Organic group protests “toxic biosolids”

San Francisco-The San Francisco Public Utilities District won’t be giving away any more biosolid fertilizer to area homeowners anytime soon after a confrontation with organic advocates who went so far as to pour out a bucket of “toxic sludge” at city hall. “Yes, they did that at a staged event on Thursday [March 4],” district spokesman Tyrone Jue told Green Markets. He said it was the culmination of differences with the Organic Consumers Assn. over the safety of biosolids that the district officials thought they had resolved by agreeing to remove the word “organic” from bags containing the biosolids. The organic group maintains that the product is being distributed even though it contains “highly concentrated toxic sludge containing anything that went down the drain but did not break down during the treatment process.” Jue said the district invited environmental groups last November for a public forum. “One of the concerns that was brought up was people might get confused with ‘organic’ on the bag labels,” he related. “So three days later we removed any reference to the compost as being organic. We sent them all our reports and data hoping to engage in a dialogue, which was the reason we brought them back to the meeting.” The district has held six giveaways since 2007, each time distributing approximately 20 tons of bagged compost to community gardeners at pickups inside the southeast treatment plant in the Bay View District and another one at the Oceanside plant near the San Francisco Zoo “to educate the public in the use of biosolids,” Jue noted. He said the district also provides biosolids free of charge to farmers in Solano County north of San Francisco “because the land is very arid out there and they can till it in to provide the nutritional value.”