Is It Organic Fertilizer or Toxic Sewer Sludge>

Toxic sludge is good for you?

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, along with municipal governments across the US, want farmers, school, and backyard gardeners to grow their veggies using toxic sludge, spreading the outrageous lie that municipal wastewater sewage plants can somehow magically transform hazardous materials into "organic fertilizer."

Toxic sludge is poison.

Listen

John Mayer and John Stauber of Organic Consumers Association talk about toxic sludge and how San Francisco's "green" mayor has sludge on his hands. 

Listen on Raising Sand Radio.
Listen on the Peter Collins Show. 

Scientific evidence has confirmed that municipal sewage sludge contains hundreds of dangerous pathogens, toxic heavy metals, flame-retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains, storm water runoff, hospitals, and industrial plants.

Sewage sludge contains everything the sewage treatment plant was able to remove from the sewage - plus every new chemical and pathogen formed in the mad synergy of this chemical soup, including virulent, antibiotic-resistant bacteria created through horizontal gene transfer.

San Francisco public officials have helped the toxic sludge industry score a major victory in the Bay Area, where they've been able to convince hundreds of regional (non-organic) farmers to spread the hazardous material on farm land and pasture, and have actually been able to get city residents to take hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic sludge and spread it over their backyard and community gardens.

San Francisco is a strategic battleground to stop the sludge industry from poisoning more farms and communities. In 1998 the organic community rose up and banned the use of sewage sludge in organic farming. Now it's time to ban its use on farms, gardens, lawns, and land in general.

Sewage sludge is a form of hazardous waste and needs to be contained and isolated as such.

California proposition 65 (P65) requires the listing of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. Chemicals known to the SFPUC that are in San Francisco sewage sludge that are also found on the California P65 list include:

Mercury - Molybdenum - Cobalt - Antimony Chromium - Dibenzofurans - Naphthalene - 1,2-Dibromo-3-Chloropropane (Dbcp) - Di (2-Ethylhexyl) Phthalate (Dehp) - Tcdd Equivalents (Dioxins) Such As Octachlorodibenzo-P-Dioxins (Ocdd)

Stop Sludge!

Click here to download OCA's Sludge Leaflet (PDF)

Organizations that have signed onto the letter asking Mayor Newsom to stop spreading toxic sludge on the city include:

Organic Consumers Association - Consumers Union - Arc Ecology - California Communities Against Toxics - California Food & Justice Coalition - Center for Food Safety - Center for Health, Environment & Justice - Earth Share California - East Bay Green Tours - Food First (Institute for Food and Development Policy) - GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives) - Green Cafe Network - Help for Sewage Victims - Lessing/Sears Community Garden - Local Harvest - MOMAS (Mothers of Marin Against the Spray) - North Berkeley Harvest - Our City - People's Grocery - Planting Justice - Raising Sand Radio/Motherspeak - Safe Food and Fertilizer - San Francisco Green Party - Teamsters Union - United Sludge -Free Alliance

Sewer Sludge Is Not Inactive Fertilizer

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Stop Toxic Sludge

Toxic sewage sludge used to be dumped into the oceans, killing fish and marine life. After public pressure put an end to ocean-dumping, toxic sludge began to be spread on farmland, touted as natural "fertilizer." In 1998 the sludge industry tried to get the USDA to allow toxic sewage sludge to be used as a fertilizer on organic farms, but the OCA's Save Organic Standards campaign and an aroused organic community stopped this insidious effort. Today millions of pounds of sludge are dumped on Monsanto's crops, including cotton, corn, and soy grown for animal feed and fuel. This toxic sludge is, by law, allowed to contain dangerous levels of pathogens, viruses and bacteria. The sludge pathogens that survive sewage "treatment" are the hardiest superbugs, bacteria that have developed a resistance to antimicrobials and antibiotics.

Toxic sludge used on food crops must be processed to reduce pathogen contamination, but is still rife with heavy metals and all manner of industrial chemicals from flame retardants to metal plating compounds.