| Toxic Waste in Fertilizer
Get the Facts About an Industrial Secret
- Fact 1: Industries around the country are disposing of toxic waste by giving it to fertilizer manufacturers.
- Fact 2: Some fertilizer has been found to contain dioxin, one of the most dangerous environmental chemicals ever identified, and heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury.
- Fact 3: Some plants such as lettuce, corn and potatoes uptake metals.
- Fact 4: Common fertilizers used by families on gardens or by farmers on fields of edible crops may contain toxic metals in amounts greater than what the law defines as “hazardous waste.”
- Fact 5: The law does not require fertilizer manufacturers to label which fertilizers contain toxic metals or where the hazardous wastes were obtained.
- Fact 6: Toxic metals known to have serious health effects are present in fertilizers, yet there is no assessment of the cumulative danger to children, animals and soils resulting from the persistent application of fertilizers containing hazardous waste.
What is the Immediate Concern for Oregonians?
The Oregon Department of Agriculture is soon to adopt new rules that ignore the overall health and environmental concerns of applying hazardous materials to our land AND obstructs the public’s right to know what is in the fertilizers they use. Oregon Toxics Alliance hopes to educate the public and join in citizen coalitions to act quickly to insure that our state adopts comprehensive legislation governing toxicity in fertilizer.
Human Health and Environmental Concerns
Fertilizers made from toxic waste that have been tested for content were shown to contain high levels of dioxin, mercury, chromium, lead, copper, zinc, arsenic, beryllium, titanium, and radioactive waste. Three of these substances, lead, cadmium and mercury, are Persistent Bioacculumulative Toxins (PBT’s) that cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive problems. PBT’s are known to persist for a long time in the environment and can acculumalte in human tissue. This increases the long-term health risks from these chemicals because, once in our bodies, PBT’s have the documented potential to cause permanent harm. Children are particularly vulnerable to chemical contamination and the results, such as damage to the central nervous system or reproductive systems, can be devastating for a lifetime.
Studies have shown that various food crops uptake these metals so that, when consumed by farm animals and humans, the metals are absorbed into their bodies. Human exposure to these chemicals also occurs when they become airborne (through wind), contaminate surface water (through run-off), and leach into our ground water (through filtration).
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