EPA Program Spreads Toxins on America's Farmland

In the midst of the push for environmental regulation in connection with the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared carbon dioxide — a substance produced by human respiration, among other means — a danger to public health. However, it appears that the EPA has a far more tolerant view to mercury, arsenic, and lead, since it is encouraging American farmers to spread these and other heavy metals on their fields.

According to a report in the Washington Post:

"The federal government is encouraging farmers to spread a chalky waste from coal-fired power plants on their fields to loosen and fertilize soil even as it considers regulating coal wastes for the first time.

The material is produced by power plant "scrubbers" that remove acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxide from plant emissions. A synthetic form of the mineral gypsum, it also contains mercury, arsenic, lead and other heavy metals....

With wastes piling up around the coal-fired plants that produce half the nation's power, the EPA and U.S. Department of Agriculture began promoting what they call the wastes' "beneficial uses" during the Bush administration.

Part of that push is to expand the use of synthetic gypsum — a whitish, calcium-rich material known as flue gas desulfurization gypsum, or FGD gypsum. The Obama administration has continued promoting FGD gypsum's use in farming."


But why, one might ask, should the plants go to the trouble of collecting and concentrating such hazardous substances in the first place if the government is simply going to encourage releasing them right back into the environment in the end? Would not the least dangerous disposal of such "insignificant" levels of heavy metals be to have as wide of an area of dispersal as possible, rather than compounding the toxins in a small area, and spreading them in the fields?

Government programs beget more government programs. One government program sets stringent guidelines to carefully collect the toxins produced by our nation’s power plants, which, in turn, necessitates another government program to determine what to do with the collected waste. Presumably, in a generation or so, the EPA and USDA will develop another program to remove newly discovered "dangerous" levels of heavy metals from the soil of America’s heartland.


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