Reply #96: Wow -- don't you know that fertilizers recycle hazardous wastes?

[AikidoSoul]

How can you give hazardous waste laden "modern fertilizer" credit for its "role in increasing output dramatically..."? That's certainly debatable, but what's disturbing is that you sem to sluff off the considerable cumulative devastating damage to the environment as though it was somehow worth increased output. I'm not even sure that "increased output" valid here.

No matter what your value system on this issue -- here's an article you need to read --it was part of a 29 part series nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. It might turn you around on this when you realize that this is being done all over the U.S. on farms and on lawns and home gardens:

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=2547772&date=19970703


Fear In The Fields -- How Hazardous Wastes Become Fertilizer -- Spreading Heavy Metals On Farmland Is Perfectly Legal, But Little Research Has Been Done To Find Out Whether It's Safe

Duff Wilson

Seattle Times Staff Reporter

Copyright 1997, Seattle Times Co.

When you're mayor of a town the size of Quincy, Wash., you hear just about everything.

So it was only natural that Patty Martin would catch some farmers in her Central Washington hamlet wondering aloud why their wheat yields were lousy, their corn crops thin, their cows sickly.

Some blamed the weather. Some blamed themselves. But only after Mayor Martin led them in weeks of investigation did they identify a possible new culprit: fertilizer.

They don't have proof that the stuff they put on their land to feed it actually was killing it. But they discovered something they found shocking and that they think other American farmers and consumers ought to know:

Manufacturing industries are disposing of hazardous wastes by turning them into fertilizer to spread around farms. And they're doing it legally.

"It's really unbelievable what's happening, but it's true," Martin said. "They just call dangerous waste a product, and it's no longer a dangerous waste. It's a fertilizer."

Across the Columbia River basin in Moxee City is visual testimony to Martin's assertion. A dark powder from two Oregon steel mills is poured from rail cars into the top of silos attached to Bay Zinc Co. under a federal permit to store hazardous waste.

The powder, a toxic byproduct of the steel-making process, is taken out of the bottom of the silos as a raw material for fertilizer.

"When it goes into our silo, it's a hazardous waste," said Bay Zinc President Dick Camp. "When it comes out of the silo, it's no longer regulated. The exact same material. Don't ask me why. That's the wisdom of the EPA."

What's happening in Washington is happening around the United States. The use of industrial toxic waste as a fertilizer ingredient is a growing national phenomenon, an investigation by The Seattle Times has found.

The Times found examples of wastes laden with heavy metals being recycled into fertilizer to be spread across crop fields.

Legally.

In Gore, Okla., a uranium-processing plant is getting rid of low-level radioactive waste by licensing it as a liquid fertilizer and spraying it over 9,000 acres of grazing land.

In Tift County, Ga., more than 1,000 acres of peanut crops were wiped out by a brew of hazardous waste and limestone sold to unsuspecting farmers.

And in Camas, Clark County, highly corrosive, lead-laced waste from a pulp mill is hauled to Southwest Washington farms and spread over crops grown for livestock consumption.

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