Its Unbelievable but….

Land application of sewage biosolids for crop production as designed by the Ontario Government

For full text and tables see:  http://www.esemag.ca/0901/land.html

I wonder where the reports are or if they even exist to show that complete tests have been conducted on the hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes of sewage sludge spread on Canadian and American farm land each and every year.

Why don’t I feel better when I read this data??? Apples, grapes etc can have sewage sludge spread as recently as 3 months before harvest. OMG.

Did you know that the feed fed to the cows and other hay/ silage fed animals are the very happy recipients of biosolids?? And the pasture land the animals graze on may have toxic biosolids applied 2 months before grazing?

Did you know that the sod from the commercial sod farm which was laid on your lawn which your children and pets have been rolling around on are also treated to biosolid application??? But it isn’t suggested for home lawns and gardens.

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1 Victory in the battle against Sewage Sludge

http://www.montrealgazette.com/cars/Oozing+with+controversy/2079944/story.html

The movement to ban the spreading of cities’ sludge on agricultural lands scored a major victory last week when Superior Court Judge Steve J. Reimnitz ruled the rural municipality of Elgin, 95 kilometres southwest of Montreal, had the right to pass a bylaw banning the transportation, storage and spreading of sludge within its territory.

“Now many other municipalities will pass the same kind of bylaw,” Elgin Mayor Jean-Pierre Proulx said. “I know a lot of them were just waiting for this judgment.”

In his ruling, Reimnitz noted that experts are not in agreement on whether sludge spreading is safe.

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BIOSOLID FACTS AND FIGURES

This post is a work in progress and as I unearth more statistics I will add them to this post.

The maximum depth of a fluid sewage biosolid that can be surface applied at any one time is 1.3 cm. This depth is equivalent to an application rate of 130 m³/ha. from an article by M Payne of Omafra (Ont Govt) Environmental Science & Engineering – www.esemag.com – September 2001

If a single application of fluid biosolids is to be limited to 1.3cm you can see why such vast areas of land are being contaminated. It sure begs the question How precise are these contractors in their application????

Ontario- Ottawa

BIOSOLIDS UTILIZATION PROGRAM STATUS UPDATE From 1997 to 2000, over 53,548 wet tons of biosolids have been successfully land applied to farms in and around the Region of Ottawa-Carleton on over 2,117 hectares of land.

Ontario- Toronto using farms in

These include all agricultural land within an area bounded by Hamilton, Brant, Waterloo, Perth and Bruce on the west, Grey,Simcoe, and Muskoka on the north and Peterborough, Hastings and Prince EdwardCounties on the east. Using the three inventory methods, the following results
were obtained for this area:
♦ Based on Method 1, this land area has the capacity to accept
approximately 17,000 tonnes of dry biosolids per year (17,000 t ds/y);
♦ Based on Method 2, this land area has the capacity to accept
approximately 26,000 t ds/y; and,
♦ Based on Method 3, this land area has the capacity to accept
approximately 133,000 t ds/y.
These figures can be compared to the Toronto biosolids generation rate of 63,000
t ds/y, of which 50,000 t ds/y is currently intended for beneficial reuse such as
agricultural land application as biosolids cake or thermally dried pellets. When application is limited by soil nutrient requirements (Method 1),
phosphorus is the limiting nutrient, and there are 22 Counties or Regions,out of 48 in total for the province, that have no additional capacity for
biosolids once manure application is taken into account.

from Biosolids and Residuals Master Plan City of Toronto 2523 040415 R

Quebec

Whatever you call it, the province’s municipalities produce a lot of it: 914,726 tonnes of sludge was scraped out of 700 water treatment plants in Quebec in 2007, the most recent year for which these statistics are available.

About 42 per cent of the sludge was incinerated and 31 per cent was sent to dumps. But the remaining 27 per cent was “recycled” as fertilizer, mostly on farmland.

That’s 246,976 tonnes, can you picture an area

1000 metres long by 1000 metres wide by 1000 metres deep?

its hard to visualize that much shit & chemical toxins I know.

– if you get in your car and drive 1 kilometer turn at right angles drive another kilometer, turn again at a right angle drive another kilometer back to your starting point and look up in the sky 1 kilometer that’s almost how much toxic sludge was applied to Quebec farms in 2007.

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