Byline: PETER WEHRWEIN Staff writer
Frustration was the mother of invention.
Every day, two dump-truck loads of sewage sludge were hauled 10 miles on twisty Ulster County roads to the town dump, said Bob Petersen, who runs the sewage treatment plant for the village of Saugerties.
Every time, it was costing the village money because the town charged a tipping fee.
Then town testing procedures got exacting. Trucks were delayed.
They seemed to want clean fill, said Petersen, and this dark watery stuff coming out of sewage treatment plant fell suspect. 'It was just getting to be an impossible situation,' he said.
So Petersen turned to alchemy, and started to investigate ways to turn the dregs of Saugerties society into - if not gold - at least something useful.
Three years and $305,000 later, the Saugerties sewage treatment plant on the bank of the Esopus Creek is churning out about 15 tons of fertilizer each day - a grayish, clumpy mix of sludge, kiln dust from a Lehigh Cement Plant and a small dash of quicklime.
'The only real smell you get is the ammonia - and that dissipates very quickly,' said Petersen, standing amid the rows of drying stuff under a covered building without walls. 'We've never had an odor complaint - not one.'
'This,' said Petersen, 'is my baby.'
On scales both as large as New York City and as small as the 5,000- person village of Saugerties, this sludge-as-fertilizer scenario is playing itself out throughout the country.
The practice is well-established in many places in the Midwest. There is a new momentum, however, in the Northeast, where the combination of landfill scarcity and the end of ocean dumping of sludge has raised the question: 'Well then, where should we put it?'
At first glance, rendering sludge into fertilizer would seem to earn the environmental stamp of approval. It is certainly preferable to polluting the oceans, right? And it is, after all, recycling.
Some environmentalists do favor land application of sludge. Sarah Clark, a staff scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, chaired a New York City citizens advisory committee on sludge disposal.
'Reusing sludge can be an environmental beneficial to manage sludge if its sufficiently clean and properly managed,' Clark said.
But other environmentalists and quite a few farmers are waving red flags. The basic objection is that while the average municipal sewage plant may be set up to bacteriologically process and separate the people-generated organic matter in sewage, it is not designed to filter out the industrial pollution. Toxic metals such as cadmium and a panoply of other toxic chemicals will concentrate in sludge, they say.
'I know it has to go somewhere, but I don't want it in my broccoli,' said Judith Enck, an Albany-based environmental lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Charlotte Hartman, of Ancram, Columbia County, president of the Taconic Preservation Alliance, worries that both the farms and abandoned gravel pits of the Hudson Valley will become a convenient dumping ground for New York City sludge.
'It is the perfect place for this kind of practice to take place,' said Hartman. 'I don't think anyone is really considering what it will do to the water table.'
Some feisty not-in-my-back-yard fights have broken out in the state of Maine and near Syracuse in communities destined to be on the receiving end of sludge.
Farmers in Queen Anne's County, a prime agricultural county in Maryland on the eastern shore of the pollution-sensitive Chesapeake Bay, turned down sludge from a sewage treatment plant in Baltimore because cadmium levels were 13 times higher than the sludge they were getting from a Washington, D.C.- area plant, according to Paul Gunther, a county extension agent there.
Linda and Raymond Zander, Washington state dairy farmers, have formed a group called Help for Sewage Victims. They blame the sudden ill health of their cowherd on the spreading of sewage sludge on an adjacent 70-acre site.
An article profiling the Zanders in Farm Journal magazine this spring was headlined 'Sludge under suspicion.' The story's second sentence said, 'Once considered a safe, cheap form of fertilizer this byproduct of sewage treatment plants may instead turn out to be a land bomb.'
The riposte from sludge defenders is that sludge is clean and getting cleaner. They credit effectiveness of mandated pretreatment programs at industrial sites with capturing the metals and toxic compounds before they go down the drain. Some of the principal contaminants, such as PCBs, are no longer being made, so the small amounts of those pollutants are expected to dwindle. Finally, in the case of New York City, heavy industry has left town, leaving a cleaner sludge behind.
A recent battery of tests on New York City's sludge shows that it violated only the federal standard for copper, according to Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the city's environmental department. That will be solved with the addition of calcium orthophosphate, an anti-corrosive, to the city's water supply, he said.
Still, most farm and agricultural interests leave the door ajar for sludge use but argue that inspection and regulation are inadequate. They want programs that would involve strict testing of the sludge itself - perhaps every load - and careful monitoring of soil on farms where the material is spread.
Without those programs, The Farm Credit of North Central New York, a federally funded lending cooperative for farmers, is advising farmers not to take sludge.
'Our concern is with respect to the heavy metal concentrations and over time we could have heavy buildup in the soils that could restrict land use,' said Robert Egerton, president of the Madison County-based cooperative.
Moreover, the New York Farm Bureau, the prime lobbying organization for the state's farmers, wants to see a program to insure farmers if land is damaged by sludge-born toxic chemicals. Richard Zimmerman, a Farm Bureau official, also decried as 'ridiculous' the circumstances in which farmers are paying companies for sludge when farmers are doing society a favor by taking the material.
Meanwhile, in Saugerties, Bob Petersen worries about 'his baby.'
He is proud of a system that he put together on a tight budget, employing his ingenuity to save the village money. With no industry, the Saugerties sludge apparently is relatively free of the toxics that worry farmers and distress environmentalists. Tests done in August showed 1.3 parts per million of cadmium, for example; the state standard is 25.
But so far, Petersen has only found one local nursery to take his sludge - at no charge though the sewage treatment plant has received some flowers and other plantings in exchange.
He won't name the nursery. They don't want it known that they are using sewage sludge, Petersen said. Local farmers have been reluctant. An elongated mound of fertilizer grows.
Petersen, taking the long view, sounded philosophical.
'Any sludge product ... there is always the fear in the back of people's minds, 'Oh my God, this is human (waste).''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO - TIMES UNION/JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE
A PILE OF FERTILIZER remains after sludge is processed at the sewage treatment plant in the village of Saugerties in Ulster County.
PHOTO Times Union/JOHN CARL D'ANNIBALE
ROBERT PETERSEN looks on as a mixer turns sewage sludge into fertilzer in Saugerties last week.
