Brown Bear Corporation

Brown Bear Corporation is, in its own words, "a privately held manufacturing company that builds products for the environmental, pipeline, and utility industries," engaged in "composting, sludge drying [and] manure handling," among other things. One of its major applications is what it calls the "Composting of Biosolids & Green Waste." According to its description in a trade industry conference, "[t]he environmental products are used for windrow composting of all types of municipal wastewater biosolids, landfill solids, industrial sludges, agricultural organic crop residues and manures; bioremediation and stabilization of hazardous and nonhazardous hydrocarbon and petro chemical wastes and contaminated soil, potable water plant residual solid, mining sludges, pulp and paper plant sludges, etc., land application of liquid, semisolid sludge cake, compost and manure with on/off highway capable transporters."

Involvement in the Toxic Sludge Industry
Brown Bear's business is the management of Toxic sludge. "Biosolids" is the Orwellian PR euphemism for toxic sewage sludge.

A list of just some of the hazardous chemicals and pathogens found in sludge can be found in the article Sludge contaminants. Sludge contaminants include Dioxins and Furans, Flame Retardants, Metals, Organochlorine Pesticides, 1,2-Dibromo-3-Chloropropane (DBCP), Naphthalene, Triclosan, Nonylphenols, Phthalates, Nanosilver, and thousands more substances. "Sewage is the mix of water and whatever wastes from domestic and industrial life are flushed into the sewer. ... We must note that, though the aim of sewage treatment is to produce clean water, it is never to produce 'clean' sludge.  Indeed, the 'dirtier' the sludge - the more complete its concentration of the noxious wastes - the more the treatment has done its job. ... very waste produced in our society that can be got rid of down toilets and drains and that can also be got out of the sewage by a given treatment process will be in the sludge.  Sludge is thus inevitably a noxious brew of vastly various and incompatible materials unpredictable in themselves and in the toxicity of their amalgamation, incalculably but certainly wildly dangerous to life."

Disposing of Sludge by Spreading it on Agricultural Land
Brown Bear is engaged in "land application of liquid, semisolids sludge cake, compost and manure."

According to Sludge News, "[t]he policy of disposing of sludge by spreading it on agricultural land - a policy given the benign term 'land application' - has its inception in the Ocean Dumping ban of 1987. Before 1992, when the law went into effect, the practice had been, after extracting the sludge from the wastewater, to load it on barges and dump it 12, and later 106 miles off shore into the ocean. But many people who cared about life in the ocean knew that, wherever it was dumped, the sludge was causing vast dead moon-scapes on the ocean floor.  New EPA regulations for 'land application' were promulgated in 1993. With the aid of heating and pelletizing and some slippery name morphs along the way, EPA claimed sludge could be transmogrified into 'compost' ...  .  But the land “application” of sewage sludge ...  will pollute the whole chain of life for which soil is the base."

Exhibitor at the 2011 BioCycle 11th Annual Conference on "Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling"
Brown Bear was an exhibitor at the 2011 BioCycle 11th Annual Conference on "Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling." BioCycle Magazine is a publication serving the interests of the sewage sludge industry.

Other SourceWatch Resources

 * Toxic sludge
 * Toxic Sludge Portal
 * Sludge contaminants
 * Sewage sludge