What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You....Or Will It???

A couple weeks ago, I saw the most interesting movie called The Confession, starring Alec Baldwin.  It was about a contractor who won a municipal bid to build a road through a city and he used contaminated dirt to capitalize on the project.  The road crew, who had to work with this contaminated dirt, all developed terminal cancer.  At this point, I wondered where the line is drawn between fact and fiction.  It brought to mind the Southington company, Solvents Recovery, that contaminated the ground and aquifers surrounding their property and most of the children in that neighborhood came down with cancer.

Now that Spring is around the corner, when we purchase products such as dirt, wood chips and mulch for landscaping, how do we know we are not getting contaminated waste?  Do we ask the provider if his product contains carcinogenic toxins?  Good luck with THAT one!  I can assure you, you will most likely get an answer that sounds good and a “dirty look”.  So, again, it’s buyer beware.

Upon doing some quick research, I found the latest craze that is being pushed on the gullible consumer is “commercial compost”.  In order to reduce the waste in municipal landfills, cities collect what they pleasantly call “green waste”, compost it and sell it back to the public for a tidy profit.  This commercial compost is sold by the yard to farmers, landscape services and companies that bag it and wholesale it to garden centers for you to purchase and use in your gardens and flower beds. 
This “green waste” is made up of plant and animal material such as shrubs, grass clippings and other yard wastes, crop residues, forest products, animal manure, food wastes, dirt, sewage sediments and sludge, newspapers and other approved paper products.

This compost is also sold as “organic” but is it really?  The USDA has come up with the National Organic Program (NOP) final rule that mandates the plant and animal material that can be permitted to enhance soil, may contain URECs: unavoidable residual environmental contamination. And this contamination includes pesticides and other dangerous chemicals and toxins such as antibiotics, heavy metals, prescription drugs, bacterial pathogens, arsenic, copper and lead. 

When this compost is applied to the soil, the pesticides and toxic poisons will leach into the soil when exposed to watering and rain and over time you will have a tidy acid-alkaline soil imbalance as well as contamination.  Your garden will not grow so nice and your flowers, grass and shrubs may discolor and die. And you will not even be aware that it was your compost and mulch that did you in.

At first, commercial compost was considered a win-win for everyone concerned.  But after a short while, the chemical contaminants started to rear its ugly head and death and devastation came to the surface.  Farmers were noticing lower yields and dying crops, as well as soil contamination.  The culprit was found to be Clopyralid, a widely-used dandelion herbicide, found to be present in City-manufactured compost. Golf courses were noticing their shrubs and trees were dying and after years of agonizing over the cause, they discovered that the DuPont herbicide Imprelis, was present in the compost used on the fairways. Trace residues of dichlorophenyl-dichloroethylene, a breakdown product of DDT, and bifenthrin, an ant killer, have been found in compost for potted plants and potted organic herbs, where they can be taken up into the plant through the root system.  And you then eat the ant killer in the herb. These pesticides and herbicides mentioned are also classified as known carcinogens.

This information was devastating to me, as I go out of my way to buy organic food, only to find out it is grown smothered in pesticide laced compost.  I OBJECT, your Honor!!!  In a world run by psychopaths, who have gone out of their way to kill everything good in God’s creation…..I do my best to live healthy chemical free.