As the saying goes, “you can’t avoid death or taxes.” Equally inevitable is the eternal question — whatever happens to your “daily flush”?
Your household wastewater contains chemicals that migrate from laundry detergent, cosmetics, bathroom and cleaning products into your septage, which is pumped into trucks for transport to a wastewater treatment plant or piped through your municipal sewer system. There, raw sewage laden with toxics becomes sludge that contains, among other things, PFAS: a class of chemicals so identified because of their propensity to persist and resist breakdown. They demonstrate a risk to public health that includes increases in cholesterol levels, lower antibody response to some vaccines, changes in liver enzymes, pregnancy-induced hypertension, decrease in birth weight and kidney and testicular cancer.
Treatment plants follow best practices in monitoring lead, mercury, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds but New Hampshire has no current management standards for PFAS. Though regulations exist for toxics from landfills leaching into surrounding soil and groundwater, there are no maximum concentration standards or remediation protocols to protect farmers from PFAS contaminated soil.
PFAS has become a hot button issue since St. Gobain, a plastics manufacturing company using PFAS in production, contaminated Merrimack’s well water. Its legacy in soil is also the tragic result of Maine’s paper mills polluting acres of agricultural land.
New Hampshire makes a herculean effort to address over 1,000 bills each legislative session. The Environment and Agriculture Committee just passed HB 1275, a bill requiring DES to develop concentration-based standards for PFAS in sludge and biosolids at land application sites. It would create a remediation fund to be used for PFAS testing, installing water filtration systems and cleanup efforts in order to assist farmers who have suffered losses or incurred costs resulting from the actual or suspected presence of PFAS in soil, water or agricultural products. More importantly, it would impose a five-year moratorium on the spreading of sludge and biosolids for agricultural use.
Though online testimony gave the bill its full support (276 in favor, 36 against), the committee adopted an amendment destined to eliminate the moratorium. Testimony from environmentalists and farmers in Maine and New Hampshire fully supported the five-year ban in order to prevent further contamination and ensure the state doesn’t repeat past mistakes while long-term, scientifically-based safeguards are developed.
They voiced grave concerns about the future of farms as models of culture and heritage providing biodiversity, habitats for wildlife, refuges for migratory species as well as livelihoods for the agricultural community. Said family farmer, Allison Jumper, ‘PFAS cannot be removed from soil and will contaminate plants, wildlife, surface and groundwater and expose people who are unknowingly in the path of these PFAS contaminated resources. It is irreversible damage to our precious natural resources that we need to protect for future generations’.
Spokespeople from the industry — NH Water Pollution Control Association, Town of Merrimack Wastewater Facility, North Conway Water Precinct, Department of Public Works Wastewater Treatment Division Town of Durham, Northeast Biosolids and Residuals Association, among others — agreed that though PFAS concerns are completely valid, the proposed solution is not. New Hamsphire relies on three established wastewater solids management pathways: land application, landfills and incineration. A five-year moratorium would have significant unintended consequences.
First, land application of biosolids when appropriately managed has a beneficial use of returning nutrients and organic matter (nitrogen, phosphorus, lime) to the soil, supporting its health and reducing disposal pressures on municipalities. Alternative disposal methods cited are more costly, less sustainable and create new environmental burdens of increased landfilling or long-distance hauling. Disposal costs would not only increase for ratepayers but become financially challenging for farmers who would have to rely upon more expensive fertilizers. Overall, believing that HB 1275 has “some very good policy components” eliminating soil application without a viable backup plan was seen as odious and odorous.
As we return to the inevitability of “the daily flush,” a five-year moratorium would, according to industry, make our taxes skyrocket, but if we continue to spread PFAS on soil, we’ll pollute ourselves to death. Believing that both sides fully agree on the problem’s urgency, now is the time to think globally and act locally to solve the PFAS problem. Nashua has recently planned a pilot study for a full scale PFAS destruction system and is soliciting proposals for this study to evaluate a process called foam fractionation to destroy PFAS generated from landfill leachate.
Bipartisanship and biotechnological efforts together look promising.
Ann Podlipny lives in Chester.