This story was originally produced by the New Hampshire Bulletin, an independent local newsroom that allows NHPR and other outlets to republish its reporting.
A resourceful solution to repurpose waste and nourish farmland, or a poisonous and permanent mistake?
Depending on whom you ask, the practice of spreading treated sewage, or sludge, on New Hampshire farmland might be either. For decades, this fertilizer has been a point of contention both locally and nationwide. Now, with renewed attention on sludge’s PFAS, or “forever chemical” content, a new bill from Merrimack Democratic Rep. Wendy Thomas brings the practice back into the spotlight.
Grounded in concerns about the health impacts of PFAS, House Bill 1275 seeks to create a financial safety net for farmers who experience losses after discovering the chemicals on their land or in their crops. The bill also proposes a five-year moratorium on agricultural use of the material, an idea that proved controversial among farmers, wastewater professionals, and legislators at a hearing Feb. 10.
Sludge bolsters croplands. It also contains dangerous chemicals.
After wastewater and sewage are processed at a treatment facility, sludge is the organic, semi-liquid material that remains.
With the necessary permits, testing, and safety procedures, New Hampshire allows farmers to spread the biosolids on agricultural land. There, it works like a fertilizer, adding nutrients to reinvigorate tired soils.
The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services promotes sludge on its website as an environmentally sustainable, affordable, and widely available fertilizer. At a public hearing for HB 1275 on Tuesday, Feb. 10, Charley Hanson, who co-owns biosolids distribution company Resource Management, Inc., said he used the material on his own farm in Center Harbor for those same reasons.
“Biosolids are the best, most environmentally friendly fertilizer that you can find,” he said.
However, concern around sewage sludge is linked to what it can contain besides nutrients: harmful chemicals, like heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and PFAS. These chemicals, excreted by humans or released from manufacturing facilities as effluent, can be channeled through the wastewater stream, winding up in treated sludge. Then, if that sludge is applied to land, the chemicals are released into the environment.
Encountering PFAS is dangerous for people and wildlife. Studies, including several conducted within New Hampshire, have linked PFAS to a range of health impacts, from increased rates of certain cancers to an elevated rate of birth defects and infant death — which, in New Hampshire, occurred at a rate as much as three times higher for babies born to mothers living downstream of highly contaminated sites compared to mothers living away from PFAS hotspots, according to a December study.
Typical methods of wastewater treatment cannot remove PFAS chemicals, which are common in consumer goods, from wastewater; forever chemicals are so named for their notoriously long lifespans. This means that if the chemicals are in the waste stream, they often wind up in sludge, too. In the late 2010s, NHDES found PFAS in “the majority of sludge samples” evaluated as part of an investigation into the chemicals’ prevalence in biosolids. NHDES also tested some wells near fields that had historically been treated with biosolids and concluded that some leaching was taking place from the fields into groundwater, according to a 2019 letter to treatment plant operators.
Today, there still hasn’t been a comprehensive study looking at PFAS contamination of New Hampshire farmlands. And though NHDES now requires biosolids producers to test for dozens of PFAS, among a total of more than 200 other contaminants, the state does not yet have a standard in place to regulate sludge or bar its application based on its PFAS content.
The relief fund
The discovery of PFAS contamination on a farm can lead to losses of crops or herds, or additional costs like the urgent need to procure clean water for animals — and the people living on a farm — if a well is found to be contaminated, said Thomas.
Colin Jumper, a doctor from Durham, said his family farm in central Maine had been upended by the discovery of highly PFAS-contaminated sludge. “Our four-generation dairy farm was essentially out of business overnight,” he said.
The state of Maine, in response to the discovery of PFAS contamination on farms like the Jumpers’, set up a statewide assistance fund. As proposed, HB 1275 would similarly establish a New Hampshire Agricultural PFAS Relief Fund.
The fund would cover testing of land, water, and agricultural products for PFAS; water filtration to reduce PFAS content of contaminated water; education; remediation; other PFAS management costs; and more as the Department of Agriculture, Markets, and Food sees fit, according to the bill text.
Speaking at the hearing, St. Paul’s School senior Anfeng Xie said he believed not having state-offered financial recourse for farmers, as neighboring states do, was a competitive disadvantage for New Hampshire’s agriculture industry. Xie is the co-author of a research paper currently under review that he said pointed to a “regulatory valley” in New Hampshire regarding agricultural PFAS contamination and protections for farmers.
The relief fund would be a home for funding from PFAS settlements, from which New Hampshire expects to receive more than $40 million from companies including 3M, Thomas said.
“The fund part is very, very important,” she said at a work session on Feb. 11.
Some call for a pause. Other destinations for sludge are few.
Another provision of HB 1275 is a five-year moratorium on the land application of sludge.
“There is no safe standard for PFAS. Once PFAS escapes into the environment, you’re not talking about losing revenue, you’re talking about billions in remediation. I mean, Merrimack will never be clean,” Thomas said at the work session. “… So that’s where we’re coming from: Stop it from escaping in the first place.”
Adam Nordell drove from his Freedom, Maine farm to give testimony on the bill. The previous owner of Nordell’s farm died of a fast-moving form of cancer, Nordell said; after purchasing the land, he and his family discovered that it was highly contaminated with PFAS. He, his wife, and his daughter also found PFAS at high levels in their own blood, he said.
“It’s been a nightmare that I can’t fully describe,” he said.
But representatives from the wastewater industry said the levels of contamination seen in Maine were unique, driven by the use of potent PFAS coatings in paper plants.
Shelagh Connelly, also a co-owner of Resource Management Inc., said her company rigorously tested the sludge they distributed for PFAS. The sludge they distribute in New Hampshire can contain PFAS, but at levels below what likely contaminated the most highly affected farms in Maine, she said.
Sludge is unavoidable in the wastewater treatment process, but disposing of it is difficult. Land application is considered the most beneficial way to do so, said Leo Gaudette, assistant director of public works for the town of Merrimack.
“For the town of Merrimack’s wastewater facility, beneficial use, including land application, is an important management option that helps control our costs, maintain operational reliability, and support environmentally responsible reuse,” he said.
Many states will not take sludge from out of state, so disposing of sludge elsewhere requires trucking it long distances, including to Canada or other regions of the U.S., he said. Other ways to dispose of the material include placing it in a landfill, on golf courses, or incinerating it — which releases PFAS into the air. Gaudette said he viewed land application as the most desirable of those options.
Gaudette, Connelly, and other wastewater representatives cautioned lawmakers about enacting a total ban on sludge application, saying removing a channel for sludge disposal would raise costs for sewer district ratepayers.
“I do want you to really think long and hard about where your daily flush is going to go,” said Connelly.
“Don’t do the ban,” said Shawn Jasper, commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, Markets, and Food. “Many farmers rely on this cheap, reliable source of fertilizer for their fields, and banning it without evidence is the wrong thing to do.”
But others said that there was substantial evidence of the significant health impacts associated with PFAS — and of its ubiquity in sludge.
The U.S. EPA has said that no level of exposure to PFAS is considered safe. Health impacts, according to the agency, can occur at any level of exposure.
“This isn’t just a town’s revenue source. This isn’t just a business that disposes of the sludge. This is people’s health,” said Catherine Corkery, chapter director of the New Hampshire Sierra Club.
Building out state standardsJasper urged the legislators to push for more soil testing, saying his department had not conducted wider testing because funding had not yet been appropriated.
NHDES is working on a modeling study that will hopefully shed light on how PFAS migrates from sludge into groundwater, said Rene Beaudoin, supervisor of the department’s residuals management section. That information will help the department land on a threshold value for regulating PFAS content in biosolids, he said.
But the rules are not yet in place, and some residents said they felt enough damage had already been done.
“In New Hampshire, we have not yet had to come to terms with the damage that has been done and is still being done,” Jumper said. “This bill is necessary to start the process of dealing with the problem.”
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