City Sludge Creates a Country Stink:

Community Divided Over Recycling Byproduct

Some Spread it on Fields, Others Want Nothing to do With it

Martin Mittelstaedt / Ontario Globe and Mail 9jul98

Brock Township -- In this picturesque farming region of Central Ontario, the annual cycle of planting crops and sending cattle out to pasture presents a bucolic image of easy-going country living. But the images can be deceiving and belie tensions here over a big-city problem: paper-mill sludge. The story says that neighbours are fighting neighbours over the wisdom of spreading thousands of tonnes of sludge from the Toronto area on farm fields throughout this region. Nearly 200 farmers in the area have signed on to a program allowing their land to be used for sludge spreading. Many farmers are clamouring for the sludge, which is being given away free, because it's rich in organic material.

But others fear and loathe the material, which has a pungent odour and when spread on farm fields gives them a bluish-grey hue rather than the normal brown. Clive Bloomfield, an organic farmer who can see a field topped with sludge outside his living-room window was quoted as saying, "I came up here from the city for the country life, fresh air and good neighbours, and since they started spreading sludge up here the whole neighbourhood is split and divided." The influx of paper-mill sludge into this region is an unexpected byproduct of the huge popularity of urban recycling programs and the expansion of mills that make new products from discarded paper. Although most would agree that paper recycling is a good idea, it has a big down side: it generates lots of sludge, a residue composed of clay, spent printing inks, water and the wood fibres that are too small to be reused for paper. As much as a quarter of all recycled paper ends up as sludge and must be disposed of somewhere.

One such place is David Brown's farm. A farmer who grows soybeans, corn and canola, Mr. Brown was cited as saying the sludge helps his crops, adding, "It's a natural substance. This isn't some man-made concoction that we're polluting farmland with." The story says that although paper-mill sludge is being applied to agricultural land elsewhere in Ontario, the subject generates the most controversy in Brock Township, an area about 100 kilometres northeast of Toronto. Because of the large amount Brock and nearby areas receive, more than 100,000 tonnes a year, this region is the province's sludge capital. Controversy has been fanned both by actions of the sludge distributor, Ontario Disposal Ltd., and Brock Land Stewards, an environmental group. Ontario Disposal has been buying farms and registering them as sludge sites.

An Environment Ministry official said the company has eight sites in the sludge program. The company also illegally dumped sludge at Kawartha Downs Raceway last year, but the material was removed and the ministry withdrew charges of violating the province's Environmental Protection Act, according to ministry records obtained by The Globe and Mail. Ontario Disposal did not return phone calls seeking comments on its sludge activities. For its part, Brock Land Stewards is trying to hound the company out of the township and is using the concerns many people feel about industrial waste to do so. Placing sludge on agricultural land has raised many environmental ambiguities, with both sludge supporters and opponents arguing their positions are the best for the environment.

The sludge in Brock Township comes from Atlantic Packaging Products Ltd., a Toronto recycler. Company spokesman Tony Biernacki said land application, by returning organic matter from trees back to the soil, is better than burying sludge in a landfill or burning it. Soil with high organic content holds moisture better and is less prone to erosion. However, sludge does not decompose well, and farmers using it are also given free nitrogen fertilizer to add to their fields to help it break down. Testing of paper-mill sludge has found it low in heavy-metal contaminants, one of the big worries about industrial waste, with concentrations comparable to livestock manure. Most of the data on Atlantic's sludge have been generated by the company, but the ministry has recently begun random testing of the material.

Test results are expected in a few weeks. In a bid to find uses for the sludge, the province commissioned a study three years ago that reviewed almost every effort in recent decades to use the material. But the review came up nearly empty-handed. One possibility that intrigued researchers was to feed sludge to cattle. But the menu didn't go over well with the animals: they hated the taste. Although some farmers believe sludge is good for the land, one of the few Ontario researchers to investigate the long-term use of the material has found it has little effect, good or bad. Calvin Chong, a horticulturalist at the University of Guelph's Horticultural Research Institute in Vineland, has been experimenting for 14 years with the use of paper sludge around trees and bushes. "It didn't seem to have a negative effect, but as far as I could see it didn't have a positive effect either," he said.