Resources should be applied to the highest and best use for the greatest outcome.
We believe maintaining the purity of discarded food materials & protecting soil health are critical to supporting a resilient, local food system & ensuring its benefits are broadly distributed throughout Vermont.
Like many social and ecological issues, this issue may be new in its specifics, and yet it’s part of a long-time, structural theme.
Our willingness to use soil as the dumping ground for toxins and pollutants - without regard for the impacts to the environment and our own food system - has been going on for long time. We can look to other similar practices for an indication of what can happen if we don’t change this attitude.
For years regulators have been urged to apply more caution to the land application of sewage sludge, and yet have continued to throw caution to the wind. Now, after decades of application some farms are showing the legacy of this widespread pollution in their exceedingly high levels of PFAS, making their drinking water unpotable and their soils potentially unsafe to grow food crops in.
“We must impart to every human being that soil, water, and air are not resources to be used and thrown away. These are life-making ingredients.”
What’s the problem?
Despite the Universal Recycling Law being the most ambitious resource management legislation in the U.S., ANR is not enforcing the separation of discarded food from packaging or sources of plastics in blended materials (like plastic-lined juice containers).
Why does source separation matter?
Source Separated Organics (SSO) is the system by which waste generators segregate compostable materials from other waste streams - at the source - for separate collection.
Separating organics from non-organics creates clean streams of this resource, supporting the production of quality compost for use on agricultural soils.
What’s happened?
Sending materials to a depackaging facility is now considered an acceptable way of “outsourcing” SSO.
Allowing mechanical separation of food from packaging results in the contamination of compostable materials with plastics and other pollutants.
Recyclable packaging is lost from the recycling stream and sent to the landfill and incinerators.
Knowingly allowing microplastics and other pollutants to be applied to our soils is not acceptable & may result in unresolvable soil contamination and public health concerns.
Ocean Plastic Is Bad, but Soil Plastic Pollution May Be Worse
The rise of plasticulture threatens the soil and human health. A new U.N. report spells out what’s needed to end it.
Civil Eats gives an overview of the report.
Read a story about an organic farmers in Maine who has just discovered that their farm had sludge spread on it 24 years prior to their ownership of it, and are now finding extremely high levels of PFAs in their soils, their well water and all their crops.
A t
errible tale of a failure to adopt the precautionary approach, and how pollution leaves a legacy that can fundamentally undermine local food systems.
While the indiscriminate application of depackaging and the disregard for concerns around microplastics and PFAS are showing up now, this ongoing trend in the thinking within the regulatory community is a much bigger issue that merits reconsideration.
One of the major beliefs that inform the choice to land apply pollution, instead of mitigating it, is the idea that people are inherently selfish and will not broadly ‘do the right thing.’ This belief drives us to fail to attempt to change the basic conditions that cause pollution from the beginning, resigning us to pollution as the guaranteed outcome, and simply trying to contain or minimize it. This is a fundamentally loosing strategy.
If society is to address the most threatening issues of our time like the climate crisis, we must first learn how to live accountably. We believe this is possible and that there are many examples of this in action. The best way to prevent pollution is to prevent the conditions for pollution. Source separating food scraps is the most effective way to prevent the contamination of soils. It certainly requires people to change their behaviors, but these are modest changes and our experience is that they are entirely possible. Additionally, by practicing greater personal accountability for separating food from packaging, we have the opportunity to practice with how to achieve this as a society, better preparing us for tackling issues like the climate crisis.
