A Southside Virginia farm. (Sarah Vogelsong / Virginia Mercury) It’s out of sight and out of mind, and it might just be killing people.

For decades, American factories have been sending their wastewater to municipal sewage treatment plants across the country, which handle it along with the effluent from other industries, homes and businesses. At the other end of the process, the separated and dried-out solids are often delivered to farmers as free fertilizer. The land application of this “sewage sludge” has long been encouraged by environmental regulators as a way to deal with what would otherwise be a vexing waste disposal problem.

Yet not all of that wastewater, or the sludge that becomes fertilizer, is benign. An increasing number of industries discharge effluent laced with toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which most treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove. PFAS are notoriously long-lasting, so much so that they are nicknamed “forever chemicals.” And now some states are finding that PFAS-laced sewage sludge is contaminating farmland and poisoning consumers . PFAS clean up could cost Virginia public water systems millions for years to come PFAS are a relatively new class of synthetic chemical, emerging commercially in the 1950s to find their way into a wide range of useful products, including non-stick pans ( most notoriously Teflon), waterproof clothing, stain-resistant fabrics and firefighting chemicals. Unfortunately, exposure to PFAS has been shown to cause an almost equally-wide range of environmental and human health harms , including cancer, kidney disease, thyroid disease, reproductive problems and obesity.

After years of foot-dragging, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally took action against two early types of PFAS that had already fallen out of use, setting drinking water standards for those and a few others. At the same time, however, chemical companies have been turning out literally thousands of new iterations that have been little studied and remain largely unregulated. PFAS have become so ubiquitous in the environment that scientists estimate 98% of Americans — and even some newborns — have detectable levels in their blood.

In recent years, public health advocates have started to worry that PFAS may also […]

Is sewage sludge laced with ‘forever chemicals’ contaminating Va. farmland? No one’s testing it.