Coal Ash On Our Fields

by Natasha Chart

Published April 07, 2009 @ 11:32AM PT

Someone sent this article to a mailing list I'm on, all shocked that coal fly ash is being used as a fertilizer:

... Less scrutiny has been given to agricultural applications of coal fly ash. In many parts of the country, food crops are allowed to be grown in soil amended with fly ash. The ash stabilizes the soil and has shown to increase yields. But a study conducted at Indiana State University concluded that plants grown in fly ash concentrates of 5 to 20 percent of soil absorb toxic metals.

... While the State of Minnesota does not allow fly ash to be used in crop production, the Minnesota Pollution Control Authority (MPCA) has approved the use of fly ash from Otter Tail Power Company’s Hoot Lake facility in Fergus Falls, Minn., to be used as a soil stabilizer in livestock pens, as an aggregate for private roads and as a base pad in feed storage. Up to two inches of ash can be spread over an area to treat the top six inches of soil. ...

So, the nasty stuff unleashed on the Kingston River Basin last December can get spread on fields or used to cushion animal feed. I am ... not surprised.

Have you heard of a book called Fateful Harvest, by Duff Wilson? It talks about the dioxin-contaminated cement kiln and steel furnace dust sold as agricultural lime, investigations that uncovered lead, chromium and arsenic contamination in fertilizer.

You've heard about Zero Waste models for industry? Well, industry's ahead of the curve, way out in front of the utopian dreamers. Instead of bothering with the expense and hassle of proper disposal, many toxin-producing industries sell their waste as fertilizer. Waste gets transformed into saleable product, which sounds good in principle, but in this instance of practice ... I'm going to have to disapprove.

Don't want cadmium being greedily sucked up by your lettuce, or getting taken up into the bodies of the hapless residents of farm communities? How silly. It doesn't matter, because you'd never even know.

Fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals only have to report their N-P-K (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) content, or pH (if being sold as a liming agent or similar), or their 'active' ingredients that are supposed to promote plant growth. Some of it is even sold as organic certified, though you're still safer with organics, because the farm is more likely to use compost or recognizably sourced and safe soil amendments.

What I'm saying is that we have no idea, and no systematic way to find out, what's been put on the fields where our food is grown. This, in addition to the endocrine-disrupting pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that are openly added to our agricultural ecosystems.

This was the main reason I first became an advocate for organic food, which is at least somewhat safer. Because I didn't want to be a walking, talking, unplanned biological experiment in industrial waste disposal.

I resent in every possible way that trying to avoid these poisons often sends my food budget through the roof.

It's another industrial 'cost control' measure that passes the bill for heavy metal and carcinogen contamination on to each and every member of the public. The burden is passed to you, and me, of greater cancer risks, reproductive system disruption, and general ill health. Costs which these same industries have, through industry associations like the national Chamber of Commerce, successfully forced the public to bear the full consequences of - by vehemently opposing universal health care.

Big business makes us sick, keeps us away from the doctor, and then pays lobbyists to keep our elected representatives from helping us out. This is the world we live in, our "theater state", and the people who run it do not mean well by us.

And still, I don't want coal ash in my goddam food.

(Photo credit: by dionhinchcliffe on Flickr.)