Maine was warned about toxins in sludge decades before PFAS crisis began

In 1983, two farmers attending a growers’ meeting in southwestern Maine heard about a new product that would change their lives, and farming in the state, for decades to come.

That product was sludge, a muddy byproduct of industrial processes and municipal wastewater treatment that also contained nutrients for enriching soil.

For Fred Stone, a dairy farmer from Arundel, the decision to spread the fertilizer meant a free way to enrich his clay soil to grow cow feed.

“I didn’t give it a second thought,” Stone recently said of his decision to use sludge. 

But Tim Leary decided against it. It initially sounded like a good idea since he didn’t have enough manure for his Saco farm. But he later talked to friends at the wastewater department and local dairy who cautioned about the chemicals and heavy metals likely to be in the fertilizer, which was made of refuse from the S.D. Warren Paper Mill in Westbrook. 

That growers’ meeting proved to be a trigger for the liberal spreading of sludge throughout Maine, including through a state-sponsored program. The decisions made by Stone and Leary that day sent them down separate paths, the effects of which both farmers still feel today.

A few years after that fateful meeting, Maine’s former state toxicologist raised alarms about finding dioxin, a major carcinogen, in the sludge. Even some companies distributing sludge hesitated to sign an agreement that they worried might make them liable for the material’s contents, according to a 1991 document obtained by the Bangor Daily News. 

Maine’s PFAS crisis is often portrayed as a result of regulators and health officials not knowing about the chemicals that were present in the sludge spread throughout the state. But there were concerns about the sludge’s contents almost from the start of the state-run program, interviews with industry figures and thousands of documents reviewed by the BDN show. 

The reporting reveals for the first time the magnitude of the state’s failure to take strong actions against using sludge despite more than 30 years of warnings about toxic chemicals in the material and missed opportunities to end its spreading program, decades before PFAS became part of Mainers’ lexicon. 

By the time Maine finally banned sludge spreading in 2022, it had been laid on more than 1,000 places. Recent state tests found unsafe levels of PFAS at more than 100 farms and 500 residences, dooming some businesses and leaving many Mainers living on heavily contaminated land. 

“I think it’s inexcusable that we were not testing sludge for lots of things and just applying it to farmland without any concern,” Patrick MacRoy, former deputy director of Defend Our Health, a Portland-based nonprofit, recently told the BDN. 

Sludge is still being spread on land in every state except Maine and Connecticut, which have comprehensive bans. 

In the beginning

Maine began promoting sludge as a safe, free soil additive for farmers in 1983. Flyers went out. Newspapers ran celebratory coverage. A 1988 column in the BDN called composted sludge “black gold for vegetables” and declared its use “a sort of civic duty.”

“A couple companies were actively promoting sludge, and were upset when I said I didn’t want it,” Leary said. 

The state required regular testing of the material for heavy metals including mercury and arsenic, based on federal limits. Maine’s paper mills and municipal waste operations submitted self-monitored results to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection quarterly. Permits issued in the 1980s and reviewed by the BDN said that sludge would not pollute water, contaminate air, be a health hazard or create a nuisance. The permits required specific setbacks from neighbors and wetlands.

But even as the program expanded, its testing regime had significant gaps. Among the chemicals not being monitored was dioxin.

The chemical is a byproduct of the paper bleaching process used by Maine mills, whose waste was spread across the state. It has been linked to cancer and reproductive and developmental problems, according to the World Health Organization.

Former state toxicologist Robert Frakes found dioxin in sludge-spread fields, and in a 1986 paper on the topic he warned people not to consume meat or milk from contaminated land. The state adopted limits on dioxin, looser than the ones Frakes pushed for, that same year. 

Even when those limits were set, Frakes said some of the self-monitored tests for the chemical were inaccurate. In a December 1987 memo to the DEP, he objected to Kennebec Sanitary Treatment District’s application for sludge spreading, saying the district’s dioxin test results were so poorly conducted and inconsistent “that they are nearly worthless,” documents uncovered by the BDN showed.

But the program continued. Frakes, working in a predecessor agency to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, fought an uphill battle for years with state regulators and politicians to make the dioxin standards more stringent. Then-Gov. John McKernan and paper mill lobbyists “effectively neutralized” Frakes and his colleagues, excluding them from regulatory discussions, according to a 1993 Maine Sunday Telegram article.

“There was resistance to these kinds of regulations that might harm the economy of Maine,” Frakes said. “I was called into the commissioner’s office a couple of times for recommending limits.”

The political resistance was enough to make Frakes quit his job in 1993. 

But Frakes’ findings influenced at least one major sludge producer, S.D. Warren, the Westbrook paper mill now owned by Sappi, to stop spreading the material. The DEP had informed the mill about dioxin in the sludge, and S.D. Warren identified the finding as an “image problem,” according to a person familiar with the sludge-spreading program who asked not to be named because of ongoing PFAS lawsuits in the state.

The discovery of dioxin in sludge “blew the whole program apart,” the person said. The mill stopped spreading sludge by about 1990 because of public opposition and press coverage. 

Fueling the pushback was the memory of Agent Orange, David Courtemanch, a former DEP scientist, said. The herbicide, which contained dioxin, had been used to defoliate forests during the Vietnam War, causing cancer, birth defects and chronic diseases for millions of Vietnamese and U.S. veterans.

Citizen groups organized. The Standish Citizens Opposed to Sludge pushed the town to adopt an ordinance in 1988 strictly limiting sludge spreading on land. Dolores Lymburner, who led the group, received threatening phone calls in the middle of the night to stop protesting, her son Tony Folsom recalled in a recent interview with the BDN.

Sludge spreading continued in other parts of Maine, largely because paper mills and municipalities needed a place to put their overflowing waste. The Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988 prohibited disposing of sludge in the ocean, which caused panic in overflowing wastewater districts across the country, said Scott Firmin, general manager of the Portland Water District. 

Hawk Ridge Compost Facility in Unity Township, which began processing and composting sludge around that time, became the state’s largest such facility. 

Abutters of the property regularly complained about odors. State records show ongoing calls complaining to Hawk Ridge’s manager before the facility installed odor containment equipment. One resident erected a sign on Route 139 reading: “World’s Largest Outhouse, Half Mile on Left.” 

The site, which is heavily contaminated by PFAS, is expected to close at the end of June, as first reported by the BDN.

The advent of PFAS

By the early 2000s, PFAS began to attract attention from health advocates in Maine. The chemicals had been used since the 1940s in products including firefighting foam, non-stick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics. They don’t break down in the environment.

Health advocates discovered that PFAS chemicals, which have been linked to kidney and testicular cancers and other health issues, were in people’s bodies. They did not connect it to sludge. We now know that once a person is exposed to PFAS, either through breathing or eating the chemicals, the person excretes the chemicals and they enter the waste stream, along with PFAS in clothing, cosmetics and kitchen pots that are washed at home.

Chemical manufacturers including 3M and DuPont had kept details about PFAS under wraps, much as tobacco companies had concealed the dangers of smoking. 3M reportedly knew of risks to human health as early as the 1970s, when one of its scientists discovered PFAS in every sample from blood banks around the U.S., but did not release the results publicly. The company began disclosing its internal test results to the federal government starting in 1998 and after regulatory pressure and lawsuits. 

A 2007 study called Body of Evidence, led by environmental groups, examined 40 chemicals found in everyday life among a group of 13 Mainers. One finding stands out in retrospect: former Maine Senate Minority Leader Dana Dow, R-Waldoboro, had PFAS levels roughly 50% above the national average for men. 

Dow still owns the furniture store where he had long been spraying sofas and other items with stain-resistant chemicals. He stopped using them after seeing the results, “partly to keep my workers safe,” he said. PFAS was a secondary concern in the study, which inspired the 2008 Toxic Chemicals in Children’s Products Act that regulated chemicals in children’s goods.

In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency required Maine regulators to examine groundwater and fish tissue near former military bases for PFAS. Brunswick Naval Air Station, which used firefighting foam containing PFAS, was among the sites tested. Some “do not eat” advisories for nearby wildlife followed.

Neither study examined sludge. The connection was not confirmed until 2016, when tests on Stone’s Arundel dairy farm showed high PFAS levels in the soil, water and milk. Regulators initially thought the contamination was isolated to Stone’s farm, and worried that if it was found on other farms, it might harm the reputation of Maine’s milk industry, documents obtained by the BDN showed. Tests quickly confirmed their worries.

In January 2019, Norm Labbe, the former superintendent of the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District and the first person to tell Stone his land was contaminated, wrote to newly elected Gov. Janet Mills urging immediate action.

“It is my firm belief that in order to protect public health, we need to act on this in a matter of weeks or months, not years,” Labbe wrote.

Mills created a PFAS task force that year. No major legislative action came until 2022, when Maine lawmakers banned land-spreading of sludge and compost made from it, more than three decades after Frakes first documented the dangers of what was in sludge. 

Some said the absence of federal regulations made earlier action hard to justify.

“Regulating waste products proved tragically inadequate because of lax chemical regulation at the federal level,” said Marina Schauffler, who recently published a book about PFAS called “Inescapable: Facing Up to Forever Chemicals.”

Others point to a deeper pattern in how institutions and governments respond to chemical risk.

“If it is not clear how risky something is, how sure do we have to be before we can act?” said David Ropeik, a risk assessment expert based in Massachusetts.

When former Sen. Tom Saviello, R-Wilton, was the environment manager at International Paper in Jay, that was his credo.

“Our presumption was, prove it’s bad,” he said.

Frakes had proven sludge was bad as early as 1986, when he discovered dioxin in it. But that did not change the outcome.

Representatives from the DEP, the current state toxicologist and the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry declined to be interviewed, citing state lawsuits against PFAS makers. Maine’s attorney general and various municipalities have filed more than 10 lawsuits against PFAS makers, joining the thousands of legal challenges nationwide. 

“State agencies typically do not comment on pending litigation or respond to questions relating to matters at issue in pending litigation, which often implicate privileged information,” DEP spokesperson David Madore said.

Moving on

More than 40 years after the meeting where Stone and Leary were introduced to sludge, their farms differ greatly based on the decisions they made back then.

Before the PFAS discovery on his farm, Stone of Stoneridge Farm had been planning to install robots in his barn to handle an expanded herd. He has since signed a deal with a company to install a solar array near the field where he buried the 130 contaminated cows he had to kill. 

Stone, who has become one of the most iconic faces of Maine’s PFAS crisis, does not blame state regulators for his misfortunes.

“I’m not faulting the DEP, they were flat-footed,” he said.

Thinking back on his decision to skip the free sludge based on his friends’ early concerns about the material, farmer Leary took a deep exhale during a phone interview. 

“Now looking back, holy smoke, I’m glad we didn’t,” said Leary, whose farm now sells mostly vegetables, along with milk, butter, eggs and meat. 

Courtemanch, the former Maine DEP scientist, said the department was in a difficult situation because of its dual roles in both promoting and regulating sludge. Reversing the course meant acknowledging the program had caused harm. 

He and others said the pattern keeps repeating itself. Industries promote products, including BPA and tobacco, as safe, but accumulating harmful evidence forces late action. Then another chemical is discovered.

“PFAS is the current environmental bogeyman,” said risk analyst Ropeik. “There will be another.”

Lori Valigra reports on the environment for the BDN’s Maine Focus investigative team. You may reach her by email at lvaligra@bangordailynews.com. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation, a fund at the Maine Community Foundation and donations by BDN readers.