NEW YORK, NY August 23, 2004 — This is New York Public Radio, 93.9 and AM 820, WNYC and wnyc.org. Good afternoon, I'm Amy Eddings.

On a recent, rainy evening, along the Hudson River, 28 people clambered across a slippery metal gang plank to the deck of a waiting ship. They were heading for a night time cruise around Manhattan. On the water, with the city sparkling before you like a jewel, it's a romantic and beautiful journey. Even when your ship is a sludge boat.

Woman: Nothing like a sludge boat!

Sludge doesn't sound pretty, and it's not. It's treated sewage, collected from the city's toilets and sinks, from the runoff in its street sewers and from the discharges of its factories. The Department of Environmental Protection manages the sewage system, and, for the past six years, it's offered an annual summer sludge boat trip for members of its Citizens Advisory Committee.

They love it.

Pat O'Brien: Well, I love the city. You know. And I love going around the city, and I like the different weathers
Amy: But on a sludge boat?
O'Brien: Well, its just like a tanker. It's just a regular boat, and you don't see any sludge.

Pat O'Brien, a committee member, has been on the sludge boat tour since DEP first offered it.

Eddings: Is this an event you look forward to every year?
O'Brien: Oh, yeah.
Eddings: Why is that?
O'Brien: Well, it's just good to be with people you've been working with all year. Move my little agendas along.

Engineer: You might change your mind! Where's that Linda back there?!
Woman: Come on, Linda!

It's raining, so most people are crowded inside, sampling Italian pastries and getting tours of the engine room, from the engineer, Bryan Wuthenow.

Bryan Wuthenow: That's the main engine. /Each one of those big things has a big piston in it and it's going like this up and down.
Eddings: And where's the sludge?
Engineer: The sludge?! Okay, come on, I'll show you the sludge. I think you're the first one that ever actually wanted to see the sludge, but I'll show ya!

Out on the forward deck, Wuthenow opens a small metal door and points downward.

Wuthenow: That's, down in there is the sludge. And there's four tanks on each side.

The city used to dump the sludge into the ocean. For more than fifty years, it did this. But the federal government banned ocean dumping in 1988. The city had only three years to come up with an alternative. At that time, many municipalities put their sludge in landfills, but the city chose not to go that route. Instead, it invested in a more progressive - and expensive - alternative. It built new facilities and hired outside companies to turn the sludge into biosolids, for use as as fertilizer. Al Lopez is a deputy commissioner at the Department of Environmental Protection


Lopez: if one were to look at the economics of straight disposal, you would naturally go towards disposal and landfilling of the material. We felt that the investment in building processes was a much greater benefit to the environment in general, the environment on a long term basis, and so we made those decisions.

At a cost of 670 million dollars, the city built eight sludge dewatering facilities, like this one on Ward's Island in the East River. This is the final destination of this evening's sludge boat tour. Here, powerful blue centrifuges spin the water out of the sludge. The end result is called - get this - cake. Beneath the centrifuges, plant manager Ron Wallace points to a a dark brown, crumbly substance.

Wallace: The centrifuge is dropping it down to a cross conveyor belt. Okay? And that's what you see dropping down now, that's a cake.
Eddings: It looks just like dirt!
Wallace: It looks just like dirt, right.

This cake gets directly applied to Colorado ranchlands. It also gets mixed with lime and added to crops in New Jersey, Arkansas, and Alabama. It's turned into pellets, and placed in Florida citrus groves. We'll have more on this aspect of the story tomorrow.

For now, members of the Citizens Advisory Committee are admiring the view from the sludge boat. CAC co-chair Michael Greene.

Greene: This is the $20 seat right here, when you're going up the East River and there's that wall, and you're going under the bridges, and you're going, Oh my God, and you realize you're on the biggest boat in the harbor right here, and it's just .so cool. It's from one sewage facility to the other, and throughout the whole thing, we're just carrying a whole boatload of it! You know what I mean? So it's just It's great!

Hear more on the use of New York City's sludge tomorrow, on New York Public Radio, WNYC.