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Sewage Sludge, Celebrities and School Gardens
"Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees." -- David Letterman
I have a strange little story to tell. It involves sewage sludge, celebrities and school gardens. It is set in the City of Angels, naturally.
This story has several characters, which we can lump into two basic categories: the children and the adults.
The children are the most important, and as always, are innocent and have virtually no say in the outcome of the story. They are the ones in the garden.
The adults can be generally divided into three groups: the green celebrities, the company, and the environmentalists.
First there are the celebrities (as we know, fame is big currency in LA). They are part of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a good organization that is seeking to make the green movement go mainstream. The tension of the story is built around EMA, which as you'll see, has a very important ethical decision to make. The EMA has a worthy project creating organic gardens in schools, so that, as Rosario Dawson says in a video on their site, "kids can be clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to be happy." Sounds great. We definitely need more organic gardens in schools.
Rosario Dawson with the kids at an EMA school garden project.
Then there is the company, Kellogg Garden Products. At risk of being formulaic, Kellogg is the controversial villain of the story. It appears that Kellogg is using sewage sludge, purchased from the city of Los Angeles, in 70% of its fertilizers, while all the while branding them as "natural & organic." The promotional language on their website says: "The cornerstone to our success, stability, and integrity is our commitment to providing organic gardeners with products you can trust." Sewage sludge is not just treated human waste (which is gross enough, but apparently safe); it also contains hazardous contaminants drawn from sewer water by sewage treatments plants, including industrial solvents and chemicals, heavy metals, medical wastes, flame retardants and PCBs. There are many potential health hazards related to exposure to sewage sludge (though the science is limited - a definite boon to the sewage sludge industry), including neurological damage, cancer, meningitis, fever, respiratory illness, roundworm, hookworm...the list goes on.
Kathy Kellogg Johnson is the Chief Sustainability Officer for Kellogg Garden Products, and is also, importantly, on EMA's corporate advisory board. EMA has formed an alliance with Kellogg Garden Products as part of the School Gardens Project. According to EMA's website: "Kellogg Garden Products has generously pledged to donate soil, fertilizer and compost to each of the partner gardens. EMA will directly support a number of school gardens through funding and celebrity mentoring via EMA's Young Hollywood Board." And so it appears that children in LA are now gardening with toxic sewage sludge, and unaware of the scandal, the celebrities are promoting the project.
Enter the environmentalists. The Food Rights Network, a project of the The Center for Media and Democracy, is running a national campaign with a fairly straightforward and reasonable message: sewage sludge is toxic and should not be branded as organic fertilizer, nor should it be used to grow food with, and very obviously, school children should not be digging around in it to grow zucchini and cilantro. The environmentalists have informed Debbie Levin, the President of the Environmental Media Association of the hazards of Kellogg's "organic" fertilizer, essentially saying: please don't kill the messenger, but sewage sludge is toxic and your worthy School Gardens Project is potentially poisoning the children you are trying to help. In an email response to the Food Rights Network, Ms. Levin said: "The EMA School Garden Program has never claimed to be "organic" and that EMA does "not claim to work with only 100% organic and or sustainable corporations."
And so herein lies the ethical dilemma: "Will Hollywood's EMA join the environmentalists and tell the truth to the parents, children and the schools: the gardens are not organic, and the children are being exposed to hazardous materials in the sewage sludge used in the gardens?" Will EMA terminate its alliance with Kellogg Garden Products and commit to only use truly organic, non hazardous fertilizer and soil in school gardens throughout Los Angeles? And of course, will Kellogg Garden Products, and the dozens of other companies using sewage sludge in their fertilizers, stop confusing the public through greenwashing, and instead label sewage sludge as sewage sludge? Or even better, stop using sewage sludge?
As I said before, we live in an adult world. Hopefully the adults will have the integrity to make decisions with the kids in mind.
Until then, we can tweak Letterman's quote a bit: Spring is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the school kids farm with sewage sludge and grow tomatoes.
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To learn more about the sewage sludge industry visit: The Food Rights Network
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9 Comments so far
Show AllMitch,you are right, the sludge promotions ,were worse than un-hot composted Bullsh!t.Even areas of lawn ,and ornamental gardens fed with reprocessed municipal sludge ,now need testing before conversion to edibles or herbs.Sad mess! Some of these products used the name of the municipality in the product name.I wonder about the liability.If a client sues me for using sludge on their turf,can I sue Milwaukee for damages? peas in
This subject came up, and was tackled by Public Citizen at least a decade ago. I remember how the Waste Industry was trying to use its clout to gain "ownership" of the organic label. Propaganda works through bending language to mean other than what it was intended to relate.
In a similar fashion, nuclear power plants don't know what to do with all the spent rods, so they are "recycling" them in programs where these dangerous semi-radioactive byproducts are smelt down and combined with cleaner metals. The result? Possibly your lastest toaster oven. "Let them eat toxic cake," the net message.
And there is yet another insidious inversion of language underway. Religion and religious texts are, well, religious! But with Christian publishing netting over ONE BILLION a year, they have recently co-opted the designation, "Spiritual." Many authoritarian religious messages and precepts are anything BUT spiritual, for the truly spiritual speaks to the soul in an individual way that is often revelatory.
Of course the marketing of war defined as the means to spread democracy (or even peace) is yet another sampling of the dangers of faulty references, and how these devious maneuvers lead to outcomes few suspect or understand. (When I first read the data in Public Citizen I thought, "Surely, this can't be real? No sane society would allow it!")
Orwell saw all this before it manifested in such an heinous and ubiquitous fashion!
We should protect not only the children, but our whole food supply. Clearly, sewage sludge should not be used as fertilizer. In fact, it should not be, at all.
Composting toilets can ease water scarcity and harvest valuable "clean" nutrients in the form of humanure, before it is contaminated with industrial wastes (such as chemicals, heavy metals, etc.). It can be safely collected, properly composted and returned to the food production cycle, reducing the need for artificial, fossil fuel fertilizers.
Toward Sustainable Sanitation:
http://www.riles.org/TSS.pdf
Don't forget that these "industrial wastes" are disposed of by for-profit corporations in the public sewage and processed at citizen's expense -financially and health wise. True for most all energy production, i.e. coal burning power plants spewing their toxic waste into the air. Excellent point about composting toilets saving water. By the way, asking citizens to conserve water when they consume a tiny portion compared to industry is another example of green-washing, for example Sierra Club's resent request of the public to support laws requiring individual meters on apartment complexes. By itself it is a good idea but not significant in overall water conservation. Asking the public to be austere while corporate usage and waste is not targeted. Shorter showers and teeth brushing conservation is focusing on the minutia while ignoring the larger picture. I really wonder about Sierra Club?
" Ms. Levin said: "The EMA School Garden Program has never claimed to be "organic" and that EMA does "not claim to work with only 100% organic and or sustainable corporations."
But will the EMA admit that it is using toxic chemicals? And will the Food Rights Network keep the pressure on EMA by planting stories and buying advertisements in the media as often as possible until EMA has to address the problem?
Organic foods can't be grown in sewage sludge. Because there's no authority overseeing the labeling of soil amendments (unlike foods), Kellogg's can get away with calling its product "organic." I hate to call for more regulation, but I think it is needed in this case. This is a blatant misrepresentation of the product.
What's the problem with "regulation?" It's only a dirty word to those profiting from "deregulation" and those aren't the 99% protected from
corporate abuse.
My concern is that the parents of these children should be aware of the toxicity posed by sewage sludge. And they should have loudly protested to the exposure to the children. In 2002, when USDA was finally defining what constitutes organic food and what inputs could be used in organic food production, those industries that profit sewage sludge sales tried to say it was an acceptable input for fertilization. As I recall there was some 400,000 comments to USDA asking it to withhold sewage sludge, irradiation, and genetically modified organisms as inputs or processes applied to organic foods.
These toxins in sewage sludge, including carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, cyclic hydrocarbons, and a host of other poisons, will surely lead to premature illnesses and deaths of children who are exposed or inadvertently consume the soil.
whoa, kids, chill out!. The contaminants in sewage sludge are present in very small concentrations; not all samples of sludge have all of the contaminants mentioned in the article; some have none. Human waste has been used fertilizer for as long as there has been agriculture. Landscaping can and should be fertilized with sludge. What better possible use for it? You're right about edibles gardening. Sludge probably should not be used there but the risks of exposure are exceedingly low. Anyway, the dirt is not a bad place for dilute waste streams. It has to go somewhere. Many of these materials are already present in the soil, acting as trace nutrients for various microbes.
Solution: the LA area generates tons of food and plant waste all of which could be composted and a tiny fraction of which would be more than enough for these garden project. Kellog's could get the tax break and good publicity by buying it and giving it to the project. The stars could get their photo op. The kids could fertilize their gardens.
But come on, folks! If sludge were our only environmental problem, we'd be doing pretty damn well. Better in our landscapes than dumped off barges and out of pipes into the ocean 1/2 mile from shore.