Clean Water — News & Analysis

Trump officials kill proposed rules for PFAS-contaminated sewage fertilizer (July 20, 2026)

The Guardian reports that the Trump administration has terminated the regulatory review of sewage sludge contaminated with PFAS and spread on farmland as fertilizer — a practice tied to sickened farmers, ruined livelihoods, dead livestock, polluted water supplies and contaminated meat and food products sold to the public. The proposed risk assessment would have largely ended the use of sludge, also called biosolids, in the food system. Instead the Environmental Protection Agency discarded its own scientific research from less than two years earlier, the work that would have formed the basis for regulation, on the reasoning that sludge poses no broad public threat because it is used mostly on farms and on only a small share of cropland. In comments published to the Federal Register, however, the agency simultaneously advised the public to research sludge companies as a means of self-protection against the toxic chemicals present in home fertilizer sold for garden use. Laura Dumais, an attorney with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, called the decision "a bit bonkers," saying it is shocking for the agency to throw out a scientific assessment outright and that the message to farmers is that their lives do not matter. She characterized the agency's remaining posture as telling the public to do its own research in the absence of any regulation.

The underlying practice dates to the early 1990s, when EPA began permitting the spread of sludge — a mixture of human and industrial waste left over from sewage treatment — on cropland, since disposal is costly and the material is rich in plant nutrients. Public health advocates object that the country spends billions treating water only to insert the toxic byproduct into the food supply and re-pollute the water. Regulators in Maine and Michigan have found PFAS in every sample tested, as did a federal review in 2001. Biosolids can carry any of some 90,000 human-made chemicals, yet EPA rules require monitoring for just nine heavy metals; PEER has sued the agency for allegedly failing to regulate PFAS in sludge under the Clean Water Act. In its final days the Biden administration issued a draft health risk assessment finding that PFAS concentrations above 1 part per billion raise cancer and other health risks for farmers — a threshold low enough to have sharply curtailed the practice, since most sludge exceeds it. Those assessments covered PFOA and PFOS, and were built on risk to farmers without examining how the chemicals reach the public through produce, dairy and meat.

Comments filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center attempted that missing calculation. Modeling a child who drinks one to two glasses daily of milk from a farm where sludge containing PFOA at 9.4 ppb had been spread — a level Maine sludge testing has exceeded — the center found that more than 36 of every 1,000 such children could develop cancer later in life from the milk alone, with non-cancer health risks more than 319 times higher. Senior attorney Jean Zhuang said the decision puts polluters ahead of farming families and rural communities, and described the agency as replacing a comprehensive science-based assessment with a thin document that minimizes real harm. The waste management industry, which profits from sludge disposal, has lobbied against regulation. EPA's new assessment asserts that sludge reaches only 1 percent of farmland, but no government agency at any level tracks where it has been spread, most states do not test the land afterward, and the chemicals are known to migrate onto neighboring properties and into water sources. Nor has the government meaningfully tested food grown in contaminated soil. In Maine, more than 100 farms have been identified as affected, with chemicals spread decades ago still contaminating land — including organic farms, where growers raised crops in tainted soil without knowing it.