It’s out of sight and out of mind, and it might just be killing people.
For decades, American factories have been sending their wastewater to municipal sewage treatment plants across the country, which handle it along with the effluent from other industries, homes and businesses. At the other end of the process, the separated and dried-out solids are often delivered to farmers as free fertilizer. The land application of this “sewage sludge” has long been encouraged by environmental regulators as a way to deal with what would otherwise be a vexing waste disposal problem.
Yet not all of that wastewater, or the sludge that becomes fertilizer, is benign. An increasing number of industries discharge effluent laced with toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, which most treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove. PFAS are notoriously long-lasting, so much so that they are nicknamed “forever chemicals.” And now some states are …