NEW YORK, NY August 24, 2004 — Taking a tour around the tip of Manhattan in a boat filled with treated sewage may not sound like your idea of fun. But for some, as we reported yesterday, it's become an annual summertime ritual.

The Department of Environmental Protection, which manages the city's sewage system, operates the sludge boats and has offered this outing for the past six years to members of its Citizens Advisory Committee. This evening's voyage is taking treated sewage to Ward's Island. There, it gets spun dry, and sent off to be used as fertilizer. Mike Quinn is DEP's director of collection facilities.

Quinn: Some of it gets directly applied in Virginia and Colorado. And some of it goes to the Bronx, where it gets pellitized into small pellets and shipped to Florida for use in citrus groves. And some of it gets composted as well. And you're left with a material that's suitable for nurseries and flower beds.

Most gardeners are comfortable with using composted cow manure in their vegetable gardens. It improves soil quality and adds important nutrients to plants. But treated New York City sewage? On board the sludge boat, I put the eww question to Michael Greene.

Eddings: How is that any different, though, than somebody using cow manure?
Greene: That's what I say!

Greene is the co-chair of the Advisory Committee.

Greene: That's what I say, except you can make a point, yeah, yeah, that's what you say, but cow manure comes from the cow directly, and this thing is going through the pipes and other things get in it, and it's human, waste, so you can get more freaked out but we're managing it very well I think it can be used.

Federal and state environmental officials, and even some environmental advocates, agree that properly treated sewage CAN be used on pastures and farmland. The sticking point between the officials and many members of the public is, what does properly treated mean? For the DEP, it means passing state and federal standards. Pathogens, such as salmonella and tapeworms, must be reduced, and that takes place at the city's treatment plants. But the city's wastewater also contains lead, copper, and other heavy metals from factories and old pipes, which the plants can't handle.

Lopez: And so the concern of the general public is that those heavy metals would accumulate on the property and then possibly taken up by the crops grown on that land.

Al Lopez is a deputy commissioner at the Department of Environmental Protection. He's standing on the rainy, windy deck of the sludge boat. He says people should not worry about the quality of biosolids coming from New York City.

Lopez: New York City is not an industrial city. And not only is it not an industrial city, for the industry that does exist in New York, we've addressed the concerns of heavy metals and contaminants long ago through our pretreatment program.

Since 1987, the DEP's industrial pretreatment program and pipe corrosion program reduced the amount of heavy metals by 65 percent, from 72-hundred pounds per day, to 25-hundred pounds. And federal and state standards require the city to reduce the presence of 10 heavy metals to trace amounts. But Citizens Advisory Committee member Pat O'Brien is still uncomfortable.

O'Brien: They've established standards. The EPA has established standards. Well, the standards are different in Europe, they're much more stringent, so who's correct?

Alan Rubin, a senior biosolids scientist at the EPA, agrees that the precautionary principle used by Germany, Denmark, and other European Union countries is more stringent.

Rubin: Then the question is, well, how much more, and how adequate are the risk based approaches that we use in the United States to protect public health and the environment? So it's not that it's better. It's different. It's a different margin of protection.

But Robert F. Kennedy, Junior, head of the environmental group, Riverkeeper, thinks there are big gaps in the EPA's data and methodology.

Kennedy: They don't require the testing, they don't require regular testing, and they don't require testing for a lot of the parameters, meaning a lot of the pollutants, that would be in that sludge. You don't have to test for PCBs, for certain kinds of metals. In many cases the EPA doesn't know what it's spreading.

The EPA says, that's not true. A spokeswoman says the agency reviews unregulated pollutants. Last fall, for instance, the EPA looked at dioxin and PCB levels in treated sewage, and determined their levels were not enough of a health risk to warrant adding them to the list of regulated toxins. The EPA concedes it leaves most of the testing to the states. New York state has found no problems with the quality of the city's biosolids, or the fertilizer pellets created by one of its subcontractors. But the New York Organic Fertilizer Company, in the South Bronx, has been the subject of odor complaints, however, and has been cited for operational violations this year and last year.

Meanwhile, New Yorkers are creating the raw material for biosolids at the rate of 1.2 billion gallons a day. And, since the early 90's, the city has been doing more with it than just dumping it in the ocean, like it used to. Even the most vocal environmental advocates concede that's a good thing.