Residents of the United States may not realize it, but the biggest threat to the food they eat isn't an occasional outbreak of e-coli or salmonella. It isn't even the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) failure to provide adequate safety controls - a failure exacerbated by Bush administration policies which favor corporations over human welfare. Nor is it food from Mexico or South America.
The greatest danger comes from a perfectly legal and seldom-questioned policy whereby manufacturers recycle hazardous wastes by turning them into fertilizer for farms.
This poison-into-fertilizer gimmick has been going on for quite a while. In July of 1997, The Seattle Times ran an expose on the ways in which U.S. industries and recyclers were pumping their toxic wastes into fertilizer. These wastes included mine tailings (from precious-metal mining, for example), paper and pulp mills, and even fly ash from steel mills and power plants.
Farmers and gardeners who bought the "nutrient enhanced" fertilizer thought they were getting a steal of a deal. What they were getting was toxins like arsenic, cadmium, lead, and even lethal dioxins. Dioxin is 60,000 times more toxic than cyanide, and a dose as small as 50 micrograms can kill.
In 1999, Environmental Working Group (EWG, a nonprofit consumer advocacy agency) revealed that, between 1990 and 1995, more than 600 companies in 44 states sent 270 million pounds of these toxins either directly to farmers to use on their fields, or to fertilizer manufacturers, who used the toxic solids to add volume to their fertilizer bags, driving profits up and the safety of American food into a corner.
Many of these toxic wastes are known to cause cancer, reproductive abnormalities, birth and developmental defects, and illnesses galore. In spite of that, the California Department of Food and Agriculture legalized the practice, under Proposition 65, which was intended to protect Californians from such pollution and instead does precisely the opposite.
Certified, independent testing showed that, in one fertilizer brand alone, all samples exceeded the criteria for listing the contents as a hazardous waste substance. Eighteen percent of all fertilizers tested also showed excessive levels of heavy metals, particularly lead and arsenic, with lead often exceeding safe criteria by a whopping 370 percent.
The road to discovery - that our government permits manufacturers to dump their toxins in our food supply - began with Dennis DeYoung of Quincy, Washington, who in 1985 bought nitrogen fertilizer from a local corporation at an estimated 50 percent savings. The savings were impressive; the results - corn that barely grew and had to be sold as animal feed - were a disaster. DeYoung was put into bankruptcy, but not before the fertilizer company's remediation efforts resulted in the deaths of a number of animals.
The U.S. government argues that such recycling preserves the longevity of landfills. Nothing is said about the longevity of humans, which is seriously reduced by using these toxic, industrial byproducts as fertilizer. In fact, the U.S. government (unlike Canada, the EU and the Scandinavian countries) doesn't even require fertilizer manufacturers to document the safety of their products, or to list its toxic ingredients on the label.
I got on this subject following an e-mail response to an article I wrote on the evils of paper manufacturing. The respondent, who asked not to be named, gave me a heads-up on a waste product being distributed by a northern Wisconsin manufacturer, Rhinelander Paper Company (purchased by Wausau Paper Company in 1980, though area residents still use the name Rhinelander).
It seems my correspondent's brother and several adjacent landowners were solicited by the company to spread the product, described as "fibercake" on northern Wisconsin fields. The company readily admitted the product contained heavy metals like lead, but reassured landowners this was no problem, "since the soil already contains naturally-occurring amounts of lead".
My correspondent and a friend, both of whom have asthma, reported burning sensations in the throat and lungs after the product was applied. Suspecting dioxins (from the use of chlorine to treat pulp), the correspondent examined the fibercake and found what can only be described as white, shredded plastic within the peaty, brown mass of fibercake.
When contacted by phone, a Rhinelander representative admitted that the product had been subjected to a chemical bath of 50-60 chemicals, including chemicals used on the plastic-like substance, which is "wet strength paper" which comes from (or is processed by) the Hercules Company.
Because of possible conflicts of interest - University of Wisconsin studies on fibercake were funded by local paper mills - my correspondent was hesitant about sending a sample to the university for testing, so the true contents of Rhinelander's fibercake remain unknown.
According to the minutes of a meeting held by the Newbold County board, Newbold, Wisconsin, the fibercake project has already impacted the drinking water of Stella residents. Oneida County (WI) officials, who suspect that the fibercake spread on farm fields around the town has contributed to a rise in nitrates in local wells, were present at the meeting but were apparently unable to get Rhinelander representative Tom Emond to disclose all of its ingredients.
According to a 2005 Oneida County Solid Waste report, 4,985 tons of Rhinelander fibercake were received for composting in that year, some of which was used at the time by Mark's Bobcat Service to establish new lawns (pdf). Continually building stockpiles of the fibercake may be leaching into groundwater with potentially hazardous results.
A followup letter to Richard H. Loeppert, a University of Florida soil chemistry expert, asking for assistance in locating an independent testing resource, has gone unanswered. In the meantime, Wisconsin residents - and, indeed, people all over the U.S. - face the prospect of being poisoned by recycling mandates endorsed by their own government which incorporate known toxins in fertilizer.
If you farm, avoid come-ons from industrial or government representatives telling you that you can get cheap fertilizer by participating in their programs or trials. The poisoning of America's food supply must be stopped, and it can only be stopped on a farm-by-farm basis, since the government has made it abundantly clear it will not act in our defense.
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