The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has withdrawn proposed safety regulations for sewage sludge contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, which is commonly spread on farmland as fertilizer.
The decision, reported by The Guardian, discards draft scientific assessments produced under the Biden administration less than two years ago.
Those assessments linked the sludge to severe health risks for farmers and the national food supply.
Policy Shift Justification
To justify the reversal, the EPA stated that contaminated biosolids do not pose a widespread threat to the general public, as they are applied to only a small percentage of domestic cropland.
However, the agency also published comments in the federal register advising Americans to research sludge utilities independently to protect home gardens from highly toxic chemical contamination found in commercial fertilizers.
Public health advocates and legal experts criticized the rollback.
They noted that current rules only require monitoring for nine heavy metals, despite sludge containing thousands of synthetic compounds.
The EPA's move effectively kills proposed regulations that would have addressed the growing concern over PFAS contamination in agriculture.
