Toxic metals in sewage sludge-amended soils: has promotion of beneficial use discounted the risks?

Land application of contaminated waste products has been defended as beneficial use by some scientists and regulators, based on the premise that the behavior of any toxins accumulated in soils from this practice is reasonably well understood and will not have detrimental agronomic or environmental impacts into the foreseeable future. In this review, I use the case of toxic metals in sewage sludges applied to agricultural land to illustrate that metal behavior in soils and plant uptake is difficult to generalize because it is strongly dependent on the nature of the metal, sludge, soil properties and crop. Nevertheless, permitted agricultural loadings of toxic metals from sewage sludges are typically regulated using the sole criterion of total metal loading or concentrations in soils. Several critical generalizing assumptions about the behavior of sludge-borne metals in soil-crop systems, built into the US EPA risk assessment for metals, have tended to underestimate risks and are shown not to be well justified by published research. It is argued that, in the absence of a basic understanding of metal behavior in each specific situation, a more precautionary approach to toxic metal additions to soils is warranted.