I am honored to have been asked to present testimony before this committee.
As director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute within the Center for the Environment, it is my responsibility to focus university resources on addressing complex waste management issues.
Over many years, Cornell faculty and staff have been involved in work pertaining to the land application of sewage sludges. Cornell faculty played an important role in developing the "Criteria and Recommendations for Land Application of Sludges in the Northeast" published in 1985 by Penn State University. This document represented the collective efforts of 27 scientists and suggests limits on land application of sludges that are generally more stringent than the 503 rules promulgated by EPA in 1993. Some of these same scientists and others now at Cornell continue to work on this issue with support from USDA, USGS and other non-industry sources. (A description of our current research as well as the abstracts of recent technical papers are included in the written materials provided to the Committee.)
In the course of our work, we have had occasion to interact with the US EPA. EPA staff have been very responsive to our requests for information, providing us with copies of data and reports, and answering our questions about what procedures they used or what data they have available.
However, we have been unsuccessful in working with EPA to address the scientific issues raised by our work. Instead, EPA attempted to discredit our science and to ignore the issues we have raised. Their responses have mischaracterized our research and have suggested that we used methods that are not appropriate to answering the scientific questions we seek to address. Some of their assertions about our work (for example that we used metal salts and not sludges to study leaching in a greenhouse study) are simply untrue. This was especially surprising since the same EPA and USDA staff who made the allegation also sat on the advisory board to the project and knew our research methods.
The result was that the issues raised by this particular research project-that groundwater leaching of sludge-borne contaminants may be greater than previously believed-remain unaddressed. Cornell researchers are not the only scientists to raise this groundwater concern. This same issue was also raised by the State of Michigan (see letters in written materials provided to the Committee). In fact and ironically, EPA's and NYS's own clean-up guidelines suggest that groundwater concerns may require significantly more stringent standards for acceptable soil levels of contaminants than those allowed under the sludge rules.
Congress wisely recognized the difficulties inherent in developing national environmental standards that are equally applicable across the nation. Thus under federal law, states may implement rules more stringent than federal rules. In our role as the Land Grant University for NYS, we evaluated the particular conditions of NYS soils and agriculture. Our generally acidic soils, shallow water table and the reliance of many rural residents on groundwater wells for their domestic use are all conditions that increase the potential impact of land applied sludges. We have worked with the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to bring our findings and expertise to their policy-deliberations. Yet inexplicably, letters from the EPA discourage the states from exercising their option to develop rules tailored to state conditions (see copies of letters to NYS and Michigan in written materials).
As the federally-designated Land Grant University for NYS and the home of the state's agricultural college, Cornell has a particular responsibility for assisting farmers, policymakers and citizens by performing relevant research and sharing that research-based knowledge with NYS farmers, citizens and policy-makers. We accomplish this through the scholarly processes of research and publication of results in peer-reviewed journals as well as through outreach via the Cornell Cooperative Extension and direct outreach from the campus.
Cornell faculty have thus provided advice to growers in NYS, following a long tradition of publishing recommendations concerning many agricultural practices. We published a working paper entitled "The Case for Caution" which attempts to make the technical literature more accessible to interested non-scientists (copy included in written materials).
When "The Case for Caution" was published, a number of people congratulated the authors for their "courage." It should not take courage to publish scientific findings and prompt open discussion. Science is a process of investigation, the testing of hypotheses and pursuing questions that remain. I am proud to be part of an institution that upholds the value that process. When then EPA Assistant Administrator Perciasepe copied the President of the Cornell on correspondence to the Deputy Commissioner of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation critical of our work, we were confident that academic freedom and integrity would protect us from any recriminations at the University, which they did.
Rather than trading allegations or attempting to discredit scientific research, we need to move forward to ensure that needed research is carried out in an objective manner. Currently it is my understanding that EPA funding for research in this area is being channeled through the Water Environment Research Foundation and related organizations. There is always a danger of conflicts of interest when government resources are channeled through special interest-based mechanisms. While WERF and related groups provide valuable contributions, they also represent the generators of sludge who have a pro-land application point of view. While that viewpoint is consistent with EPA's position that "EPA has a policy that promotes the recycling of biosolids to land", (see Perciasepe letter to Rominger, Nov. 10, 1997 in written materials) it is inconsistent with maintaining scientific objectivity.
Our experience on this issue tells us that a better, more open, and more impartial process is needed. Ignoring research and scientists with opposing scientific viewpoints is not the way to develop sound policy. It is time to try to depolarize the situation and to work together to identify and conduct the needed investigations and to use all the available science to formulate good policy.
As the agency develops rules for additional contaminants over the coming years, we hope that the process will include scientists with different points of view, and allow for regional, state and local environmental variables. The standard set for molybdenum will be particularly difficult since the industry successfully sued EPA in the past, and since current Cornell research points to the need for strict standards to protect the dairy industry.
We must also be open to revisiting the
current standards. As a University of New Hampshire colleague
of mine observed "no regulation serves the public if it is
not designed to be changed as the science evolves."