It’s been just over a year since Ryan Dunham heard his kids start screaming from different showers in the house.
“The next thing I know,” Dunham said, “I come upstairs and the water's brown.”
Dunham and his family get their water from a well, which they test regularly. They’ve been living in their New Scotland home for more than two decades, and Dunham said they never had any serious problems — until the farm across the road began applying sewage sludge onto their fields for fertilizer.
Living in a rural swath of the Capital Region, the family is used to farms and the smell of cow manure. But the scent of sludge — sewage collected from homes and factories — was different.
“It smelled like rot and death, and it was disgusting,” said Dunham, a high school history and social studies teacher.
For decades, state and federal officials have actively encouraged the use of sewage sludge — marketed as biosolids by waste companies — as a cost-effective fertilizer alternative. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, describes the product as “nutrient-rich organic materials,” and wants to more than double its recycling rate for biosolids.
But a growing number of residents and researchers are questioning that directive.
With just days until New York’s legislative session wraps up, lawmakers in Albany are considering a bill that would pause the use of sewage sludge on farmland for five years.
“Our farmland should not be a dumping ground for our waste,” said Assemblymember Anna Kelles, a Democrat who represents Cortland and Tompkins counties.
Kelles, who received a doctorate in nutritional epidemiology, is co-sponsoring the bill with state Sen. Pete Harckham, a Democrat who represents parts of Westchester and the Hudson Valley.
They point to research that finds sewage sludge can contain concerning concentrations of heavy metals, chemicals and pathogens, thereby potentially ruining farmland and exposing humans to health risks.
The bill originally included a measure to also have the state conduct a study about how sewage sludge has impacted New York’s lands, and establish a fund to support farmers if their lands have been harmed. But lawmakers say they will consider those provisions in separate legislation.
“This is not a straight-out ban,” Kelles said. “This is saying, ‘Okay, we need to understand how bad things are, and when we identify that, we need to start intervening.’”
A spokesperson from the DEC wrote that the department “will continue to work with municipalities across the state to ensure clean water and the protection of public health.”
Localities and states have already implemented biosolids bans
According to the DEC, about 13,000 tons of sewage sludge are applied on land in New York each year, and biosolids are applied on about 30,000 acres of farmland.
The statewide moratorium, if passed, would follow the lead of localities that have already implemented their own pauses, including Albany County, where Dunham lives, and Schoharie County. Steuben County's county legislature, along with the town of Bethlehem, both support a five-year statewide moratorium.
Maine became the first state in the country to do so after tests found traces of PFAS in soil where sludge was applied — and were connected to tainted dairy milk. Kelles said concentrations of PFAS — man-made “forever chemicals” that don’t break down easily — from the affected farms in Maine were particularly concerning.
“There were some farms where the accumulation was so high that those farms were shuttered permanently,” Kelles said.
Dunham got his water tested immediately through the Department of Health. The results found concerning levels of E. coli and coliform, above what is safe and recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency.
He and his family drank bottled water and showered at his other family member’s homes for weeks. They now rent a reverse osmosis tank to filter the water.
Other residents in the Capital region have joined Dunham in sharing concerns about biosolids, which they say could have led to the contamination of the Vly Creek Reservoir.
Dunham’s frustration only grew when he learned that the state has greenlit permits for biosolids with waste coming from as far as Quincy, Mass., to be applied on New York land. Meanwhile, waste management companies such as Casella and Denali have permits to spread sludge in towns across the state.
“I’m still worried about my 11-year-old,” he said. “She’s in the shower singing Taylor Swift, and all I can think about is, ‘What water is she ingesting in her body, and how many forever chemicals are in there?”
“Hundreds and thousands of persistent chemicals”
Murray McBride, a professor emeritus in environmental sciences at Cornell University, said current sewage treatment plants don’t have the capacity to filter out toxic chemicals, heavy metals and pathogens from the waste.
“We have a sewer system that pretty much admits just about anything (that) gets thrown in there,” said McBride, who has studied the effects of sewage sludge for decades. “We’re talking about hundreds and thousands of persistent chemicals.”
McBride and other researchers, including from the Environmental Protection Agency, are particularly concerned that PFAS chemicals have appeared in sewage sludge at relatively high levels.
“Some of these are taken up by crops,” McBride said. “Some of them are bio-accumulative in livestock and dairy cows, and therefore in milk. And so we have a pathway now of exposure of humans to toxic chemicals from the soil to livestock, to humans.”
The negative health effects are far-ranging. Residue from pharmaceutical drugs could lead to interruptions in reproductive cycles, while heavy metals could lead to toxic poisoning. PFAS chemicals are carcinogenic.
And the EPA warned in January that the compounds could cause kidney, prostate and testicular cancer, along with damage to the immune system and childhood growth.
Kelles said the DEC’s recommendation to increase the production and application of biosolids puts New York’s farmlands in jeopardy.
“It would be the equivalent of me saying to a person who is malnourished, ‘Here is this protein shake that will provide micronutrients. It’s got some arsenic in it. But don't worry about that now. We'll figure that out later,’” she said.
Kelles said the five-year moratorium could also give the state time to set a cap for the amount of PFAS that would be accepted on farmland.
Currently, no standard exists.
Bill is ‘terrible ... on so many levels’
But some towns worry that a pause would carry financial ramifications. Waste has to go somewhere, and for towns, that means either recycling waste into biosolids or sending them to costly landfills.
“It’s terrible on so many levels,” said Rick Kenealy, the chief plant operator for the Town of Webster’s waste treatment system. “I think they’re jumping in too deep to say we’re just going to cut it off while we study.”
With a $20 million boost from the state, Webster is aiming to revamp its water treatment plant by 2026 in order to produce biosolids to New York’s current standards. Even turning waste into biosolids — which weigh less than unprocessed waste — and then sending them to landfills are more cost effective, some municipalities argue.
Kenealy argued that while it’s important for localities to have reliable sewage filtration practices, he said it’s more imperative for the state to set regulations on factories that put out industrial waste.
“To put regulations on us – it's counterproductive to me,” Kenealy said. “So go after the ones that are putting this stuff into the system first.”
Biosolids, Kenealy and the DEC argue, could solve landfill shortage issues in the state. According to DEC estimates, the state will run out of space for landfills within about 20 years. As a result, Kenealy says costs to ship waste to landfills has become unbearable for Webster’s finances.
Biosolids, meanwhile, could be a “full circle” option for the town, Kenealy said.
“Those nutrients that we’d be putting back to the earth help grow product that the cows would be eating,” he said.
But, as it stands, Webster’s biosolids aren’t without potentially harmful contaminants, and McBride doubts treatment plants will be able to filter out those compounds in the near future.
A recent test of Webster’s sewage sludge found PFOS levels at 3.7 micro grams per kilogram. But the EPA wrote in a draft risk assessment that there may be human health risks if just 1 micro gram of PFOS is found in biosolids. That assessment did not suggest a threshold for the general population, which the state DEC has done in the interim.
Kenealy said the town is adhering to those interim DEC guidelines, which recommend that recycled biosolids have no more than 20 micrograms of PFOS and PFOA.
“If and when the EPA establishes regulations applicable to the Town of Webster, the Town will work with both regulating bodies to ensure ongoing compliance," Kenealy wrote in a statement.
Growing frustration toward DEC, state
New Scotland town Supervisor Doug LaGrange had never heard about the potential threats from sewage sludge until Dunham came to him.
LaGrange, an eighth-generation dairy farmer, said he was shocked to learn that the DEC is encouraging the use of sewage sludge on New York’s farms.
“I just don't understand where the DEC is coming from,” LaGrange said. “I assume that, somewhere, somehow, this edict came down from somewhere to say, ‘We have to get rid of this, and this is how we're going to do it.’”
LaGrange has been sharing his concerns about sewage sludge with leaders from other towns and counties. Localities that have imposed their own moratoria include Albany and Schoharie counties, and the Town of Thurston.
Dunham said his frustration lies with the state.
“I can't even believe that the health of New Yorkers can be put at risk every single day because of this practice, because New York state doesn't know what to do with this sewage that they produce,” Dunham said. “They spread it on farmland. It makes, literally, no sense to me.”
