THE NEW YORK TIMES – The abandoned Galey & Lord textile mill in Society Hill, S.C., resembles an apocalyptic wasteland. Looters have hauled away the steel gates for scrap metal.
Rusting tanks sit in pools of dark water. Alligators lurk in wastewater ponds.
But the real danger, environmental officials say, lies in the surrounding fields, nearly 10,000 acres of contaminated farmland, including fields still growing food, that South Carolina says should be part of an unprecedented federal Superfund cleanup.
Galey & Lord, on the banks of the Great Pee Dee River, was once known as the “King of Khaki” for its role in introducing the casual cotton twill to American wardrobes. And for decades, it took the water that had been used in making its fabrics, treated it in wastewater lagoons, then gave the sludge to farmers as fertilizer.
What those farmers and many others didn’t know: The sludge contained dangerous levels of “forever chemicals” linked to cancer and other diseases. Testing has now shown high concentrations of the chemicals, also known as PFAS, on farms where the sludge fertilizer was spread.
“They said that it was good fertilizer, that it would help our crops,” said Robert O’Neal, a soy, corn and wheat farmer whose fields were fertilized with sludge from Galey & Lord in the late 1990s.
“They said, ‘This is so great for you. You can have it for free,’” he said. “And they brought us all their problems.”
Sludge from city sewage has been used as fertilizer for decades, a practice the federal government has long promoted.
Early this year, for the first time, the E.P.A. warned of the health risks of PFAS in fertilizer made from sewage sludge.
Factories far and wide, for example paper mills in Maine, have also provided wastewater sludge to farmers for years. Industrial wastewater has contamination risks that can go beyond city sewage …
