From The New York Times:
Today, the E.P.A. continues to promote sewage sludge as fertilizer and doesn’t require testing for PFAS, despite the fact that whistle-blowers, academics, state officials and the agency’s internal studies over the years have also raised contamination concerns.
“These are highly complex mixtures of chemicals,” said David Lewis, a former E.P.A. microbiologist who in the late 1990s issued early warnings of the risks in spreading sludge on farmland. The soil “becomes essentially permanently contaminated,” he said in a recent interview from his home in Georgia. The concerns raised by Dr. Lewis and others went unheeded at the time. The country is starting to wake up to the consequences. Only one state, Maine, has started to systematically test its farms for PFAS. Maine has also banned the use of sludge on its fields.