farmlands – to be spiked with these municipal sludge ‘products’ then we will have to do much toxin testing of our gardens, much toxin testing of our food, much toxin testing of our children and put at risk the health of generations to come.
The sludge industry was keen to ‘own the green’ on the White House. Now they need to man up and own the toxic legacy as well.
Dear Michelle Obama – please help to ban the use of sewage sludge fertilizers on your lawn, on all public parks, and on farmlands.
Go organic!
Sludge Watch