The headlines this week regarding Montreal’s eight-billion-litre untreated sewage dump came and went with a few large plumes of dark-brown water or white effluent witnessed in the St. Lawrence River and strong early morning odours in some quarters, but little visible sewage detected overall.
The infrastructure repairs that necessitated the sewage dump progressed as planned Wednesday, with 17 workers descending into the bowels of the city’s southeast sewage interceptor to dry out the tunnel and start repairing and removing malfunctioning support structures.
Few Canadians understand that it is common practice in the spreading of hazardous municipal sewage sludge biosolids on farmland?
Questions that need to be asked of the newly sworn in Liberal government, will you and your Party agree to allow the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to fulfill its mandate to enforce the Canadian Fertilizer Act and stop the spreading of hazardous municipal sewage sludge biosolids on farmland?
The CFIA is forbidden to stop this noxious practice because successive federal ministers have chosen to violate the intent and wording of the Act by pretending it only applies to products distributed “for sale” as fertilizer. This wrongful interpretation opened the way for provinces and municipalities to unload their hazardous sewage wastes on farmland as a free gift to farmers willing to overlook the pathogens and harmful chemicals because the nitrogen and phosphorus is sufficient to grow cash corn crops.
The Class B sewage sludge is permitted by provinces to contain up to 2 million e-coli per 1/2 cup as marker for all the other pathogens in human sewage, and 40% of it by dry weight consists of some 100,000 chemical contaminants (including garbage dump leachate). It is spread at a rate of 10 tonnes per acre for fertilizing corn crops, and even when disked in, some 10% or 1 tonne per acre remains on the surface to be washed into Canada’s rivers and lakes during rain and snow melt and floods, Canadians deserve to have government investigate the probable links between the sewage spreading and health and environmental problems? These include:
A) The anaerobic digestion process in sewage treatment plants is an ideal breeding ground for super-bugs, as the bacteria are maintained at body temperature and exposed to weak solutions of all the antibiotics flushed into sewers. This causes them to defensively mutate and develop immunity. The sewage is spread on farmland in the spring and fall, yet has never been considered as a probable cause of the super-bug outbreaks that close hospital wards during this time.
The new government needs to investigate and fully assess the risk of sewage spreading causing outbreaks of antibiotic resistant super-bug infections in the Canadian population?
B) When sewage sludge is spread at the present rate for providing sufficient nitrogen to corn crops, there is 4 times more phosphorus than the corn crops can use.
This excess phosphorus is washing into the surface waters and likely a major cause of the algae blooms that are plaguing our lakes and rivers, and consequently having an impact on the Great Lakes. Yet instead of exposing this obvious source of contamination and stopping it, farmers in general are being unfairly blamed for using too much phosphorus.
Why would farmers pay for extra phosphorus their crops do not need, knowing that it will contaminate their environment? The excess phosphorus is obviously from municipal sewage sludge applied as a “free gift” to some cash croppers, while government regulators see, hear, and say nothing! The government needs to properly investigate this and have government rightfully hold those who are responsible to account?
C) It is likely that the aerial land application of sewage is spreading infectious prions that are a cause of the higher incidence of fatal dementia in the rural vs urban population. Research has determined that breathing prions is 100,000 times more infectious than ingesting them, and the rural population near sewage spreading are breathing the sewage aerosols for up to 5 days at a time, as well as in later wind-blown dusts.
As sewage has been spread in Canada for 15 years or more in some areas, illnesses with such long incubation periods can be expected to show up in a comprehensive health study that compares the over-all health of people living adjacent to such spreading to those living further away. The government needs to commit to such a study, ASAP?
D) In the Ottawa area and elsewhere 1000s of migrating Canada Geese feed on the sewage fertilized corn fields in spring flood conditions, before flying to the Arctic where they are a staple of the Inuit diet. Are the birds ingesting pathogens and chemicals from the sewage that are causing health problems for Northerners?
E) There is documented scientific evidence that land application of sewage has sickened thousands and is linked to both human and animal deaths, and has adversely affected ground water and soil. The government needs to apply the Precautionary Principle and stop the spreading of municipal sewage sludge on Canada’s farmland until full and proper research into the health and environmental consequences is carried out by government?
Municipal sewage can be temporarily landfilled with garbage in engineered sanitary landfills, where it shrinks to just 10% of its original volume due to further decomposition and evaporation of the water it contains. High temperature waste to energy facilities that recycle pure nitrogen and phosphorus and reclaim metals while completely eliminating toxins are the best permanent solution.
F) There needs to be a form of compensation for those who have suffered harm from sewage spreading on farmland, and to undertake remedial action to overcome whatever environmental damage it has caused?
Be aware that failing to act on concerns raised about the health and wellbeing of rural people and the rural environment is discriminatory under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as the status quo protects city residents from their pathogenic and toxic sewage wastes to a far greater extent than the rural residents city sewage is being spread around.
Allowing this to continue on your watch would be a violation of your fiduciary duty to protect the equal rights of all the people of Canada.
By:
Dr. Bill Pomfret, MSc. FIOSH, RSP, FRSH
President, Safety Projects International Inc.
Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2K 1X4.
Tel: (613) 2549233. E-mail pomfretb@spi5star.com