A Backlash After San Francisco Labels Sewage Sludge “Organic”

Front page photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/44857113@N00/855639608/">DefMo</a> (<a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a>)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Activists wearing face masks and haz-mat suits dumped a pile of sewage sludge on the steps of San Francisco’s city hall today to protest the city’s practice of marketing the material to home gardeners as “organic compost.” The US Department of Agriculture’s organic standards explicity prohibit organic produce from being grown on sludge-treated land.  “The City of San Francisco owes an apology to all of the food consumers in California who have been eating non-organic food grown on sewage sludge,” said Ronnie Cummins, president of the Organic Consumers Association. He was wearing a haz-mat suit on which he’d written a message to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: “Organic gardens aren’t toxic waste dumps.”

Using sludge as fertilizer is a common practice; more than half of the sewage produced in America ends up being treated and applied to gardens and farmland. The EPA considers sludge to be safe, but many food activists and some of the EPA’s own scientists disagree, pointing out that it can contain trace amounts of almost anything that gets poured down the drain, from heavy metals to endocrine disruptors–and that only a portion of these contaminants are screened for in sludge. (For more on the safety of sludge, check out “Sludge Happens” in our May/June 2009 issue).

The confusion over San Francisco’s “organic” sludge isn’t unique. The USDA doesn’t regulate which fertilizers can be labeled as organic, allowing anyone to use the term. But Cummins says it’s particularly misleading to apply the “organic” term to treated sewage sludge, which has been known to contain high levels of pollutants such PFOAs and flame retardants. Mother Jonesreport that President Obama’s “organic” White House vegetable garden was planted on sludge-treated land led to considerable outcry last year. In response to complaints from organic gardeners who say they were duped and to this CBS news segment, San Francisco has at least temporary suspended its public “compost giveaway events” and announced that it will no longer call the material “organic.”

Still, Cummins wants San Francisco to stop using sludge as fertilizer and to help gardeners who accepted the material clean up their land. To press his case, he poured some sludge into a jars and marched into Newsom’s office, still wearing his haz-mat suit and a pair of safety goggles. After a moment, mayoral representative David Miree appeared and Cummins gifted him with the sludge sample. “Be careful with this stuff,” Cummins said. Another activist offered Miree her safety gloves.  He politely declined them, but rather than holding the jars, walked out with them loaded into a garbage can.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate