For the inhabitants of Mead, Nebraska, the first sign of something wrong was the stench, the smell of something that had rotted. People have reported eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds. Then bee colonies began to die, birds and butterflies looked disoriented and pet dogs became ill while stunned with dilated pupils.
There is no mystery about the cause of the concern in Mead, a small farming community that its 500 residents call it a town and not a town.
After multiple complaints from government officials and federal officials and an investigation by a University of Nebraska researcher, all evidence points to what an unlikely culprit must be – an ethanol plant that, like many others in the United States, wheat in biofuels alter.
The company, called AltEn, is supposed to help the environment by using high starch granules such as maize to spread about 25 million liters of ethanol annually, which is usually an environmentally friendly source of motor fuel. Ethanol plants usually also produce a by-product called distillation granules to sell as nutritious animal feed.
But unlike most of the other 203 U.S. ethanol plants, AltEn used seeds covered in the production process with fungicides and insecticides, including those known as neonicotinoids, or ‘neonics’.
Industry officials advertised AltEn as a “recycling site” where agribusinesses could dispose of their excess stocks of pesticide-treated seeds, a strategy that gave AltEn free supplies for its ethanol, but also left it with a waste product that was too pesticide to feed to animals.
Instead, AltEn accumulated thousands of kilograms of a stinking, lime-green mash of fermented grains, which spread as a “soil improver” to farm fields and accumulated the rest on the site of the plant.
It is the waste that, according to some researchers, pollutes water and soil dangerously and probably also poses a health threat to animals and humans. They point to the test ordered by government officials who found neonics in AltEn waste at much higher levels than are considered safe.
“Some of the recorded levels are just off the map,” said Dan Raichel, a lawyer for the Council for the Defense of Natural Resources (NRDC), who worked with academics and other environmental protection groups to monitor the situation in Mead. “If I lived in the area with the levels of neonics going into the water and the environment, I would worry about my own health.”
It is important that Raichel and other observers say that the situation in Mead is a warning sign – an example of the need for stricter regulations of the pesticide seed marketed by large companies such as Bayer AG and Syngenta.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers neonics in food and water to be safe up to 70 parts per billion (ppb), depending on the specific pesticide. The agency sets different criteria for invertebrates in “aquatic life”. For the neon, known as clothianidin, the default point is 11ppb and it is 17.5ppb for a neonic called thiamethoxam.
On the AltEn property, state environmental officials recorded levels of clothianidin at a staggering 427,000 ppp in testing one of the major hills of AltEn waste. Thiamethoxam was detected at 85,100 ppm, according to the test ordered by the Department of Agriculture in Nebraska.
In an AltEn wastewater lagoon, clothianidin was recorded at 31,000 ppm and thiamethoxam at 24,000 ppm. A third dangerous neon, called imidacloprid, was also found in the lagoon, at 312 ppm. The EPA criterion for aquatic life for imidacloprid is 0.385ppb. The lagoon system of AltEn contains about 175 liters.
High levels of ten other pesticides were also found in the plant lake. At least four pesticides in the maize used by AltEn, including clothianidin and thiamethoxam, are known to be ‘harmful to humans, birds, mammals, bees, freshwater fish’ and other living things, government officials said in a letter to October. AltEn.
Government officials cited the plant for “non-compliance” with various rules intended to prevent pollution, and said in the October letter that they were concerned that AltEn was not disposing of the waste properly, and that they may notice possibility of ‘short-term’ pollution. and long-term surface water and groundwater ”.
“This is a very important pollution event that is affecting the local ecosystems and the community there,” said Sarah Hoyle, who specializes in pesticide issues for the Xerces Society, an Oregon conservation organization that helps investigate the problem in Mead. .
Neither Scott Tingelhoff, AltEn general manager, nor two other factory officials responded to several requests for comment from the Guardian.
Last year, Tingelhoff told a local television station that the company was working with state regulators to address concerns.
Residents of Mead say they are concerned about waste from the plant that did not remain on the plant’s property. In addition to the quantities taken to farms to spread over the surface, it appears even more that the wastewater lagoons in adjacent waterways have been rolled and spilled.
AltEn also applied its wastewater to surfaces. Some Mead residents fear that the water dependent on their homes is now contaminated, while researchers are also concerned about the possible contamination of an underground aquifer that supplies water to the American west.
They are also dissatisfied with what they believe were more than two years of legal errors to protect the community.
“I have a lot of backlash from people in the state,” said regional resident Paula Dyas. She lodged a complaint with the state when her dogs became ill after ingesting some of the waste dumped on a neighboring farm field. Her pets recovered but were so ill that she feared it would suffer lasting damage. “There is simply no account of how many of these chemicals we apply to the land and what it will ultimately do to animals and wildlife,” she said.
Jody Weible, former chair of the Mead Planning Commission, tried to help the state’s political leaders as well as regulators deal with what she refers to as the ‘poison’ coming from AltEn. The plant is about a mile from her 34-year-old home.
“I emailed the EPA, water, parks and conservation people, almost everyone I could think of,” Weible said. “They all say there’s nothing they think they can do about it.”
Other neighbors living near the plant told state officials of strange diseases and dead or dying birds.
After the Nebraska Department of Agriculture filed multiple complaints, it ordered AltEn to stop distributing the waste to farm fields. But that meant more and more accumulated on site at the ethanol plant or washed up in the lagoons. AltEn also started burning some of the waste and storing ‘biochar’ in bags outside on plant property, a practice that further worries residents in the area.
Dead bees
State regulators say they have not tested water or soil or vegetation outside the plant’s property and that they have no knowledge of possible major damage due to the distribution of the AltEn waste. But Judy Wu-Smart, a researcher at the University of Nebraska who studies bee health, did some testing and said there was little doubt that pollution by the plant had spread far beyond its borders.
In an academic paper she shared with regulators and other researchers, Wu-Smart said that every beehive located on a university research farm died about a mile from Mead, losses that coincided with the timing of AltEn’s timing. use of neon-treated seed. She also reported a deficiency of other insects that occur in the area and has video recordings of birds and butterflies in the area appearing neurologically affected.
After neon residues were found in vegetation and found waterways connecting the university grounds with AltEn, Wu-Smart is concerned that a broad pollution event due to high levels of neonics is demanding the environment and possibly the people living in the area.
‘Here’s a red flag. The bees are just a bio-indicator that something is seriously wrong, ‘said Wu-Smart. There is an “urgent need to investigate potential impacts on local communities and wildlife,” she said.
Neonica is absorbed by the roots of plants as they grow, and can persist in the environment for many years and, along with other pesticides, is blamed for a so-called ‘insect apocalypse’. The insecticides have also been linked to serious deficiencies in white-tailed deer, deepening concerns about the chemical’s potential to harm large mammals, including humans.
The European Union banned the extramural use of neonics clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam in 2018, and the United Nations says neonics are so dangerous that they should be ‘strictly’ restricted. But in the US, neonica is widely used.
Not just Nebraska in danger
Meghan Milbrath, assistant professor of entomology at Michigan State University, said the implications of AltEn’s practices go far beyond Mead.
“As we have seen here, treated seed can be wrongly polluted, disrupting ecosystems and endangering communities,” Milbrath said.
The Department of Environment and Energy in Nebraska (NDEE) said it “does not have an opinion” on the source of the bee deaths and that it is not “jurisdiction.” The state agency said it was continuing to “review operations and activities at the facility”.
And although the state did not stop AltEn from ingesting pesticide-coated seeds for ethanol production, it ordered AltEn to put in place a groundwater monitoring plan and other mitigation measures, although the state noted several problems with compliance. The state also ordered AltEn to dispose of its waste at an approved solid waste disposal facility.
Residents questioned whether this would happen or not, pointing to large piles of green waste still ringing in the facility.
Neither Tingelhoff, the AltEn general manager, nor two other factory officials responded to a request for comment.
But government officials did not want to be questioned for this story, although Blayne Glissman, a waste permit specialist at NDEE, offered a defense for the ethanol operation, saying he believes AltEn officials are just ‘hard-working people trying to’ to make a living ‘.