Sometimes recycling is
more pernicious than we’ve all been taught to believe. In 1997,
Patty Martin, mayor of the small town of Quincy, Wash., discovered
that the local agricultural chemicals provider had been mixing
leftover pesticides with other chemicals and passing the “recycled”
mixture off to farmers as a beneficial soil additive. The crusading
mayor called Seattle-based reporter Duff Wilson, who soon
discovered that the Quincy case was far from an isolated
incident.
Wilson’s thorough investigation,
Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global
Industry, and a Toxic Secret, takes us into the guts of
an industry few of us know much about.
Because
of a loophole in the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation
of hazardous wastes, leftovers from cement factories, steel mills
and pesticide factories can be sent to companies that transform
them into fertilizers. It’s perfectly legal, and the wastes are
high in nutrients. There’s only one problem, Wilson says: The
fertilizers made from the waste are often fortified with a scary
dose of heavy metals and other toxic chemicals. There’s no proof
that the toxins end up in food, but nobody has been doing the tests
to find out. Worse, fertilizers don’t have detailed labels, so
consumers seldom know what they’re
getting.
Wilson is convinced that there’s a
fundamental problem with the way we regulate hazardous waste. When
it comes to recycled fertilizers, Wilson says, “Nobody can argue
that there is no harm; indeed, nobody has tried. Instead, the
government has buried itself in toxic disregard … The fields that
grow the food my children eat are being transformed into toxic
waste dumps, one season at a
time.”
Fateful Harvest: The True Story
of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret,
by Duff Wilson, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, 2001.
Hardcover: $26. 321 pages.
Copyright
© 2002 HCN and Ali Macalady
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Fateful harvest a scary read.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
