I was reading that the Albany County Legislature was feeling all good about stroking it’s legislative penis — I mean — banning the spreading of bio-solids from wastewater treatment plants, aka processed human shit extracted out of wastewater for ninety days. The only problem for the county is that Albany County Wastewater District operates one of the last remaining sewage sludge incineration plants in the state.

Albany County not only burns it’s own sewage sludge, it also imports it from many other town and village wastewater treatment plants in the region. It’s a relic of the Erastus Corning era of Albany, where the solution to municipal waste was to burn it for volume reduction and to a lesser extent energy. Why burn oil poorly when you can burn garbage poorly to heat state office buildings? While the state decided to stop burning garbage in it’s state steam heating plant due to the cost of complying with EPA regulation and dioxin-laden soot emissions, the sewage sludge incinerator in Menands — next to my office — has kept burning the poop for nearly fifty years now. The City of Albany also operates one of the few landfills in New York permitted to use sewage sludge incinerator ash as alternative daily cover to cover the trah their burying in the Albany Pine Bush.

PFAS aka teflon compounds are an enormous problem, mainly because flourinated compounds are notoriously stable and resistant to breaking down chemically, thermally and biologically. They don’t rot, they don’t burn, they don’t photodegrade. All that toilet paper and shit might burn in a furnace fueled by natural gas, but the PFAS are just going up the stack. And maybe that’s an inconvenient thing that county doesn’t want to admit.

The whole biosolids 90-day ban is pretty silly because it’s the dead of winter, and nobody is spreading biosolids this time of year, not to mention biosolids are highly regulated in New York and account for less then 1% of all sources of fertilization in New York. Manure and to a lesser extent chemical fertilizers are what farms are applying to their soils. Human shit not so much, though it’s a valuable material that should be recovered and used for agricultural purpose, being aware of risks and need for regulation and testing of metals, pharmaceuticals and PFAS.

If anything, we should be looking towards burning less shit and composting and land applying it to recover rather discard nitrogen and especially phosphorous. It’s great we are keeping the shit out of creeks but we shouldn’t building mounds of it in outskirts and warming the planet by sending it up the stack. We should be investing in the science of this and finding ways to clean up the waste stream, by accelerating the phase out of the production of PFAS compounds, as once they’re created they are going up in the air, into the water, the land and into our bodies. They don’t go away. As even if they bury them in the garbage heap in Albany Pine Bush, they’re still running out of landfill as leachate, heading downtown in the pipe, and ultimately going up the smoke stack in Menands.

The plant where Albany County burns it’s shit and sends PFAS up in the air, while banning biosolids.