North Florida has had enough.
The region's flat, rural cattle pastures, longtime dumping grounds of South Florida's sewage sludge, will close their gates to feces-filled trucks by 2028. That's owing to a provision of Florida's Farm Bill, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in March.
Sewage sludge is what's treated from millions of toilet flushes. New state law bans municipalities from spreading the less-treated types on farm fields, a practice that's been prohibited south of Lake Okeechobee since 2013. Legislation to tighten regulations on the most-treated sludge, too, awaits the governor's signature.
Water quality advocates consider the ban a decisive victory for the St. Johns River. Farmland along the river receives more than two-thirds of the state's so-called "class B" sludge, they say, causing an estimated $1.1 billion in cleanup costs in the watershed
That sludge has potentially dangerous levels of "forever chemicals", the Environmental Protection Agency told farmers in a draft report published last year. Maine and Connecticut stopped smearing the stuff on farmland in 2022 and 2024, respectively, and a slew of other states are considering full or partial bans.
Across the country, local utilities are grappling with the fact that toilets don't stop flushing when farmers stop accepting the treated waste. The product they used to market as free fertilizer may actually be an expensive problem to solve.
State bans
Sewage sludge, known in the industry as biosolids, is made when wastewater goes through chemical tanks, bacterial pools and industrial dryers at treatment plants.
For decades, spreading it on land seemed like an ideal use for the stinky stuff. Paying haulers to truck sludge to the countryside was cheaper than burning it or burying it in a landfill.
The farmers who signed up to receive it got reliable batches of free fertilizer. But they didn't know exactly what was in it, later found to include everything from ibuprofen to meth to hormones from birth control pills, according to a 2025 study.
St. Johns Riverkeeper Lisa Rinaman said phosphorus is the main chemical of concern in her watershed, spurring algae blooms that sicken pets and foul fish. Florida's ban, a "monumental move" will cut a big source of the river's phosphorus pollution, she said, though impacts will linger from decades of nutrients built up in soil.
But the nationwide push to stop spreading sewage sludge isn't about any of those chemicals.
It's about PFAS.
Wastewater treatment doesn't destroy the manmade "forever chemicals" used in nearly everything non-stick and non-stain. Instead, the drying process concentrates them, leading the EPA to conclude that living near a site that spreads sludge or drinking water contaminated by it could pose human health risks.
A group of farmers in Texas alleged sludge poisoned their calves, fish and other animals whose autopsies revealed high levels of PFAS. State-sponsored testing in Maine, which banned sludge because of contaminant concerns in 2022, has identified more than 100 farms with unsafe levels of PFAS from past spreading.
While Florida's class B biosolids ban doesn't mention PFAS, legislation proposed this year in Virginia, Mississippi, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Illinois and other states does.
" We have seen a growing concern of ranchers and farmers that this material is not healthy for their crops, it's not healthy for their cattle, it's not healthy for their way of life," Rinaman said.
Landfills
Though states are increasingly skeptical of spreading sludge, land application is often the cheapest disposal method and, according to the EPA, the main one.
That means bans hit local utilities hard, said Ian Pepper, professor and director of the Water and Energy Sustainable Technology Center at the University of Arizona.
With land application off the table, municipalities can burn their biosolids, put them in a landfill or further treat them until they're marketable to the general public as fertilizer.
Pima County, Arizona, imposed a moratorium on land application in 2020 because of PFAS concerns, Pepper said. The county, which had been spending about $1.3 million annually on land application, spent $3.3 million to bury the sludge in a landfill instead.
"That got their attention," Pepper said of wastewater managers. "And so in response to that, we started a collaborative study."
The university and the utility tested sites where sludge had been applied in varying quantities since 1985 and found low levels of PFAS on the surface and underground.
"We gave that data to the Pima County Board of Supervisors," Pepper said, "and lo and behold, the moratorium was rescinded."
Maine's ban drove up rates, too.
The state's air regulations make incineration difficult, so landfilling "was the only option," said Rob Pontau, general manager of the Brunswick Sewer District and president of the Maine Water Environment Association.
"As soon as you're left with only one option, then the market dictates what you're gonna pay," Pontau said.
Costs to drop off sludge at a landfill, about two hours away and close to capacity, rose from $80 per ton to $120 to $170, Pontau said, leaving ratepayers to foot the bill.
Maine's 2024 waste plan says emerging tech that destroys PFAS could open the door for a "cautious return" to sludge spreading, but Pontau is skeptical.
"There was dioxin and then there's heavy metals, and then comes PFAS," he said. "Well, soon enough we're going to have microplastics or whatever the next great pollutant is, and then we're going to find out that that was in the sludge, too."
Pontau's advice to other states? "Expect a ban to be coming one way or another."
Advanced treatment tech
The city of Orlando heeded Pontau's advice.
Water reclamation division project manager Alan Oyler told WUFT last fall he felt "a bullseye painted on his forehead" after hearing EPA staff discuss PFAS concerns in biosolids.
The city partnered with wastewater management companies to test new, two-part treatment tech that would shrink sludge, then superheat it to destroy PFAS and other chemicals, creating synthetic gas and biochar.
The city anticipates starting up the first phase, a metal-barreled dryer run by waste tech company Stircor, in July, according to Orlando public information officer Ashley Papagni. It'll process about 240 wet tons of sludge per day, she wrote in response to WUFT's questions, enough to handle all of the city's biosolids.
The machine's output – shrunken, class A biosolids – can be landfilled or spread on farmland until Florida's ban takes effect in 2028. Part two of the system, a gasifier, "eliminates the need to land apply biosolids altogether," Papagni wrote.
The gasifier was delayed after project managers found the site where they'd planned to install the machine couldn't supply enough natural gas to run it. New plans place the unit at a different treatment facility. Even before the system's running, managers are talking to Stircor about expanding it to accept waste from outside of Orlando for a fee.
In The Villages, waste treatment companies stand to profit from tightening rules on sludge.
Washington-based Sedron Technologies and Goldman Sachs-owned Synagro Technologies, which farmers have sued over PFAS, plan to open a sludge recycling facility on the site of a former juice plant by 2028. The plant would treat biosolids to what is known as class AA: the only kind still allowed to be spread following Florida's ban. In March, Martin County became the first municipality to sign on to send its biosolids to the facility.
One of the impacts of banning the two less-treated sludge types is that more biosolids will be treated to the highest level, said AJ Reisinger, associate professor in urban soil and water quality at the University of Florida.
That's "generally a good thing," Reisinger said, "because it includes increased pathogen removal, increased removal of other harmful contaminants."
But class AA sludge still has nutrients and PFAS. If applied in excess, "you could still see triggering of high nutrient conditions, algal blooms, that sort of thing associated with it," he said.
That's where the Legislature's second biosolids bill comes in.
Pending the governor's approval, the bill would prevent companies from applying more sludge than crops can handle. It would direct UF's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researchers to create recommended application rates for class AA biosolids just as they do for off-the-shelf fertilizers.
Those rates aim to maximize plant growth while minimizing nutrient loss to the surroundings, but don't typically consider other potential contaminants like PFAS.
Still, this session's regulations are likely to benefit water quality, Reisinger said, especially in the St. Johns River. At the end of the day, sludge is waste, he said, one "that we are figuring out how to use the most efficient way we possibly can."
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