MODERN TIMES
Art Hobson
NWA Times 25 April 2009
Will Fayetteville pay for poultry industry pollution?
Northwest Arkansas cities might soon have to cough up tens of millions of dollars for water treatment plant improvements in an effort to fix a pollution problem that the region's poultry industry has long neglected and evaded.There's a good chance that even these tens of millions won't fix the problem, because the poultry industry will continue polluting.
The problem is phosphorus pollution in the Illinois and other regional rivers.Phosphorus fosters algae growth that eventually turns waterways into putrid dead zones.The seriousness of the problem is demonstrated by Tulsa's successful 2005 lawsuit against six poultry companies for phosphorus run-off that fouled Tulsa's Tenkiller Lake water supply.The U.S. Geological Survey found that most of the phosphorus came from farm and suburban run-off rather than from water treatment plants.A 2006 study by Dan Storm of Oklahoma State University concluded that most phosphorus getting into the Illinois comes from poultry litter (a mixture of dung, rice hulls, and straw) that's spread on farmlands as fertilizer and as a method of disposal.The problem comes both from the immediate run-off of recently-applied litter and from years of phosphorus buildup in the soil.
Phosphorus was a known problem in 1986 when Oklahoma sued the Environmental Protection Agency to stop Fayetteville's discharge into the Illinois River.The case reached the Supreme Court, which in 1992 ruled for the first time that upstream states had to meet downstream states' water standards, but the case nevertheless failed because Oklahoma's standards were not sufficiently specific.
Oklahoma studied the problem, and in 2002 imposed a quite specific maximum of .037 milligrams of phosphorus per liter of water (mg/L) for its eastern waterways and for waterways entering Oklahoma from Arkansas, allowing ten years for the new standard to be met.It's a well-founded standard, as you can learn from my September 3, 2005 column; you can see all five of my previous columns about this issue at listed under "river pollution."The .037 mg/L limit leans over backward to industry.It's the highest level that has any chance of maintaining healthy Oklahoma rivers.
Phosphorus in these rivers has run at monstrous .100 to .400 mg/L levels for years, many times the maximum safe level.The Arkansas poultry industry, realizing that Oklahoma's .037 limit implied they would have to stop spreading their litter on farmland, balked.They argued that the standard was "unattainable," a code word for "too expensive," arguing instead for a vague "best practices" standard incorporating trial burning of litter as an energy source, minimal litter shipments out of the region, and other things they should have done for decades.
Impatient with the lack of real cooperation and progress, Oklahoma in 2007 asked a federal judge to forbid farmers from spreading litter in the Illinois River watershed.The poultry industry has been fighting this ever since.
Now the EPA, citing the .037 mg/L standard and perhaps energized by the change of leadership in Washington, has stepped in with an announcement that it will reduce the limit on phosphorus discharge from one Northwest Arkansas water treatment plant to 0.1 mg/L with the implication that the same limit would eventually be imposed on all regional treatment plants.Fayetteville's new water treatment plant discharges less than 1 mg/L, an admirably low level that's already among the nation's lowest.Phosphorus is greatly diluted once the discharge mixes into the river, and it's assumed that a 1 mg/L discharge contributes little to phosphorus levels in the rivers.But the EPA apparently thinks differently.
The chief sources of phosphorus pollution are immediate runoff from recently-applied litter, long-term phosphorus buildup from years of putting litter on farms, poultry processing plants that feed phosphorus to wastewater plants, immediate runoff from lawn fertilizers, and wastewater treatment plants.As mentioned above, most research has found poultry responsible for most of the problem.This conclusion is further supported by recent University of Arkansas research showing that farmers in the Eucha-Spavinaw watershed just north of our Illinois watershed have reduced the amount of litter they spread on the land by an admirable 75 percent during the past 4 years.The litter reduction happened because of a federal lawsuit, settled in 2003.Despite the reduction, the study found that it will be years before water quality in Oklahoma's Eucha and Spavinaw lakes, important parts of Tulsa's drinking water supply, improves.The problem, according to the study, is that years of putting litter on farmland has bound phosphorus into the soil, where it will takes years to draw down.Right now, despite a big reduction in the amount of litter being spread, long-term phosphorus storage in the soil is causing phosphorus levels in the lakes to continue rising.
Arkansas made a big mistake by opposing, instead of assisting, Oklahoma's actions to get the poultry industry to greatly reduce its pollution.I don't see how we can ever solve this problem so long as we continue taking industry's side.A ban on applying litter to farmland, as demanded by Oklahoma's lawsuit, is probably what's needed.Now, because waterways remain polluted and because EPA is looking for solutions, our cities are paying the price.We need to ask some hard questions about the real sources of phosphorus pollution.It's not at all clear that treatment plants are causing much of the problem.
We should agree with the EPA that there is a problem that needs solving, and that .037 mg/L is the right standard.The responsibility for fixing it and paying for it should rest with those who caused the problem.