Dear Mary Polak, Minister of the Environment:

 

I would like to react to statements you made on a Merritt radio station last week.

I think it is time to pull back the curtain — on these lands covered in waste, and on the way this has been allowed to happen.

Over the past few decades, governments (local, provincial and federal) have allowed the waste management industry to dictate its agenda and help create legislation (within the departments of agriculture, health and environment) which promotes the cheapest method of toxin dispersal.

What is in the waste industry’s best interest is not what is best for the Canadian people.

Industry’s easy solution is not the people’s preferred option.

The government has for too long now allowed industry to dictate its priorities over those of the citizens it is meant to serve.

Without hesitation, you swallowed completely the industry’s rebranding of its toxic by-product, sewer sludge, as “beneficial biosolids.”

We ask: beneficial to whom? It is surely beneficial to the sludge industry as it allows them to easily get rid of thousands of tons of pollutant.

It is certainly beneficial to the government as it is the cheapest solution (though dangerous) to the waste build-up in our cities.

It also benefits the trucking business with large contracts for hauling these toxic piles out to rural areas.

Unfortunately, it is decidedly not beneficial to the environment in which it is spread, nor to the people who must live within it.

Mary, the waste industry system does a fabulous job at removing toxins, pathogens and heavy metal from raw sewage in order to return the water to mother earth.

But remember: that mixture that was removed is the very same material that is being reintroduced to these lands in the form of “biosolids” — a warm and cuddly term for a sinister mix of pollutants, concentrated and collected by the treatment process.

We took them out for a reason — let’s not pretend that by some strange alchemical  process they become “beneficial” all of a sudden.

The language has been modified by the industry, not this chemical goulash.

Of the thousands of chemicals contained in the resultant sludge, only a handful are tested for, and only some removed.

The rest is left to be thinly spread over the farms and forests with the woefully reckless belief that risks will be low — though how they can know this when they test for so little is certainly a question begging an answer.

Many recent credible scientific papers have questioned this practice of spreading waste on land, and are issuing dire warnings about the many emerging chemicals and poisons in this so-called “treated” effluent.

Mary, we are what we eat.

This “toilet to table” practice is a folly masterminded by the waste industry and sanctioned by governments more interested in cheap, expedient solutions to serious issues, than in safeguarding the environment or the health of its citizens.

There is a reason why food manufacturers like Whole Foods, Campbells and DelMonte will not use crops grown with sewer sludge — they believe the risk of toxic contamination is too high.

Why then  is the waste industry involved in creating legislation that impacts the safety of our food production?

Why are you allowing the waste industry’s facile “solution” to become an environmental burden?

We have allowed the industry to write the rules, alter the language, and manipulate this crucial debate for too long.

It has been a dirty secret, and one that we are determined to shed light on before it is too late.

Mary, please look at the cleaner, safer waste management methods employed by other countries that have looked at the science and see that the risk for toxic build-up is just too high.

There are solutions, like properly filtered incineration, that actually return energy back to the grid.

Our farmlands and forests need to be cared for — they give us life.

Is it wise to be loading these life-giving lands with the most sinister pollutants of our industrialized cities?

We are putting a terrible burden on mother nature, and on future generations. I would hope that we, the present caretakers of this land, would leave this earth in a better condition than when we arrived, rather than bestow upon the future what will become, under the sludge-industry’s negligent direction -— a true wasteland.

 

Sincerely,

Don Vincent

Member of The Friends of the Nicola Valley Society

Merritt BC