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"Born Skeptic,"

Nothing in the article suggested that there are not also USCC members that do not handle sewage sludge. Nothing in the article suggested that using real compost made from clean organic materials is not an excellent idea in community gardens and elsewhere.

What makes you say that Kellogg Garden Products does not use sewage sludge in its products? Do you work for Kellogg? If so, I would love to speak with you about it. If it no longer does, that is excellent news. Its own website previously confirmed its use, and a case study by a third party points out that Kellogg's brand was built on using sewage sludge in its products: http://www.sourcewatch.org/images/4/43/KelloggBrandcasestudy.pdf.

You use the words "potential" and "allegedly" to suggest that there is little or no risk for sewage sludge to contain a host of chemical contaminants. The EPA's testing and regulation of sewage sludge products is problematic at best, but even the EPA's Targeted National Sewage Sludge Survey in 2009 concluded that ALL sewage sludge contains toxic and hazardous materials, including large numbers of endocrine disruptors: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/TNSSS.

CMD has been reporting on sewage sludge for many years, and each PRWatch article cannot contain the decades of scientific research showing the problems with its application to soil, but many of those studies can be found on our sister wiki site, SourceWatch, here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Scientific_Studies_of_Sewage_Sludge.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation,

Rebekah Wilce