Part 3 of Grist’s special series on poop.

Laura Allen, a 33-year-old teacher from Oakland, California, has a famous toilet. To be honest, it’s actually a box, covered in decorative ceramic tiles, sitting on the cement floor of her bathroom like a throne. No pipes lead to or from it; instead, a bucket full of shavings from a local wood shop rests on the box next to the seat with a note instructing users to add a scoopful after making their “deposit.” Essentially an indoor outhouse, it’s a composting toilet, a sewerless system that Allen uses to collect her household’s excrement and transform it into a rich brown material known to fans as “humanure.”

Laura Allen’s famous composting toilet.Courtesy Nicolas Boullosa via FlickrAllen is a founding member of an activist group devoted to the end of sewage as we know it. Her toilet recently made an appearance in the Los Angeles Times — which might explain why she didn’t seem surprised when I emailed her out of the blue to ask if I could use it.

Lifting the seat, she showed me a seal of insulating foam tape she’d put around its edges to prevent odors from wafting into the bathroom and then pointed out a funnel-like contraption hanging from the front of the toilet that diverted urine away from crap. The separated waste collected in two containers sitting several feet below the toilet seat, accessible through a hatch cut into the side of the house: the urine flowed into a plastic jug formerly used for olive oil, the feces into a bucket labeled “feta cheese.”  A year from now, once it’s composted, Allen and her roommates will use this excrement to fertilize their fruit trees.

To most Americans, Allen’s system would seem eccentric, if not downright weird. But while feta cheese buckets are relatively new creations, humans have used shit as fertilizer since the dawn of agriculture — the nitrogen in our urine is an excellent fertilizer, and feces, itself nutrient-rich, is a great soil amendment. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that water-based sewer systems became commonplace in the United States; after that, “sewer farms,” where crops were irrigated with untreated wastewater, were commonplace. Even today, the majority of the world’s population doesn’t have access to flush toilets, making us the anomaly, rather than the norm.

As public health advocates will be quick to point out, the switch to sewers helps protects us from sewage borne diseases. But it also breaks the nutrient cycle: instead of returning nutrients to the land from where they came, we now reclassify excrement as waste and use chemical fertilizers to replace it. From an agricultural standpoint, the crazy thing isn’t the idea of using our crap as fertilizer. It’s how far we’ve strayed.

With this in mind, the idea behind our current system would seem to make sense: more than half of America’s sewage sludge is applied to land. But there’s a crucial difference between humanure and modern sludge, known in the sewage industry as “biosolids.” Humanure is made from pure human excrement. It can still contain residues from pharmaceuticals that pass through our bodies, but it lacks the industrial chemicals or other contaminants that make sludge so controversial.

Biosolids, on the other hand, can count as ingredients everything that’s dumped into our sewer system, including a mixture of domestic and industrial waste that can include heavy metals, toxic chemicals, and thousands of other pollutants — and its long-term effects on soil are impossible to predict. The main ingredient of biosolids and humanure — feces — might be the same, but when it comes to their potential to contaminate soil, the two materials are fundamentally different.  

It’s difficult to judge what will ultimately have worse consequences for agriculture and human health: spreading the contaminants in modern sewage sludge on soil or diverting sewage’s nutrients away from land. (Both are bad in different ways.) But one thing is certain: creating pure humanure with our current wastewater treatment system would require segregating our waste streams at their sources, which, thanks to the way our sewers are piped, is impossible to do.

Allen left me alone so that I could experience her bathroom firsthand and then took me outside to see the next step in the process. We walked through a small chicken coop to three 55-gallon barrels full of decomposing feces arranged in a row next to the side of the house, each of which would sit for at least a year in order to compost thoroughly. Covered with netting to prevent flies and plastic lids to keep out rain, they didn’t smell.

Laura Allen with a bucket of humanure in her garden at her house in Oakland, Calif.Courtesy Nicolas Boullosa via FlickrBut then Allen reached for a compost auger — a corkscrew-like device with a hand crank that breaks apart the composting material and adds oxygen — and worked it into the compost. The air filled with the strong, unpleasant odor of methane, a byproduct of anaerobic composting. 

“It must have gotten some water into it, that’s why it smells so bad,” Allen said, pulling up the auger and revealing some confused-looking earthworms. She examined the moist brown material clinging to the corkscrew.  “This one’s probably about seven months old.”

Allen and her roommates’ devotion to their toilet is unusual, but they’re far from alone — a small but growing number of Americans is unhooking from septic tanks and sewer systems (or, in some cases, never hooking in) and composting their waste. If you want to get a sense of how excited people can get about the results, check out the website of a man named Joseph Jenkins. A slate-roofing contractor in Pennsylvania who’s been shitting in a bucket since the 1970s, Jenkins and his followers dream of a day where entire cities might compost their excrement, with municipal collection services similar to today’s recycling programs.

To help jumpstart the revolution, Jenkins self-published a guide in 2005 called The Humanure Handbook that features chapter with titles like “Crap Happens” and an illustrated character named “Tommy the Turd.” For his first run, Jenkins could only afford to print 600 copies; he’s now sold more than 33,000, and portions of the handbook have been translated into Spanish, Norweigan, Korean, Hebrew, Mongolian and Chinese.

The challenge these simple systems face, however, is that most Americans don’t like the idea of homemade toilets. We don’t like thinking about our shit, period. So a middle ground has emerged: commercially designed toilets that look what you’re used to, but have composting systems built in.

The BioLet, originally a Swedish design, includes a heater to speed decomposition and aerates its contents with mechanized arms. The Sun-Mar has a built-in crank and a removable tray that catches finished material.  The Ecotech, the American version of a design by a Norweigan company called Vera Miljö, uses a carousel system — sort of like a lazy Susan — to keep batches separate so that new waste doesn’t mix with old. Biolytix, an Australian wastewater treatment system designed to fit into a conventional septic tank, comes pre-seeded with an ecosystem of worms, beetles and microorganisms that filter and break down waste.

Bio-Sun, Envirolet, Aquatron, Equaris, Phoenix — like “biosolids,” they all manage to sound vaguely green while avoiding any allusions to the substance they’re meant to treat. Talk to people who have owned them, though, and there’s no getting around that what you’re dealing with is shit. With a typical toilet, all you need to do is flush; with a composting toilet, everything you produce stays right where you left it — and some of these commercial designs, while tempting, aren’t big enough to handle daily use. (Horror stories abound.)

Joseph Jenkins sells his book online, and he has posted a series of instructional videos about humanure on his YouTube channel (watch one below).Courtesy Jenkins PublishingSuccessful composting, while not rocket science, requires attention, devotion and considerable knowledge of the process; far from being an informational brochure, The Humanure Handbook, is 255 pages long. The environmentalist in me wanted to embrace the idea behind Allen’s toilet — really, I did — but when it came to dealing with my own excrement, I was like most Americans: the only time I wanted to look back in the bathroom was to flush.

To find out if there were any way to create a composting toilet that wouldn’t make an average American recoil in disgust, I traveled to Bainbridge Island, a 35-minute ferry ride from Seattle. My destination was IslandWood, an outdoor learning center tucked into 255 wooded acres of a former tree farm that’s home to one of the country’s only large-scale composting toilets. Known as the Clivus Multrum M-15, this particular system can handle up to 36,000 uses per year.

When I reached IslandWood, I was welcomed by Brian Bonifaci, the man responsible for maintaining the Clivus system. Dressed in Carhartt clothing from top to bottom, Bonifaci led me to the basement room where the compost was collected in two large, gray boxes. With sloping floors designed to make it easier to remove finished material, each bin was nearly 10 feet long and over seven feet high, with thick black pipes connecting them to four toilets sitting directly above.

After showing me a trap door where finished compost could be removed, Bonifaci opened a hatch on the upper part of the box so that I could see what was inside: a giant mound of feces, toilet paper, and wood chips. It was level except for an upside down cone that had formed where the most recent deposits had dropped. But even though my face was practically in the box, I couldn’t smell its contents — an exhaust fan was constantly pulling fresh air into the bin and out a vent on the roof so that no odors could leak into the room where I was standing. (The same fan also pulled air down the toilet so the smell couldn’t escape upwards into the bathroom.)

“What do you need to do to maintain this?” I asked Bonifaci.

“I add a bucket of wood chips once a week and rake down the cone when it gets too high,” he said. “That’s about it.”

He explained that the fan helped aerate the pile, eliminating the need to turn the compost, and an automatic moistening system added just enough water to keep the material from getting too dry. Eventually, Bonifaci told me, they’d have to remove some of the compost from the bottom of the pile, but so far they hadn’t had to, despite the fact that they’d installed the toilet in 2002 — composting dramatically reduces the volume of waste.

But then again, IslandWood’s facilities weren’t exactly getting their maximum 36,000 uses per year — Bonifaci told me that some campers, fearful about the toilets’ gaping black holes, simply held it till they got to a different building.  So I called Don Mills, the sales director for Clivus Multrum, to find out more about what these systems’ capacities really were.

A metal composting bin that is part of the Clivus Multrum at IslandWood.Catherine PriceMills, who refuses to use the word “biosolid” unless he can add in a “so-called” before it, has strong opinions on the current way America deals with sewage.

“I’m calling that shit ‘sludge’ until I die,” he announced when I used the word “biosolids” without his preferred modifier. “And I might die from it!”

He then launched into a tirade against land application. But when the subject switched to composting toilets, Mills became cautiously optimistic.

“Look,” he said. “Selling composting toilets is an uphill struggle, partially because of the psychology around shit and also because of regulations.”

But once you sell people on the idea, said Mills, “there’s no capacity limitation with this technology. We can build it for as many people as would need to use any toilet, any place.” If a bathroom is meant to serve more people than a single Clivus Multrum system can handle, you just add more bins or toilets. Clivus Multrum has a system installed at the Bronx Zoo, for example, that’s designed for over 500,000 uses a year.

Mills explained that there are ways to make composting toilets less offensive — Clivus Multrum already has models that use a small amount of foam to “flush” the excrement to a hidden holding tank, which means the toilets don’t have to sit directly over the composting bins and users don’t have to look down onto a giant mound of shit. Less hands-on customers than Bonifaci can also contract Clivus Multrum to maintain the toilets for them. 

“If this were something that were supported by the government,” Mills said, “if the compost toilet was made a requirement, then many things would change.” Toilets would be designed to be even more palatable to non-environmentalists, he said, and large-scale municipal collection systems would evolve to get the compost out of the toilets and onto fields.

Mill is not entirely optimistic — like me, he doubts that composting toilets will become mainstream in America any time soon. Manhattan’s skyscrapers weren’t built with humanure in mind, and as he himself admits, “the dry toilet at IslandWood is not something most homeowners would regard as satisfactory in their dream house.”

But there are plenty of places in the world not yet hooked up to sewer systems — in fact, an estimated 2.6 billion people don’t even have access to toilets. Just as many developing countries adopted cell phones without ever having built the infrastructure for landline phones, poor communities could skip sewer systems and develop an integrated system of composting toilets instead.

In India, where 18 percent of the population lacks toilets, a man named Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, is helping people do just that: he’s developed a line of composting toilets that earned him the prestigious 2009 Stockholm Water Prize. According to the Stockholm Water Institute, the Sulabh Shauchalaya twin pit, pour-flush toilet is being used in more than 1.2 million residences and buildings in India, and its public facilities — spread across 7500 locations — are getting more than 10 million uses per day.

America’s a tougher market. But if composting toilets were inoffensive to use, if someone else were responsible for dealing with the compost — just as right now someone else is responsible for treating our watered-down waste — it’s possible to imagine new buildings and communities that incorporate at least some of the recycling schemes of which the humanurists dream. We probably will never eliminate American sludge entirely, but if we were able to divert even a small portion of our excrement away from the sewer system, treat it for pathogens and turn it into compost, we’d be reducing the amount left to deal with. The best solution for the future, it seems, just might be a modernized version of the past.

Back at IslandWood, I asked Bonifaci if I could try out the facilities, and soon found myself alone in the restroom. Thanks to the fan sucking air into the toilet, the only noticeable odor was a faint aura of lemongrass cleaning products and the lingering scent of lavender soap. Since the Clivus Multrum doesn’t divert urine, when I sat down, I didn’t have to aim. The biggest tangible difference between it and a conventional toilet was the breeze — which, if you’re not expecting it, can be a little surprising. But there was no odor, no wood chips, no worry that in a week or two or three, I’d be responsible for handling the waste I’d just produced.

The experience was remarkably unremarkable. It required so little thought that when I got up, I didn’t even need to turn back to flush.

–

A video on humanure composting from Joseph Jenkins’ YouTube channel:

Correction: The story was updated on May 13, 2009, to correct the description of the Envirolet toilet system. The description in the original post actually referred to the Ecotech system.

Part 2 of Grist’s special series on poop.

“We’re trying to get the pieces bigger — ideally the size of pencil erasers,” said John “Rus” Miller, handing me a plastic packet of a brown, dry, crumbly material with the texture of couscous and the odor of manure. That’s because it was manure — in the form of dried sewage sludge. To me, it looked and smelled like shit. But when Miller looked at the pellets, he saw coal.

I was visiting a company named Enertech‘s plant in Rialto, California, because I was searching for alternatives for what we currently do with sludge — the dark brown, complex material that’s left over after wastewater is treated. Referred to as “biosolids” by the sewage industry, more than half of America’s sludge is applied to land as a soil amendment or fertilizer. However, since sludge also contains thousands of chemicals, pharmaceuticals residues, and other toxic materials that get dumped into our sewers, many call this more of a problem than a solution.

But what if we could use sludge as energy? In addition to undigested food, it contains woody material from toilet paper and billions of microorganisms from our digestive tracts and the plants where sludge is treated, all of which contain carbon. Sewage treatment plants have captured methane from their sludge for years, which can either be sold or used to run the plant — but those systems only partially reduce the volume of the sludge that’s left over. So far there’s no widespread method to create energy and get rid of the sludge at the same time.

You’d think this wouldn’t be the case. Back in 1873, before most American cities had sewer systems to begin with, Scientific American commented that “(i)t is no exaggeration that the problem of the conversion of the excremental waste of towns and people and the refuse of factories into useful materials is now engaging as much of the attention of intelligent minds throughout the world as any social question.”

Other social questions trumped sewage, though, and it’s only been recently that the cost and controversy of our current methods has inspired a new generation of intelligent minds to look for alternative solutions. Some of these, while exciting, are still embryonic, like fuel cells that use sewage-eating microbes to produce electricity, closed-loop incinerators that run off of sludge and waste oils, biofuel made from sewage-fed algae, or methods that gasify sludge into liquid fuel. But a handful of promising alternatives are already in use. One of them is SlurryCarb^TM.

Enertech’s plant in Rialto, California, is producing a biofuel from processed sludge.Courtesy EnertechThe theory behind SlurryCarb is not particulary complicated: take sludge, dry it into pellets, then burn it as a carbon-neutral replacement for coal. And in fact, when I first saw Enertech’s Rialto Plant, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Flanked by a sewage treatment facility and a cement manufacturer, it blends in perfectly with its industrial surroundings. Large silos of sludge feed into an outdoor network of metal pipes; eventually, the sludge goes through a centrifuge and heat dryer and comes out as pellets on the other end.

But while the idea of burning sludge is simple, there’s a big problem: when it arrives from the wastewater treatment plant, sludge is really, really wet. Treated sludge looks like clumpy dirt but it’s actually 70 to 85 percent water, much of which has to be removed before the sludge will burn. Adding to the challenge, a lot of the liquid in sludge is locked within its cell walls. Releasing that trapped liquid takes so much energy that although plants have been pelletizing sludge for years (usually to use as fertilizer), there’s a net energy loss.

That’s where Enertech is different. Unlike a traditional heat-drying plant that uses evaporation to get rid of water — which requires a lot of energy — Enertech pressurizes its sludge so that it never boils. Then it uses controlled heat to break down the sludge’s cell walls and force them to release their water. Enertech’s overall process uses less than half as much natural gas as a traditional drying plant and produces what the company claims is a net energy gain of approximately 95 percent. Granted, that gain doesn’t take into account the energy the wastewater treatment plant used to dewater the sludge before it got to Enertech. But the system works well for Enertech’s balance sheets: not only do the treatment plants take care of some of the drying beforehand, but they have to pay Enertech a tipping fee for every ton of sludge that it accepts.

At full capacity, Enertech hopes that its Rialto plant will produce 200 dry tons of SlurryCarb per day, which prompts the obvious question of what they’re going to do with it — in most markets, dried shit doesn’t go for much. Luckily for Enertech, the answer is right next door:  cement plants. Making cement produces a lot of carbon dioxide, and most cement plants run on coal — and ever tightening regulations make cement plants eager to find substitutes for the coal in their kilns. SlurryCarb, which is cheaper and has about half of the BTUs of bituminous coal, is exactly that. (It’s also a hell of a lot easier to extract.)  Even better, sludge’s leftover ash contains silica, another ingredient in cement, and can be incorporated directly into the cement mixture. Cement plants therefore don’t just reduce the volume of the sludge by burning SlurryCarb — they make it disappear.

So far, Enertech has contracts with two cement companies in Southern California, and is in talks with five more. Its technique has also attracted foreign attention: the Masdar Clean Tech Fund is considering hiring Enertech to handle the biosolids produced by Masdar, a planned development in Abu Dhabi for 50,000 people that aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral city. Back home, Miller says he’s spoken with sewage agencies in most of America’s major cities, who are watching the Rialto plant with interest. If it’s a success, Enertech hopes the SlurryCarb process might become a common way for sewage treatment plants to dispose of sludge.

“But what if you eventually produce so much that the SlurryCarb gets used in places besides cement plants?” I asked Miller when he explained that SlurryCarb could be used in other industries as a substitute for low-grade coal. “What would you do with all the ash?”

“That,” he said, “would require some pretty creative thinking.”

Which brings me to a different plastic bag. This one’s black, tucked into a shelf in my living room, and contains a collection of sewage-related products that I’ve picked up in the course of my reporting. Most can be clearly traced back to sludge — a sample of SlurryCarb-like pellets from a different plant, for example, or a pouch of compost made from sludge and wood chips in an enormous building that used to be an Ikea warehouse. But one of my sewage souvenirs looks like it doesn’t belong: a jar, about the size of a pill bottle, containing tiny black chips the size and shape of a crumbled Oreo cookie. They don’t look or smell like they came from sludge — in fact, they don’t have a smell at all. The chips are glass aggregate, the sparkly material commonly seen on roofing shingles.

Minergy subjects sludge to extremely high temperatures to produce a glass aggregate used in a variety of construction materials.Barb ScheiberThe glass came from a company named Minergy, whose technology is currently being used in a plant at the North Shore Sanitary District in Illinois that won a 2008 Global Grand Project Innovation Award from the International Water Association. Instead of selling dried sludge as fuel, Minergy’s technology uses it as energy for its own process: it combusts pre-dried sludge to create temperatures so high — roughly 2400 to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit — that the minerals that would usually be left over as ash melt into molten glass. When this hot liquid is put into cold water, it shatters, creating the tiny black chips in my jar. It’s as if the sludge consumed itself, avoiding the problem of residual ash by never making it to begin with. The resulting aggregate can be used in shingles, asphalt, concrete, ceramic tiles, sandblasting grit, and a variety of other construction materials.

It’s exciting stuff, but the North Shore Sanitary District has run into a very mundane problem: human hair. Flushed down shower drains, incorporated into sludge, hair (and other similarly stringy objects) clogged NSSD’s machinery, which has been temporarily shut down as its operators work on a solution.

That’s the thing about sludge, though — it has tremendous potential for reuse, but a lot of dirty details.  To find out how the various technologies stack up, I called James Smith, a senior environmental engineer who’s been at EPA for more than 40 years and has played an important role in shaping biosolids regulations. He said that the “world is watching the outcome of the SlurryCarb start-up,” and he was especially positive about a technology called the Cannibal process, which can reduce the volume of sludge produced by up to 80 percent, partially by getting different types of microbes in the sludge to eat each other. But as for the bigger question of the future of sludge?

“It depends on whose Ouija board you have,” Smith said. “I think what we’re all hoping for is [a process that leaves] very few residuals to deal with, and for whatever we do have to deal with to be the highest quality possible.”

Unfortunately, regardless of which processes emerge, all these alchemies are likely to come with a catch. The solids in wastewater are so diluted that they need to be dried before their energy is recovered, which requires a lot of energy itself. Even worse, while these technologies might prevent toxic chemicals from seeping into farmland, they also prevent nutrients from returning to the soil — a deficit that brings increased use of synthetic fertilizers and their accompanying host of problems. An ideal solution would do one without the other, nourishing the dirt without contaminating it. But until we figure out how to better segregate our waste streams, even the best new techniques will still suffer from this critical, unavoidable flaw.

Tomorrow: In the future, we’ll all haul our own shit.

Part 1: Sludge, farmer’s friend or toxic slime?

Should what we put down our sewers ultimately wind up back on our plates?Marc Samsom via Flickr

Urine, feces, menstrual blood, hair, fingernails, vomit, dead skin cells. Industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, soaps, shampoos, solvents, pesticides, household cleansers, hospital waste.

Sewage sludge, the viscous brown gunk left over when wastewater is treated, is more than just poop: it’s an odiferous smoothie of everything we pour down the drain. There are pathogens; there are heavy metals. PCBs, dioxins, DDT, asbestos, polio, parasitic worms, radioactive material — all have been found in sludge. Despite pretreatment programs that prevent some of the most noxious stuff from entering the public sewers, sludge can include so many toxins that the Clean Water Act lists it as a “pollutant.”  

So it’s a little surprising where it ends up: Today more than half of America’s sewage sludge is spread on land as fertilizer.

Granted, this isn’t a new idea. For most of human history, our crap has ended up back on land — and it wasn’t until the past century, which brought flush toilets and public sewers to mainstream America, that using excrement as fertilizer started sounding at all strange. Sure, this system was driven partially by convenience, but it also made ecological sense: our urine and feces contain the same nutrients that plants need. Spreading it on land closes the nutrient loop; it avoids the need for chemical fertilizers. Eat, shit, fertilize, and eat again. For thousands of years, this arrangement worked just fine.

Or, rather, almost fine. As human populations grew and concentrated, health problems like cholera outbreaks inspired a push for flush toilets and public sewer systems. This led to huge improvements in public health, but resulted in a new problem: sewers mixed domestic sewage with industrial waste and spewed it untreated into rivers and lakes. The next step was sewage treatment plants, which separated liquids from solids, but in solving one issue they created yet another: the cleaner they made the water, the dirtier the leftover sludge. Adding to the challenge, as the population of the United States grew, so did the amount of sludge: we’re currently generating more than 7 million dry tons a year and counting — and we have no intention of cutting back.

Meanwhile, as a mycelium of sewer pipes spreads underneath our cities to whisk our waste away from us, Americans became increasingly squeamish about dealing with excrement. We’re now a nation of “fecaphobes,” obsessed with toilet humor but unaware and uninterested in what happens to our actual crap. We don’t want to think about it; we don’t want to deal with it. We want to flush the toilet and forget.

**

Sludge from Los Angeles is dumped at Green Acres, a Los Angeles-owned farm in Kern County, California.Courtesy Bakersfield CalifornianThe Office of Water doesn’t have the privilege of forgetting about sludge — it’s the Environmental Protection Agency department responsible for dealing with America’s sewage. In the 1990s its job got even harder: sewers and wastewater treatment facilities mandated by the 1972 Clean Water Act more than doubled the amount of sludge America produced each year, and the 1988 Ocean Dumping Act eliminated the option of getting rid of it at sea. The OW had been encouraging land application on a limited scale since the 1970s.  Now, faced with limited options and a never-ending supply, it evaluated its remaining possibilities — landfilling, incineration, or land application — and settled on the cheapest option available: promoting sludge as fertilizer.

To make this palatable to the American people — or, at least, to prevent them from thinking about it too hard — the word “sludge” had to go. So the sewage industry’s main trade and lobbying organization, the Water Environment Federation, stepped in. (WEF and OW often work closely together.) It organized a “Name Change Taskforce” and sponsored a contest to come up with a different term for sludge. Rebranding was an area in which WEF had experience — originally founded in 1928 as the brown-sounding “Federation of Sewage Works Associations,” it had recently gone through its fourth name change, and had begun referring to its members, who included sewage plant operators and waste management corporations, as “water quality professionals.”

The renaming contest received over 250 entries, many of which suggested that even water quality professionals still enjoy a good poop joke. Submissions included “bioslurp,” “black gold,” “sca-doo,” “hu-doo,” “geoslime,” and “the end product”; one person proposed rebranding sludge as “R.O.S.E.” (“Recycling Of Solids Environmentally”). Critics asked whether a rose by any other name would still smell as bad, and in 1991 WEF settled on “biosolids,” a term that Sheldon Rampton, co-author of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, suggests “must have been chosen precisely because it evokes absolutely nothing in the minds of people who hear it.”

Of course, from the wastewater treatment industry’s perspective, that was the point: they didn’t want any visuals. Armed with an empty word, their next goal was to make “biosolid” suggest something positive. So in 1992, OW and WEF joined in a “cooperative agreement” called the Biosolids National Public Acceptance Campaign and hired a public relations and lobbying firm called Powell Tate to produce a report on how to improve the public image of sludge.

The resulting campaign — “Biosolids 2000″ — didn’t answer important questions, like why people living near biosolids application sites complained of health problems, or why current federal legislation still permits every business, institution and industry in the country to dump 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of untreated hazardous waste into the sewer system each month, no reporting required. It also failed to prevent 2000 and 2002 reports from EPA’s own Office of Inspector General from stating that “EPA cannot assure the public that current land application practices are protective of human health and the environment.”

And yet partially because of OW and WEF’s PR efforts, partially because of our willful ignorance, the effort to rebrand sludge as biosolids has largely been successful. Although some is still incinerated or buried in landfills, today more than 50 percent of America’s sewage sludge is spread on land.

***

Biosolid digesters at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in Los Angeles.Courtesy Brian RaimondiDiane Gilbert, a spokesperson for biosolids at the Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant in Los Angeles, is a water quality professional of the sort endorsed by the Powell Tate report. Her enthusiasm seems genuine, but like other biosolids spokespeople I interviewed, she is also a master at following the guidelines articulated in biosolids media training guides. [Sample tip: "If the reporter asks rapid fire (multiple questions), choose the easiest."]

Enthusiastic and bubbly, Gilbert grew up in Louisiana and has been at Hyperion since 1987. But Gilbert’s involvement with sewage sludge started even earlier; with a father who worked at a wastewater treatment plant and used sludge to fertilize the family’s garden, she considers herself a poster child for land application. “I’ve been eating food fertilized with biosolids for as long as I can remember,” she told me, after I’d returned from a tour of the plant. (Tip: “Encourage the reporter to meet you at a working location.”) “So if anyone should be affected by biosolids, it should clearly be me.”

I’d come to Hyperion because I wanted to learn more about this mysterious brown substance — how it was made, how it was monitored, and how worried we should be. Eager to dispel my concerns about land application, Gilbert had originally wanted to take me to Green Acres, the 5,000-acre city-owned farm just outside of Bakersfield, where Los Angeles ships most of its treated sludge to grow various grass crops to be fed to dairy cows. (Tip: “Location visuals help enhance and give credibility to your message.”)

Unfortunately, lawyers got in the way. Green Acres is in Kern County, and residents there don’t like the idea of being the recipients of Los Angeles’ crap. So, like an increasing number of communities across America, Kern County passed a ban on the land application of sewage sludge. Los Angeles responded by suing the county, and since the lawsuit is still pending, lawyers have gotten cagey about letting reporters visit the farm.

Instead Gilbert and I grabbed sandwiches and headed for a darkened conference room at Hyperion, where Gilbert popped in a promotional movie about Green Acres. With a synthesized soundtrack reminiscent of the theme song for Doogie Howser, M.D., the movie opened with a picture of a field of wheat, its title superimposed in yellow bubbly script.

“Imagine turning arid soil that can only grow tumbleweeds and sage brush into nutrient-rich soil that can grow crops for livestock,” said a male narrator, blessed with the voice of a 1950s public service announcer. “Imagine doing this without saturating the soil with chemicals.”

He continued, smoothly substituting euphemisms for That Which Must Not Be Named: “Now imagine tons of treated primarily organic material from wastewater treatment plants being used to change the soil through its own nitrogen, phosphate, phosphorous and other natural ingredients.”

The movie was titled, appropriately enough, “Imagine.” But instead of being a paean for peace, it invited me to imagine a world in which all of our “beneficial,” “nutrient-rich” biosolids were put to use as fertilizer — and followed a script that could have come directly from the Powell Tate report. I took a bite of my sandwich as the narrator dispelled concerns about using sewage sludge as a soil amendment. “There will always be skeptics who question the use of biosolids,” he announced, “just like there were skeptics who didn’t believe that people could fly — until the Wright Brothers proved them wrong.”

***

Among many others, these skeptics include two unrelated Georgia dairy farmers, Andy McElmurray and Bill Boyce. Starting in 1979 and 1986 respectively, both began using free sludge as fertilizer on their farms, a practice the city of Augusta assured them was safe. But starting in the 1990s, problems arose: hundreds of the men’s cows died, McElmurray discovered his land was contaminated with aluminum, which he attributed to the sludge, and a 1999 test found that milk from some of Boyce’s surviving cows contained thallium — an element once used as rat poison — at 120 times the concentration EPA allows in drinking water.

Both farmers filed lawsuits against the city and in March 2008, U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo issued a 45-page ruling on one of McElmurray’s lawsuits that found that “senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of the EPA’s biosolids program.”

And that’s just the cows. Today, 16 years after the official federal sludge rules came into effect in 1993, EPA still doesn’t have a system in place to monitor or investigate sludge-related health complaints. But in 2002, a team of researchers produced the first peer-reviewed article (whose findings were recently backed up in a separate study) to both document health complaints from people who’d been exposed to sludge and explain how this exposure might have made them sick.

The long list of health problems reported by the study’s 48 participants includes asthma, fevers, nausea, vomiting, skin rashes, coughs, burning eyes and throats, sinusitis, and diarrhea. Two subjects died from Staphylococcus aureus infections acquired shortly after being exposed to freshly applied biosolids. (Interestingly, while EPA’s Office of Water — the department responsible for writing the sludge rules — denies that these deaths were at all connected to biosolids exposure, EPA’s office of Research and Development approved the paper for publication and supported its conclusions.) When the researchers compared their subjects’ rate of staph infections to that of hospital patients, considered “a recognized risk group for S. Aureus,” the infection rate of the study’s subjects was approximately 25 times higher.

According to EPA paperwork, the lead author of this study, David Lewis, Ph.D., resigned from EPA in 2003.  Lewis, however, says he was essentially fired for speaking out on sludge — and his former lab director backs him up. She wrote in a 2008 statement that Lewis’s termination was “involuntary” and that Lewis “was an excellent researcher and an asset to EPA science.”

Motivated by stories like these, several passionate groups — like Citizens for Sludge-Free Land, Sludge Victims and Riles (Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems) — have dedicated themselves to fighting the land application of sludge. They run websites; they lobby politicians to try to change the rules. But as for the rest of Americans, the subject of sludge is still not something we dwell on.

Unfortunately, as arguments and lawsuits against land application pile up — not to mention the sludge itself — our days of blissful ignorance might be limited. I’d come to Hyperion not just because it had occurred to me that we should be thinking about what happens to our sewage, but because I could see a day in the not-so-distant future when we’d be forced to.

Given the inconsistency and toxicity of the ingredients in sludge, the loopholes in its regulations and the mounting criticisms against its use, I kept reaching the same conclusion: despite the Office of Water’s insistence on the safety of spreading sludge on land, we should be looking for alternatives. The United States will never stop producing shit. But there must be a better way to deal with it.

Tomorrow: Businesses try to figure out how to turn poop into gold.

It’s not light reading, so here are the basics: The most recent version of the 503 rule regulates seven heavy metals in sludge. It also divides biosolids into two categories for land application, Class A and Class B, based on the number of detectable pathogens that they’re allowed to contain.

For biosolids to qualify as Class A, they have to be treated with a method that’s been shown to “persistently reduce pathogens in biosolids,” according to USDA agronomist Rufus Chaney, like composting or heat drying. The resulting material must contain non-detectable levels of fecal coliform or salmonella, enteric viruses and helminth ova (i.e. parasitic worms) according to EPA-specified testing methods. 

Class B biosolids must also be treated to reduce pathogens, but the only pathogen reduction requirement is for fecal coliform.

To prove they qualify as Class A or Class B, biosolids can either be tested directly for pathogens, or the sewage plants can demonstrate that they’ve used a treatment process which has been proven to achieve the required level of reduction.

Class A biosolids — which can be created through methods like heat drying and composting — can be used on most land without any restrictions (hence Milorganite); Class B biosolids have regulations about where and how they can be used, including waiting periods before crops can be harvested for human consumption.

EPA doesn’t have any testing requirements for other potential contaminants like synthetic chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, pharmaceuticals, pathogens or metals not listed in the 503 guidelines, or radioactive material (which can be excreted in the urine and feces of people going through radiation therapy). 

Chaney, a senior researcher at the Agricultural Research Service who is supportive of land application, claims that there’s no need to test for additional substances because “biosolids have not been found to contain levels of these materials which cause risk to humans or the environment.” He also commented in a separate message that “there has been no evidence of infection from Class B biosolids used according to EPA regulations, and certainly none from Class A biosolids products” — a statement that anti-sludge advocates criticize. As Caroline Snyder, founder of Citizens for Sludge Free Land, put it to me in an email, “Since EPA and Chaney and the rest have bent over backwards NOT to document adverse effects, have worked to COVER up adverse effects, [and] used fraudulent data in these cover-ups, it is not surprising that there is little documented evidence.”