Last month, I wrote Chez Sludge, the
first inside report on the sewage sludge scandal unfolding in San
Francisco, based on internal
documents obtained by the Food Rights
Network and now online in the Toxic Sludge wiki
on SourceWatch.

San Francisco, under its “green mayor” Gavin Newsom, has
since 2007 perpetrated a greenwashing scam
upon city gardeners. The city, known for its environmentally sound
practices and commitment to a precautionary
principle approach to dealing with environmental hazards, has
deceptively and fraudulently been giving away free “organic Biosolids compost,”
that is actually nothing but toxic sewage sludge from
San Francisco and eight other counties, “composted” by the giant waste
handler Synagro.

This issue hit the news in San Francisco first last September
and gained national media attention in December, 2009. On
March 4, 2010 a protest
in Mayor Newsom’s office that also received national attention,
led by the Organic
Consumers Association, forced the Mayor to put the program on
temporary hold, at least during the political season. He is currently
the front
runner for the office of California Lieutenant Governor and come
December Mayor Newsom is likely on his way to Sacramento. And,
apparently, he wants to leave his sludge, if not his heart, in San
Francisco.

In the face of the controversy, and the dioxins and other dangerous contaminants
found in their sludge, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission spent
$25,000 to conduct some very limited and inadequate testing of their
free “organic Biosolids compost.” Like most sludge industry tests, this
one examined a minuscule sample of the mountain of sludge, and only
searched for a small fraction of the thousands of persistent chemicals
and substances, and none of the biological contaminants, in sewage
sludge.

It was designed as a PR stunt and worked well in that regard when the
results were fed to the
San Francisco Examiner and
San
Francisco Chronicle. Both papers filed stories on July 28th, and
both papers reported that the SFPUC staff would be bringing this
controversy before the five citizens who make up the SFPUC Board of
Commissioners, appointed by the Mayor, and who have never, despite the
year-old public controversy, taken a close public examination of the
sludge-to-gardens issue in any of their frequent meetings. But with
two PUC commissioner meetings scheduled for August — the 10th and the
24th — that would soon change, the articles implied.