Food Rights Network

Click the “Toxic Sludge” Tab for the Latest News on Sludge Scam!

April 27, 2011

For more news on the sewage sludge scam, click the “Toxic Sludge” tab above or here, which will take you to the information clearinghouse we have created on SourceWatch about sewage sludge being promoted as “compost,” along with information about products made from sewage sludge that may be in a garden store near you.

For more information about the “Environmental Media Assocation,” please click here.

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John Stauber, author and adviser to the Food Rights Network reveals one of the biggest toxic scams in America, sewage sludge being sold as garden “compost” for growing vegetables. Watch the video here.

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Sewage Sludge, Celebrities and School Gardens
Guest post by Mitch Anderson, The San Francisco Chronicle

I have a strange little story to tell. It involves sewage sludge, celebrities and school gardens. It is set in the City of Angels, naturally. This story has several characters, which we can lump into two basic categories: the children and the adults. The children are the most important, and as always, are innocent and have virtually no say in the outcome of the story. They are the ones in the garden. The adults can be generally divided into three groups: the green celebrities, the company, and the environmentalists. First there are the celebrities (as we know, fame is big currency in LA). They are part of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a good organization that is seeking to make the green movement go mainstream. The tension of the story is built around EMA, which as you’ll see, has a very important ethical decision to make. The EMA has a worthy project creating organic gardens in schools, so that, as Rosario Dawson says in a video on their site, “kids can be clean enough to be healthy, and dirty enough to be happy.” Sounds great. We definitely need more organic gardens in schools.

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Guest post by Josh Harkinson, Mother Jones

Last May, a group of movie stars gathered at a schoolyard garden in Venice, California to raise money for the Environmental Media Association, a prominent Hollywood green group that supports organic gardens at public schools. Among the publicity photos snapped that day was a product-placement shot of Rosario Dawson planting vegetables alongside a sack of Kellogg Amend, an “organic” soil supplement sold by Kellogg Garden Products, one of EMA’s corporate sponsors. “This was one of those unfortunate weird things,” says EMA president Debbie Levin, who hadn’t known anything about Amend before the shoot. Amend, she later learned, is not approved for organic farming because it’s made from municipal sewage sludge.

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