How many people in Ontario know that their farm crops are nurtured by human sewage?
With the whole world watching Walkerton and worried about drinking water, Ontario municipalities are quietly dumping human sewage on farmer’s fields. The practice of dumping human waste on Ontario’s farmlands is largely unknown, controversial but legal. In Ontario, foods from strawberries to steak may be fertilized by human excrement.
Municipal planners don't call it human waste. They use the terms "biosolids", "waste water residual" and "sludge".
The Walkerton tragedy is bound to call public attention to this controversial practice.
In Toronto, trucks from Terratec Environmental Ltd. haul sludge from the main sewage treatment plant at Ashbridges Bay to farmer’s fields. The Oakville-based company received city council’s blessing to handle biosolids in a pilot program, in August of 1996.
Potential for liability to taxpayers is astronomical when it is considered that by the end of year 2000, Toronto expects to send all the sludge from its main treatment plant to rural Ontario to nourish crops.
On Sept. 3, 1997 Terratec entered into discussion with Metro Works about the feasibility of removing and applying to agricultural land, quantities of biosolids up to twice the original estimated requirements.
Approval for the contract came from environmental activists Karey Shinn and Karen Buck, of the private Safe Sewage Committee, who became members of the city’s Biosolids Multi-Stakeholder Committee, and were the only two private citizens on the city’s influential eight-member Independent Review Committee, which ultimately hand-picked two biosolid companies who made it to the city’s shortlist.
Observers contend that it was bureaucrats and environmental activists, and not city politicians who had the most say in the decision-making process which led to who would control Metro’s lucrative biosolid contract.
Consultants hired by the city identified that in the long term, the city preferred non-food chain uses of biosolids over food chain uses (Call for Expression of Interest, Draft, Aug. 11, 1998, page 2, section 2.1d). City documents show that Shinn, Buck and Ms. Elizabeth Borek suggested that the consultants remove this line from final EOI documents.
According to Shinn’s own words in a lettter to the mayor and council in October of 1998, ‘Most councillors could not attend the Multi-Stakeholder meetings. There have been huge demands on councillors, staff, consultants and the public over the summer to pull the current request for proposals together. This has been a collaborative, fair and open process.’
Incredibly, Ken Waldie, the environment ministry’s retired Metro Toronto district manager, who later went to work as a consultant at Aquatech Blue under a cloud of allegations about a possible breach of trust, was the man most responsible for ministry approval of the stability of Toronto’s biosolids. A year-long environment ministry probe into the oil recycling plant has resulted in 34 charges against Aquatech Blue Ltd., its owners and two former managers stemming from alleged dumping of toxic waste into Ashbridges Bay. Provincial police anti-rackets branch member Detective-Sergeant Chuck Cox confirmed an investigation of Waldie was taking place separate from the ministry’s probe.
‘This is in response to the documentation provided by Metro to the Ministry on June 2, 1995, regarding the stabilization and quality of your biosolids for the two proposed beneficial biosolids demonstration projects,’ Waldie wrote in a letter to Bob Pickett, Director, Water Pollution Control, Metropolitan Toronto. ‘Based on the documentation provided by Metro, the Ministry accepts that the biosolids can meet the interim stability criteria and the relevant quality criteria for the two proposed beneficial biosolids demonstration projects. Metro should still continue to review and implement improved sludge management options, including providing a nominal minimum hydraulic retention time in primary digestion of 15 days as outlined in the Ministry’s Guidelines for the Design of Sewage Treatment Works.’
According to a Canadian Press story earlier this month, ‘until late last year, Walkerton was discreetly selling its treated sewage to local farmers to plow into their fields. Now Walkerton is faced with a problem that might well plague other communities going the sludge route. It has a massive concrete holding tank full of human waste and nowhere to legally put it.’
By July the tank will be full.
‘When environment ministry spokesman John Steele was asked what will be done with the tank, he answered, �We don’t know.’
‘The Walkerton sewage tank contains, among other things, the potentially virulent excrement of those felled by the killer E. coli bacteria.’
Add to public safety problems the well above average level of rainfall--60 millimetres so far this June. Excess surface water--full of bacteria--ran into the sewers and washed into Lake Ontario. Sewer drains also overflowed with rainwater.
In terms of potential contamination, Ontario farmland could be a bigger problem than Lake Ontario.
In Britain ‘many water companies are counting on farmers as other disposal routes start to close down,’ says New Scientist (August 1998). ‘Sea dumping has been illegal in North America since 1993 and will become illegal in the EU at the end of this year.
‘A report on sewage by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in 1996, and the Commons inquiry this year, both decided that safe means killing as many germs as possible. They called for all sludge used in agriculture to be pasteurized, which involves heating at 70 0C for an hour.
‘...Even uncommon diseases caused by sludge would be hard to trace. But we do know that people have been infected with cholera and typhoid by crops watered with sewage--where germs are less concentrated than in sludge. Last year in the U.S., imported crops that had been irrigated with sewage, including salad and berries, were implicated in gut upsets.’
Closer to home, Robert Pickett, Director, Water Pollution Control, Metropolitan Toronto says it’s ‘an issue of biosolids meeting and exceeding all the (ministry) guidelines.’
‘No deleterious long term effect has ever come from the use of treated human waste on farmer’s fields,’ Pickett told Toronto Free Press.
Pickett admits that knowledge of the practice of spreading sludge on agricultural land may not be well known to John Q. Public.
‘I don’t know that it’s well known. We all know about animal waste and what manure is.’
Pickett admits that there are no guarantees in the safety of biosolids, ‘as there are no guarantees for anything.’
Michael Price, General Manager, Water and Wastewater Services, Toronto did not return TFP’s telephone calls.
The prevalent use of human waste, which is cheaper than animal waste, is driven by economics.
And, if human waste is considered good enough to nurture Ontario’s crops, it is not always considered good enough for application on agricultural lands elsewhere.
According to Wastewater Digest (Sept. 1997), ‘San Joaquin County, the fifth largest crop-producing county in California, passed an ordinance banning the land application of biosolids in certain areas. The ordinance questions the safety of land-applied biosolids �even when applied in accordance with federal and state regulation’, and states that the public concerns over safety �may cause a loss of confidence in agricultural products from San Joaquin County.’ The county gave weight to a National Food Processors Association policy that does not endorse application of biosolids on agri-cultural land and to incidents of food chain contam-ination from E. coli (bacteria) and mold (fungus) in United States and abroad. Land appli-cation of biosolids also has been banned or placed on moratorium elsewhere in the U.S., including Rappahannock County in Virginia and several Washington State counties.’
Quoted in New Scientist, James Smith of the EPA said Giarda, hookworm, Cryptosporidium, and germs causing typhoid, cholera, hepatitis A, polio and amoebic dysentery have all been found in sludge in the U.S.’
‘The water companies (in Britain) insist that even if pathogens persist in sludge, they die during the 10 months before crops can be harvested from sludged fields. The U.S., more cautiously, won’t let the public walk on sludged land for a year.’
While in Ontario we depend on the stability of biosolids as approved by former ministry officials under police investigation and environmental activists who manage to gain entry to the city’s influential Biosolids Multi-Stakeholder Committee, scientists in other parts of the world are on the public record with anxieties about land applications of sludge composed of human waste.
David Kay, Professor of environmental science at the University of Leeds, told New Scientist ‘the scientific literature contains almost no good information to tell us how rapidly viruses die in sludged soil, and little data even for well-studied coliform and streptococcus bacteria.’
--with files from Laura McGill
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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