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For almost a decade, Edwards resident Jim Poushinsky has been warning anybody who will listen of the potential threat of spreading treated human waste on rural Ottawa farm fields.
When it comes to officialdom, the warnings have fallen mainly on deaf ears.
While Poushinsky argues there’s plenty of scientific evidence that treatment in such facilities as Ottawa’s Robert O. Pickard Environmental Centre neutralizes only some of the toxins and viruses in the waste, officials counter they don’t spread any material which doesn’t meet provincial standards.
Those standards, Poushinsky says, permit a half-cup of sludge containing “1.5 million E.coli plus most other human pathogens … bacteria, viruses, diseased prions and parasites.”
Poushinsky’s eyes were opened to the process of distributing treatment plant solids as a fertilizer after a friend west of Metcalfe called him some 10 years ago to say she’d been notified of the intent to spread waste close to her home.
The research he began then convinced him the sludge poses an ever-present danger to human health.
Earlier this decade, Poushinsky and his Ottawa Citizens Against Pollution by Sewage raised such a stink against the practice, they were partly responsible for prompting Ottawa council to ban the spreading of dewatered sewage sludge on city farm fields.
But, early in its mandate, the current council lifted the ban after being convinced by supporters of the practice that it’s safe and beneficial as a soil enhancer. Poushinsky says he wasn’t informed of the decision.
The latest battleground is Vernon, where, earlier this week, Poushinsky tried to prevent Third High Farms, professional Iroquois-based spreaders working under contract to the city, from covering with sludge 110 acres of corn field belonging to North Gower mega-farmer Dwight Foster.
PROVINCIAL GREEN LIGHT
The project was certified by the Ontario Ministry of Environment and green-lighted by on-site ministry and city inspectors. It’s part of a planned 3,800-tonne distribution around Vernon.
Poushinsky believes airborne particulate arising from spreading human waste can weaken the immune systems of people “breathing the stuff as far as one mile away” — which includes all of Vernon.
This is particularly alarming during the H1N1 outbreak, he says. If nothing else, spreading of the sludge should be suspended until the flu threat has dissipated, he argues.
That kind of talk has Dean Swerdfeger of Third High Farms fuming.
“He’s scaring everybody for no good reason,” Swerdfeger says of Poushinsky.
“We’ve been spreading biosolids for years, all over Eastern Ontario and on our own 1,600 acres with no complications. If there were health issues, don’t you think we’d experience them first?”
Poushinsky suggests that Swerdfeger and his workers have developed “elevated” immune systems because of their close proximity to the material.
Poushinsky is also concerned leaching can impact the water supply to residential wells, and allow toxic pollutants to enter watercourses through surface runoff, farm tile drains and abandoned wells. There’s documented evidence, he says, that leachate from biosolids can be harmful to fish and amphibians.