Their Fertilizer Poisons Farmland. Now, They Want Protection From Lawsuits: A company controlled by Goldman Sachs is helping to lead a lobbying effort by makers of fertilizer linked to “forever chemicals”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/climate/sludge-fertilizer-synagro-lobbying.html

by DoremusJessup

5 comments

  2. “For decades, a company now owned by a Goldman Sachs fund has been making millions of dollars from the unlikely dredges of American life: sewage sludge.

    The company, Synagro, sells farmers treated sludge from factories and homes to use as fertilizer. But that fertilizer, also known as biosolids, can contain harmful “forever chemicals” known as PFAS linked to serious health problems including cancer and birth defects.

    Farmers are starting to find the chemicals contaminating their land, water, crops and livestock.

    Now, Synagro is part of a major effort to lobby Congress to limit the ability of farmers and others to sue to clean up fields polluted by the sludge fertilizer.

    “Sludge-industry lobbyists” argued that they shouldn’t be held liable because the chemicals were already in the sludge.

    A bill introduced by republican Senators John Boozman and Cynthia Lummis would protect sludge companies like Synagro, as well as the wastewater plants that provide the sludge, from lawsuits. Ms. Lummis office has said she will “work with President Trump’s E.P.A.”

    All this protects a business model that “makes Synagro rich while destroying America’s farmland.

  3. Don’t worry Trump’s upcoming head of the EPA Lee Zeldin will give them all the protection they could ever want.

    Don’t forget that Trump loves clean water, [meanwhile](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/02/trump-allies-attack-epa-drinking-water-rules) he doesn’t feel the same way about those pesky EPA rules protecting it.

    How soon before Elon Musk buys up all the available fresh drinkable water, renames it and start charging $27.50 per bottle.

  4. Crazy! I wrote about the spread of PFAS in sewage sediment to fertilizer in an infrastructure class in grad school back in 2021. it’s a nasty cycle of agricultural runoff entering water treatment, settling in sediment, and ending up back in the fertilizer, creating a nasty cycle.

  5. > Mr. Trump’s return to office introduces a new complication: The E.P.A.’s designation of some PFAS as hazardous under the Superfund law could be rolled back. Project 2025 calls for removing the hazardous-substance designation, and a major industry group has challenged the E.P.A.’s move in court.

    > Neither can farmers easily sue the PFAS manufacturers, unless there is evidence that the manufacturer intended for the chemicals to be released onto farmland, Kate R. Bowers, legislative attorney at the Congressional Research Service, testified at a recent hearing.

    >That leaves ranchers like Tony Coleman, one of the plaintiffs in the Texas case against Synagro, in limbo. They have now taken legal action against the E.P.A., saying that it failed to properly regulate PFAS in fertilizer. The agency is pushing to dismiss the lawsuit.

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