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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fateful Harvest | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fateful_Harvest | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:39:18.176447+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Investigation === Alarmed by this issue, Martin ran for mayor of Quincy. She and her bankrupt farmer friends researched the mysterious origin of metals in the fertilizer. They discovered that the ubiquitous practice of mixing tailings and other industrial waste with fertilizer was accepted and even encouraged as a way to recycle waste with some zinc or iron, and increasing landfill costs exacerbated the trend. Martin discovered, for example, a proposed state rule for disposing of cement kiln dust by using it as agricultural lime. She also discovered that Alcoa sold waste product as a fertilizer or road deicer through L-Bar, a smaller company. The product was sued twice in Oregon, where farmers settled out of court. Martin also believed that cancer rates were higher in Quincy, but the state toxicologist dismissed her claims, though the state tracked deaths, not illnesses, by place of death when many of the victims' traveled out of the county and died in advanced hospitals. Later, five people in Quincy came down with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Ganesh Raghu told author Duff Wilson that this phenomenon strongly suggests environmental factors, as the disease is extremely rare.
==== Heavy Metal Task Force ==== The group contacted Wilson in 1996, who began investigating. He found that most government agencies knew little about fertilizer, but he was referred to EPA scientist Alan Rubin. Rubin said that while the purely organic, heavily studied, and regulated biosolids were hazardous, there was "almost no federal regulation on fertilizer" and that "[he had] never seen a state or federal limit on heavy metals in fertilizer". The only group researching these health risks, the Heavy Metal Task Force, was industry-funded despite being established by the state of California. It was concerned about California's Proposition 65, which required that people must be informed if they were being subjected to toxins. However, the group created a loophole to get around laws on hazardous wastes: some products were not classified as waste, so the limits of heavy metals in wastes did not apply to fertilizers. One of the particular loopholes was electric arc furnace dust K061, which was "simply not considered hazardous waste if it was used to make fertilizer". Wilson and a couple other concerned individuals met in February 1997, which comprised 15 industry officials and 5 state officials. The meeting began with fly ash; one of the men claimed that 4 million tons of coal ash and 2.1 million tons of flue dust was recycled into agricultural fertilizer and sold under names such as Lime Plus. At the meeting, one of the members suggested that Wilson examine Bay Zinc Company in Washington state, a leading manufacturer of the recycled "fertilizer". Before meeting with Dick Camp Jr. of Bay Zinc, Wilson discovered Cozinco, whose founder Kipp Smallwood was concerned about the metals in zinc fertilizers. The company had a comparison table and offered a free test, while claiming that most zinc fertilizers were three percent lead. Wilson later cited Zinc Nacionale, a Mexican recycling company, as another source of good zinc through high-temperature purification.
==== Bay Zinc Company ==== When it goes into our silo, it's a hazardous waste. When it comes out of the silo, it's no longer regulated. The exact same material. Don't ask me why. That's the wisdom of the EPA. Wilson reported that the Bay Zinc Company, founded by Dick Camp Sr., was a pioneer in the recycling of industrial byproducts into fertilizer. Camp Jr. recounted that his father might have been the first to use flue dust from steel smokestacks. Camp had been instrumental in creating the loopholes that allowed heavy metals in fertilizers to go unregulated. Between 1990 and 1996, Bay Zinc took in roughly 1.5 million pounds of lead, 86,000 pounds of chromium, and 19,000 pounds of nickel. Bay Zinc was relatively small in comparison to Alabama-based Frit Industries, which connected one its major factories to Nucor Steel. Together eight companies processed 120 million pounds of industrial byproducts into fertilizer, roughly half of the total zinc fertilizer sold in the country. This trade was facilitated by state industrial material exchanges (IMEX) used by twenty-six states. Mountain—Monsanto decided in 1994 that it no longer wanted the liability of using its industrial byproducts as fertilizer.
==== Soil science ==== Wilson found two scientists studying these problems: John Mortvedt and United States Department of Agriculture scientist Rufus Chaney. Mortvedt studied the uptake of cadmium by plants and found that plants absorbed cadmium quickly in acidic soil. He believed the cadmium in foods was small enough to be safe and cautioned that the soil should be kept alkaline. Chaney disagreed with Mortvedt: Wilson wrote that Chaney, an expert in phytoremediation, believed that a high zinc-to-cadmium ratio (at least 100 to 1) was needed to avoid cadmium's toxic effects. Chaney also noted that "heavy metals persist in surface soils for centuries to millennia in absence of erosive loss". Chaney also brought up a case in Georgia, where over 1,000 acres (4 km2) of peanuts were destroyed when the pH dropped. The fertilizers had been bought from SoGreen.