For decades, a little-known company now owned by a Goldman Sachs fund has been making millions of dollars from the unlikely dregs of American life: sewage sludge.
The company, Synagro, sells farmers treated sludge from factories and homes to use as fertilizer. But that fertilizer, also known as biosolids, can contain harmful “forever chemicals” known as PFAS linked to serious health problems including cancer and birth defects.
Farmers are starting to find the chemicals contaminating their land, water, crops and livestock. Just this year, two common types of PFAS were declared hazardous substances by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Superfund law.
Now, Synagro is part of a major effort to lobby Congress to limit the ability of farmers and others to sue to clean up fields polluted by the sludge fertilizer, according to lobbying records and interviews with people familiar with the strategy. The chairman of one of the lobbying groups is Synagro’s chief executive.
In a letter to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in March, sludge-industry lobbyists argued that they shouldn’t be held liable because the chemicals were already in the sludge before they received it and made it into fertilizer.
The lobbying has found early success. A bill introduced by Senators John Boozman of Arkansas and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, both Republicans, would protect sludge companies like Synagro, as well as the wastewater plants that provide the sludge, from lawsuits. A House bill has also been introduced.
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