Six months after EPA warned about “forever chemicals” tainting sewage sludge, states are resorting to a patchwork of policies as the agency’s path forward on the widely used farmland fertilizer remains unclear.
In the final days of the Biden administration, EPA inched toward regulating the toxic chemicals in sewage sludge, releasing a draft report outlining risks to people living near farms that use the foul-smelling, nutrient-rich material to grow crops.
Now, as the Trump administration weighs options for addressing contamination concerns, states and localities are struggling with how to respond to growing evidence that sludge fertilizer can spread forever chemicals.
“We now have more than a dozen states considering biosolids legislation to deal with this issue, because EPA is not doing anything about it,” said Dean Naujoks, who leads the Potomac Riverkeeper Network in Virginia.
