Biosolids Applied to Land: Advancing Standards and Practices
Summary
Wastewater treatment in the United States is a major cornerstone of efforts to keep the nation’s waters clean. Sewage sludge is the solid, semisolid, or liquid residue generated during treatment of domestic sewage. Since the early 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the wastewater treatment industry have promoted recycling of sewage sludge. With the prohibition of ocean disposal of wastewater residuals in 1992, the use of sewage sludge as soil amendments (soil conditioners or fertilizers) or for land reclamation has been increased to reduce the volume of sewage sludge that must be landfilled, incinerated, or disposed of at surface sites. Approximately 5.6 million dry tons of sewage sludge are used or disposed of annually in the United States; approximately 60% of that is used for land application. Depending on the extent of treatment, sewage sludge may be applied where little exposure of the general public is expected to occur on the sites, such as on agricultural land, forests, and reclamation sites, or on public-contact sites, such as parks, golf courses, lawns, and home gardens. EPA estimates that sewage sludge is applied to approximately 0.1% of available agricultural land in the United States on an annual basis.
The regulation governing land application of sewage sludge was established by EPA in 1993 in the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 40 (Part 503), under Section 405 (d) of the Clean Water Act. The regulation is intended to protect public health and the environment. The Part 503 rule established management practices for land application of sewage sludge, concentration limits and loading rates for chemicals, and treatment and use requirements designed to control and reduce pathogens and attraction of disease vectors (insects or other organisms that can transport pathogens). In this report, the term biosolids refers to sewage sludge treated to meet the land-application standards in the Part 503 rule or any other equivalent land-application standards.
The chemical and pathogen land-application standards in the Part 503 rule were developed differently. For chemicals, EPA conducted extensive risk assessments that involved identifying the chemical constituents in biosolids judged likely to pose the greatest hazard, characterizing the most likely exposure scenarios, and using scientific information and assumptions to calculate concentration limits and loading rates (amount of chemical that can be applied to a unit area of land). Nine inorganic chemicals in biosolids are currently regulated, and EPA is considering the addition of a class of organic chemicals (dioxins) to its regulation.
Monitoring data on some of the regulated inorganic chemicals indicate a decrease in their concentrations over the past decade, due in part to the implementation of wastewater pretreatment programs. Thus, the chemical limits for biosolids can be achieved easily. In contrast to the chemical standards, the pathogen standards are not risk-based concentration limits for individual pathogens but are technologically based requirements aimed at reducing the presence of pathogens and potential exposures to them by treatment or a combination of treatment and use restrictions. Monitoring biosolids is required for indicator organisms (certain species of organisms believed to indicate the presence of a larger set of pathogens).
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