GHD, Inc.

GHD, Inc. is a Wisconsin environmental engineering firm specializing in anaerobic digestion. Although focusing on farm digesters for animal manure, GHD also manufactures equipment to generate energy from industrial and human sewage sludge. As this oversimplified diagram from its website shows, one of the end products of its digester equipment is "biosolids," or Toxic sludge:



Toxic Sludge Gasification Controversy
"Biosolids" is a euphemistic PR term for Toxic sludge. EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman has called gasification, or using sludge to generate methanol or energy, the "most environmentally sound approach, but also the most expensive," to sludge disposal. However, anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge, while it reduces the volume of the sludge and heats it to a temperature that kills many pathogens, still leaves behind what the industry calls "digestate" or, more specifically in this case, "biosolids." These "Class A Biosolids" (so-called because the Environmental Protection Agency has stricter limits on pathogens and "vector attraction" for Class A than for Class B Biosolids, i.e. they must not attract disease-carrying insects or rodents, etc.) still contain other sludge contaminants, including Dioxins and Furans, Flame Retardants, Metals, Organochlorine Pesticides, 1,2-Dibromo-3-Chloropropane (DBCP), Naphthalene, Triclosan, Nonylphenols, Phthalates, Nanosilver, and thousands more substances.

The EPA's 2009 Targeted National Sewage Sludge Survey (TNSSS) concluded that all sewage sludge, Class A, Class B or otherwise, contains toxic and hazardous materials, including large numbers of endocrine disruptors. The TNSSS results are described in two EPA reports published in 2009. EPA found that dozens of hazardous materials, not regulated and not required to be tested for, have been documented in each and every one of the sludge samples EPA took around the USA. And yet Class A "Biosolids" may be applied to cropland with no restrictions and sold or given away to gardeners as "organic fertilizers," and hundreds of municipalities and companies do so.

Disposing of Sludge by Spreading it on Agricultural Land
GHD, Inc. advocates the use of "biosolids . . . as a soil amendment."

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 2011 BioCycle 11th Annual Conference on "Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling"
GHD, Inc. 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.

Contact
P.O. Box 69 Chilton, WI 53014 USA Phone: (920) 849-9797 Fax: (920) 849-9160 Email: info@ghdinc.net Web: www.ghdinc.net

Other SourceWatch Resources

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