By Julieta Cardenas for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic less than 5mm in size. Small and ubiquitous - they are only about as thick as a paperclip - microplastics have been detected in our water supply, agricultural soils and the farm animals we raise for food. One study suggests the presence of microplastics might be anywhere from 4 to 23 times higher in farm soils than in waterways. Whether in soils or water, plastic pollution flows throughout our food system, Brett Nadrich, communications officer for Break Free From Plastic, tells Sentient, and "we have to turn off the tap."

Break Free From Plastic is an international advocacy group working to combat plastic pollution. "More than 99 percent of plastics are made of fossil fuels that used to be mostly oil," Nadrich says. Now it is also made from fracked gas, he says. In the communities of West Pennsylvania, Appalachia, the Gulf, Louisiana and Texas, "you're already seeing toxic chemicals entering the water table." Pollution from fracking extraction sites settles on soil as particulate matter, Nadrich says, which is then absorbed by plants and animals, including crops and farm animals.

Plastic Pollution Begins at the Source, But Is Found Everywhere

In 2022, Break Free From Plastic released a brand audit to identify the top plastic polluting corporations for the past five years, naming Coca-Cola as the top contributor to the plastic problem, followed by Pepsi-Co and Nestlé, among others. These corporations produce a wide range of products, including packaged meats, dairy and also plant-based brands.

Foods packaged in plastic can end up in the food itself. In one example, researchers tested cuts of meat and found plastics that matched the surrounding wrapping and polystyrene trays.

How Microplastics End Up in the Food System

One of the more surprising ways plastics end up in the food system happens on livestock farms in a practice called garbage feeding. Legal in 27 states, the practice is shown in a 2022 video taken by a maintenance technician at a grain elevator owned by Smithfield, where bread in plastic wrappers was being processed into feed. The video went viral, and an executive from Smithfield responded to say most plastic is vacuumed out onsite. The technician disagreed, but there is no agency that inspects or oversees the process to tell for sure.

Garbage feeding sometimes results in wrapped food from schools, bakeries and markets thrown directly into a shredding machine, churned up, plastic and all, to be fed later to pigs. From there, the plastic ends up in the pigs, in turn slaughtered for pork for human consumption.

There are a host of other ways that plastics end up traveling through the food system. On farms, plastics break down into microplastics thanks to a variety of factors - exposure to sunlight, farm animals brushing up against on-farm plastic and from agricultural practices like adding compost that contains plastic, and fertilizer and using mulch film.

Mulch film, often used to prevent weeds and conserve water, ends up deteriorating, and need to be prelaced every one to two years, when the process starts all over again.

Researchers have also found that plants, including crops fed to farm animals, are capable of accumulating microplastics, absorbing them from the soil. Some farm animals like poultry are also fed feed derived from marine sources like fishmeal and seaweed, and these too can contain microplastics.

Microplastics have also been detected in the feces of various domestic animals, including sheep, dairy cows, poultry and pigs. The microplastics in animal waste re-enter the food system when applied to fields, and in turn can also leach into nearby water sources. Irrigation can also bring microplastics into agricultural soils, especially when it contains waste water, either from humans or from factory farms.

According to a 2022 report from the Center for International Environmental Law, another source are synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that are encapsulated in a plastic coating and marketed as "controlled-release." Much like slow release pills, they break down in the soil, releasing not only the pesticide or fertilizer, but the plastic into the ground.

What Can We Do About Microplastics?

Though the exact human health risks of microplastics are not known, some studies have found microplastics present in patients with adverse health outcomes, like cancer and cardiovascular disease. Another study found more microplastics in recent tissue samples as compared to those taken ten years earlier. As toxicology researcher Phoebe Stapleton told People magazine, "while it might not affect my health today, it may affect my health in 50 years."

While researchers and advocates have a variety of recommendations for reducing individual plastic use - like shifting to reusable bottles and filtered tap water rather than bottled - it will likely take a policy intervention to curb plastic pollution. The Biden administration issued a briefing on plastic pollution over the summer, but there are few signs the incoming Trump administration will carry on those policies.


Julieta Cardenas wrote this article for Sentient.


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Two coal plants in Arkansas have received an exemption from the Trump administration and will have two additional years to comply with updated clean air regulations.

As part of an amendment to the Clean Air Act, former President Joe Biden required additional limits on mercury, lead, arsenic and other toxins be in place by 2027. President Donald Trump has given 68 coal plants an additional two years to comply.

Tony Mendoza, senior staff attorney for the Sierra Club, said while Trump is within his constitutional rights, the move is perplexing.

"The president is allowed to extend compliance for two years if he finds that the technology to reduce the emissions is not available and there's a national security interest," Mendoza explained. "I don't think allowing these Arkansas plants to emit more mercury into the air is a national security concern."

The exemptions come on the heels of a Trump executive order to boost coal production. The two Arkansas locations are the White Bluff plant between Little Rock and Pine Bluff and the Plum Point plant in Northeast Arkansas. The White Bluff plant is scheduled for retirement in 2029.

Members of the Sierra Club said they will urge plant operators to curb the pollutants coming from the facilities. Mendoza noted research has shown exposure to pollutants is responsible for countless deaths, heart attacks and asthma.

"More mercury in fish, more mercury in water, more advisories against eating fish in certain rivers and streams and lakes," Mendoza outlined. "Mercury is a serious neurotoxin that causes harm to newborn children. Babies are at harm if their mother is exposed to too much mercury."

The Trump administration invited power plants to apply for the exemption. The president also wants to exempt coal mining projects from environmental reviews, remove restrictions stopping companies from mining coal on federal lands and require the Energy Department to provide funds to support developing coal technologies.

The Washington State Pollution Control Hearings Board is ordering state officials to rewrite pollution discharge permit regulations for concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

The order was issued after a challenge from community and conservation groups, complaining that previous regulations violated state and federal law. The complaint alleged that the state failed to control the discharge of excess nutrients, bacteria and other pollutants from dairy factory farms.

Tyler Lobdell, a staff attorney for Food & Water Watch, said the state must better protect its water, wildlife and communities.

"The state of Washington hasn't been requiring what are called nutrient management plans or the newer pollution prevention plans to be robustly developed by every CAFO," he said, "and they haven't required those plans to be available to the public to make sure they're actually doing what they're supposed to do."

The ruling ordered the state Department of Ecology to require CAFOs to control pollution from animal waste runoff. CAFOs are industrial farming and dairy operations that can generate substantial amounts of animal waste, which must be appropriately managed to prevent water and air pollution.

Lobdell said it's essential that the order stipulates the public's right to review and comment on all regulations before they are issued, noting that the state has a poor track record of protecting waterways from nitrate pollution. He said having the Environmental Protection Agency involved strengthens the process.

"The state of Washington issues a single, combined permit that covers both the Federal Clean Water Act, which is authority delegated by U.S. EPA to Department of Ecology," he said, "but it also covers Washington state law, which is more expansive."

Several conservation groups, including the Waterkeeper Alliance, the Center for Food Safety, Friends of Teppenish Creek and the Sierra Club, participated in filing the complaint. The appellants were represented by the Western Environmental Law Center.


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By Sara Hashemi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Johnson County's long saga with PFAS started in 2022, with an influx of calls to Detective Dana Ames, an environmental crimes investigator for the Texas county located just south of Fort Worth. The calls sounded like "desperate pleas for help from all over the state," Ames says, as residents were suddenly seeing dead animals. "We're getting report after report after report," she recounts, with people telling her, "Yeah, they applied this stuff across the street from us, and our animals are dead." More than two years later, county officials declared a state of disaster, as testing pointed to high levels of PFAS in the county's farmland. PFAS stands for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also dubbed "forever chemicals" because they require much longer spans of time to break down in soils. But in Johnson county, officials attributed these high levels of PFAS to a form of processed waste called biosolids - also known as sewage sludge - that were applied to farms as fertilizer to boost crop fertility.

More than two million dry tons of biosolids were applied to U.S. farmland in 2018, according to a report from a biosolids industry group. Biosolids are sourced from treated sewage - waste flowing from homes and factories, everything from basic manufacturing facilities to slaughterhouse operations. In a press release, county officials characterized the test results as an "immediate threat" - to farms, drinking water and public health.

The process works like this: first, wastewater treatment plants filter out the water from sewage, Christopher Higgins, an environmental chemist at the Colorado School of Mines, tells Sentient. The solids left behind can then be processed and turned into fertilizer. One problem, however, is that so-called forever chemicals do not break down during that process, which means these chemicals travel into soils along with the biosolids.

Johnson County is now at the center of two lawsuits: local farmers are suing the biofertilizer company Synagro Technologies, and, along with the county itself, are also suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Biosolids, Explained

Nearly 4.5 billion pounds of sludge were used in the United States in 2023 alone, applied to farmland or used in compost for gardens and landscaping. The EPA has long promoted agricultural use of sewage sludge as an environmentally friendly way to reuse municipal waste.

Last year, a New York Times investigation revealed that even though the EPA was aware of the potential risks of biosolids since at least 2003, the agency continued to encourage the practice.

The strategy of applying excess waste - whether from livestock operations or city wastewater - is a common one on farms. Fertilizer, whether synthetic or manure, is used to boost yields and enhance crop fertility. But there are other consequences, as the waste and its contaminants don't tend to stay put. In Iowa, for example, fertilizer is so over-applied or misapplied that it ends up contaminating nearby waterways. Manure storage tanks can leak or break down. Dangerous pathogens like E. coli linked to food outbreaks have been traced back to dust particles from manure.

In early January of this year, the EPA released a draft risk assessment that warned of the PFAS contamination that can occur from sewage sludge used as fertilizer. The assessment found that around 31 percent of sewage sludge was used on farms. Any land that has had biosolids applied will have some amount of PFAS, says Higgins, but not necessarily at the levels seen in Johnson County.

Johnson County officials who spoke with Sentient expressed hope the area would receive federal assistance. Yet the Trump administration's moves to slash EPA programs and aid provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could complicate the response, though so far EPA regulators working on biosolids risk do appear to still be employed by the agency.

Other advocates are not so confident about future funding, in part because Texas governor Greg Abbott is a staunch supporter of the president. "I don't have a lot of faith that it will get approved by the governor, but I hope it will," says Kyla Bennett, the director of science policy with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and a former EPA attorney. "I guess we're just going to have to wait and see."

'Shocking to the Conscience'

When Detective Ames first received a complaint in 2022, it was from a rancher seeing fertilizer that had been smoking on a neighboring farm for days. "He was just complaining that it was horrible. He couldn't breathe. It smelled bad," Ames tells Sentient. The smoke had caused the valley where the farmer lived to fill up with smoke.

Ames drove out to the farm and found 12 to 15 large piles of smoking biosolids. She then brought what she learned to her boss, Constable Troy Fuller, and County Commissioner Larry Woolley. From there, Ames launched an investigation that involved calls with scientists, environmentalists and EPA whistleblowers. "It was shocking to the conscience, honestly, what all I learned," she says.

"We tested the well water. We tested soil, we tested the pond water. From animals that were dying, we tested their livers. We tested fish in the ponds," she says. "We had PFAS contamination in everything."

A stillborn calf's liver had over 610,00 parts per trillion (ppt) of PFAS. Fish had 57,000 ppt of PFAS. They found PFAS in a property's well water too, according to Ames.

The levels of PFAS found in Johnson County were unusual - "really, really high," confirms Higgins, a researcher who was not involved in the investigation but reviewed the public test results. He says there could be two reasons for that. Either the farmers applied more biosolids than is typical, or the levels in the sludge were just unusually high to begin with. "It's more likely the latter," he says.

Ames feels an obligation to uncover what happened. "I think we owe our citizens to know what's happening here, to listen, to believe them when they tell us there's something wrong, even though we can't put our finger on it," she recalls telling the commissioners. "And we need to test, because if what I'm reading is accurate and what I'm being told is accurate, we may have a very dangerous contaminant that has been land applied, and that could have a lot of far-reaching consequences."

County and Watchdog Groups Pursue Lawsuits and Legislation

"The more we allow these biosolids to spread, and the more we allow this to continue without cleaning it up, or at least attempting to clean it up, is just sentencing the farmers of Texas to decades of unusable land, inedible meat, milk, fish, dairy," says Bennett, who works for the watchdog group PEER.

PEER is representing Johnson County and other plaintiffs in their case against the EPA, which aims to compel the agency to address the PFAS and biosolids under the Clean Water Act. "It's rendering the farmland useless, and harming the people themselves."

Christopher Boedeker, the county judge who issued the declaration, tells Sentient that one of the primary purposes of the declaration is to work with the state government to pass legislation that addresses and stops the contamination. "We've done all of this out in the daylight with the intent of shining a spotlight on what's going on here," Boedeker says.

"And then the other part of it is, of course, making our citizens who have been impacted eligible for federal aid." The affected farmers in Johnson County have kept their cattle, but are not selling them, and county officials would like to see the farmers compensated.

"I've had, strangely enough, a few negative interactions, and those have all been questions of, well, why didn't you all do more sooner?" says Boedeker. "I feel like that's in some ways validating, that people believe we're doing the right thing here. I think we're doing the right thing here."

The EPA told Sentient it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

"It's really important to recognize that this is not a partisan issue," says Laura Dumais, legal counsel at PEER. "No one wants toxic chemicals in their food. No one wants farmers to be poisoned. Johnson County is a rural, conservative county, and everyone's reaction is: how come the EPA hasn't regulated this."

How to address PFAS under current regulations can quickly get complicated, says Bennett, who is the director of science policy for PEER. "We don't know how widespread the contamination is. We don't know how much it will cost to try to remediate it, or whether it can be remediated. There are a lot of unanswered questions."

Texas lawmaker Helen Kerwin has already filed a bill to require biosolids to be tested for PFAS levels. Other states have already taken steps to restrict their use. Michigan, California and Wisconsin require wastewater treatment plans to test biosolids for PFAS, while Connecticut and Maine have banned the use of biosolids on farmland all together.

If anything, says Higgins, the situation in Johnson County "indicates we need more testing. As an environmental chemist, I would not be disappointed if every single soil farm that had received biosolids over the last 50 years was tested. I think that's not an unreasonable ask."

Ames put it more bluntly: "Stop using our [agricultural] land as the city's toilet."


Sara Hashemi wrote this article for Sentient.


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