The Big Necessity (24 page)

Gregory objects. “Not milkshake. It's more like coffee.”

“But it's 2.5 percent solids. It's milkshake!”

“Coffee with grounds in it then. But definitely coffee.”

 

An inspection will settle it. They give me a hard hat bearing a U.S. flag and a “United We Stand” logo. They overlook my open-toed shoes, which are forbidden, and united we head out onto the campus. It's called a campus because it looks like one. The buildings are red-brick and compact. It has a college quadrangle neatness. I've never seen any sewage works like it, because they are usually huge and spread out and dotted with unsightly settlement tanks or aeration lanes. Sewage treatment is a messy, malodorous business, but not here. ASA built this plant to blend in aesthetically with the old-worldness of Alexandria, and with the city's new-world sensitivities to smell.

Odor is the biggest headache for a treatment plant operator. It is the cause of most public complaints. The huge Mogden works in west London even generated a name for its odor—the Mogden Pong—and a
combative residents' group that runs a site to collect residents' complaints. One email reads, simply, “Stench.” Water utilities spend millions on odor treatment and are regularly taken to court by local government for breaking nuisance laws. Saying that “sewage is bound to smell,” as one utility manager told me, is not sympathetically received by people who have to cancel their garden parties when the wind blows.

Another wastewater manager told me it was people's own fault. “Who'd buy a house right next door to a wastewater plant? Were you drunk?” But houses arrive when cities expand. It's not the fault of the sewage works when the city grows to meet them. Sewage treatment professionals think odor complaints arise from ignorance. Gregory tells a tale to illustrate this. “My brother's a cop. His wife does my taxes. I make more money than my brother, so my sister-in-law says, how in the world is that right, that you make more money than a policeman? She was sitting down drinking a glass of water. I picked up some dirt and dumped it in her water and said, ‘Drink it now. If I don't work, eventually that's what you're going to drink. If we don't pretreat that water, water treatment plants can't treat it for you.'” She never queried his salary again.

ASA spent millions on an odor treatment removal system. But the “jewel in the crown” is a 115-foot building that houses solids treatment. I'd been told by another wastewater manager that I'd be able to eat off the floor here, and he wasn't lying. Other sewage treatment plants invariably had parts that made me retch, but this place is spotless and odorless. We traipse through the several floors following the sludge through its transformation. The trucks pick up the EQ result on the ground floor from 5
A.M
. onward, early enough to avoid the traffic and not disturb the neighbors, to take the biosolids to fields in Virginia. ASA pays a company called Synagro to take its product away. Synagro—which describes itself as “a residuals management company”—is paid by a lot of states to take sludge away and then to apply it to land, turn it into pellets, or landfill it. It's good business. Ten years ago, according to a
Houston Press
investigation, the company operated in three states and made $20 million. Now, it's active in thirty-three and has revenues of $320 million.

Gregory takes some sludge from a chute and tells me to do the same. It's black, earthy. It looks and feels like a crumbled brownie, rich and fertile. Farmers love this stuff, says Gregory. They honestly can't get enough. It's not as good as artificial fertilizers, which have more nitrogen and phosphorous, but for a free product, it's unbeatable. I ask him if he'd use it on his garden, and he knows that I'm actually asking if it's safe. “Sure I would. And I'd have my kids roll around in it. No problem.” If they ever bag it and sell it in garden centers, he'd be a satisfied customer. Why not? It's a marvel, an expensive and remarkable transformation. Cake from milkshake. It's nearly as good a transfiguration as turning “sludge” into “biosolids.”

 

By 1992, American sewage treatment plants had a problem. For the ninety or so years since most cities had installed sewers, the way human waste had been dealt with had not evolved. Remove sludge from the liquid sewage, then treat the water and dump the sludge at sea, in rivers, or in landfill. Effluent from industrial sources was dumped with little regulation. By 1969,
Time
could write that the nation's rivers were “convenient, free sewers.” It described Ohio's Cuyahoga River, which caught fire twice that year, as “chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with sub-surface gases.” Consequently, the Clean Water Act of 1972 provided big money for municipalities to improve their sewage treatment.

The construction and renovation frenzy that ensued was the largest public works project in the country to date. By its completion, the United States had 16,000 sewage treatment plants and an improved sewage treatment process. But cleaning sewage more efficiently meant removing more dirt. In other words, the Clean Water Act increased the amount of sludge being produced, which was mostly dumped at sea. Farmers like sludge because it has nutrients, but the same nitrogen and phosphorous can feed and breed algae that suck out water's dissolved oxygen content, leaving it lifeless. Sewage can suffocate the sea. After too many toxic shellfish beds and algal blooms, Congress passed the 1989 Ocean Dumping Ban Act. This gave the industry four years to come up
with an alternative to ocean dumping. Americans produce 7 million dry tons of sludge a year. It had to go somewhere.

At this point, someone must have remembered the “sewage doctors” of nineteenth-century Europe. Men like Justus von Liebig and Alderman Mechi thought Joseph Bazalgette's new sanitary sewer system was a criminal waste of a potential fertilizer because it discharged the contents of the sewers into the Thames. Liebig calculated the worth of this lost wealth at £4 million. Karl Marx remarked that London “could find no better use for the excretion of four and one-half million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.” Alderman Mechi, luxuriating in the modern convenience of household-supplied gas, imagined a future “when each farmer will turn on the tap and supply himself with town sewage through his meter according to his requirements.”

Sewage taps never caught on, but until wastewater treatment became pervasive in the early twentieth century, sewage farms, which irrigated their fields with raw sewage, thrived all over. Gennevilliers, outside Paris, produced vegetables highly sought-after by Parisian restaurateurs. The sewage farm at Pasadena, California, grew excellent walnuts. The arrival of cheap artificial fertilizers made sewage farming uneconomical, but the principle was sound. Properly treated, sewage could have a place in the nutrient cycle. Food feeds humans whose waste feeds food.

But by end of the century sludge contained far more than pure human excrement, and hardly any of it good. Anything that gets into the sewers can end up in sludge. U.S. industry is estimated to use 100,000 chemicals, with 1,000 new chemicals being added every year. These chemicals can include PCBs and phthalates, dioxins, and other carcinogens. Sludge may contain pathogens from all sorts of sources. Hospital and funeral waste can include SARS, TB, or hepatitis. Sick people excrete sickness, and it all ends up in the sewers. The
HarperCollins Dictionary of Environmental Science
defines sludge as “a viscous, semisolid mixture of bacteria and virus-laden organic matter, toxic metals, synthetic organic chemicals and settled solids removed from domestic industrial waste water at a sewage treatment plant.” The Clean Water Act keeps it simple and calls it a pollutant.

I have to use words like
if
and
may
because no one actually knows what's in sludge. Technically, industries are supposed to pretreat hazardous chemicals and waste, but oversight is minimal. And anyway, no one regulates how thousands of chemicals might react with one another or with the pathogens floating alongside them. The most optimistic view of sludge is that it is a soup of unknowns. Others think it's toxic and can't be anything else. Cleaning water is done by removing contaminants and concentrating them in sludge. The better the wastewater treatment process, the worse the sludge.

So its transformation into fertilizer was going to be a hard sell, but there was little alternative. There are five options for sludge disposal: landfill, incineration, gasification, disposal at sea, and land application. The first three are costly, and ocean dumping is illegal. Land application is legal and cheap. It was not a difficult choice. Also, there was precedent. In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) has been selling its sludge as fertilizer since 1925, with discreet labeling. Only someone who knew what MMSD stood for would realize Milorganite is derived from a human body.

The sludge and wastewater industry looked at Milorganite and saw the light. No one would want to live near farms where sewage sludge was applied. But people might want to live near fields that were covered in a fertilizer called something else. The transformation of sludge into “biosolids” was brilliantly documented in
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You
by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The book was about “the lies, damn lies” of the PR industry in general, but the maneuvers of the Water Environment Federation (WEF), the U.S. sewage industry association, were impressive enough to provide the authors with their title. The EPA, they write, was conscious even in 1981 of the need to persuade the public to accept sludge farming. A Name Change Task Force was formed, and suggestions solicited through a WEF newsletter. The 250 suggestions received included “bioslurp,” “black gold,” “the end product,” “hudoo,” “powergro,” and—my favorite—ROSE, standing for “Recycling Of Solids Environmentally.” Biosolids won, probably because it was the blandest. Maureen Reilly, a prominent sludge opponent and the producer of the prolific
SludgeWatch
newsletter, calls this “linguistic detoxification.”

 

_______

 

Chris Peot thinks the name change was common sense and nothing more. He uses Jell-O as an example. “It's called Jell-O for a reason. It's not called gelatinous red goo because no one would buy it. Of course you're going to try and have a name for your product that is palatable. This is a product that helps the farmers, that is valuable. We'd be insane to call it sludge.”

Peot's was the other name suggested by the National Biosolids Partnership. He runs the biosolids program at Washington, D.C.'s Blue Plains plant. He's on a conference call when I arrive at his office, so I pass the time reading the Positions Available advertisements in the lobby. A young man is filling in an application form, and I wonder if it's the announcement for a Wastewater Treatment Plant Operator, a job that will require him to “troubleshoot operational problems including process microbiology” and “perform laboratory analysis.” Wastewater personnel keep effluent clean. Because effluent ends up in drinking water sources, even low-level employees are the guardians of the nation's safe drinking water. To qualify for this weighty responsibility, the Operator is required to have a high school diploma and lift fifty pounds.

Blue Plains is so big it has road signs. (I like Solids Road best.) Despite its vastness, it is totally automated and directed from a command center that looks like mission control, with three enormous plasma screens and several banks of monitors. The place is impressive, and so is Peot, when we finally coincide. He is handsome, like Alexandria's Paul Carbary, tall and lean and dressed in normal clothes—hiking boots, comfortable trousers—not a suit. I'm beginning to wonder if all biosolids managers are designed by Gap.

He is also languid and likable, but the calmness shouldn't deceive. He is in charge of an operation worth $20 million a year. He has a $250,000 annual research budget. I start with the most obvious question: Why do people hate biosolids so much?

He thinks it's all about smell. “We're all preprogrammed to be afraid of our own waste.” Cave people who didn't avoid the potentially pathogenic matter that was their own excrement probably got sick and died
out. “Maybe they slipped and fell in it, then they went back into the cave and made a sandwich and they culled themselves from the gene pool. Everyone who was sensitive to the sulphur odors, which is the trigger, avoided it. So you have a population that's extremely sensitive to sulphur odors.” Sulphur has been shown to produce anxiety, he says. “That's exactly what we're producing from biosolids. So we have a hypersensitive population which is here only because they knew how to avoid the fecal-oral cycle. They're getting this smell of sulphur and then when they find out it's human it's even worse.” Women are the most vocal protesters because they are the protective ones. It's primal.

This is a good argument because it is hard to argue with it. Odor can be measured with olfactometry machines—which can bag an odor and then have it smelled by testers—but it's hard to be definitive about a largely subjective reaction. In 2004, the grand jury in Orange County, California, in a report titled “Does Anyone Want Orange County Sanitation District's 230,000 Tons of Biosolids?” noted that biosolids proponents described their product's smell as “musty” or “earthy,” whereas opponents preferred words like “noxious, horrible, putrid, nauseating, eye-watering and sickening.” The jury quoted a list published by the National Academy of Sciences of odorous compounds found in sludge. These included hydrogen sulphide (which smells like rotten eggs); dimethyl sulphide and carbon sulphide (decayed vegetables); thiocresol (skunk-like odor); methylamine, dimethylamine, and trimethylamine (fishy); pyridine (“disagreeable and irritating”). In all fairness, they concluded, “acetaldehyde is reported to smell like apples.” The report writers could “only imagine what odor might emanate from a concoction of these compounds. ‘Musty' or ‘earthy' doesn't come to mind.”