California Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined five other state attorneys general in a letter last week asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to tell the meat and poultry industry to pre-treat its wastewater.  

The tighter standards might help clean public waters around processing plants and industrial animal farms. 

This is good news for a group of local activists in Sonoma County, who successfully ran a petition drive for a November ballot measure to end large-scale factory farming. 

“Factories in Sonoma County have long relied on the federal requirements for concentrated animal feeding operations,” said Samantha Faye, one of the petitioners. Faye, along with other members of the Coalition to End Factory Farming say they have seen pollution running in surface and groundwater around the large chicken farms and processing plants. 

“They process around 10,000 chickens a day,” she said of large national processor. “I’ve seen water leaking from the poultry plant directly into the creek in a neighborhood of apartments.”  

Manufacturers for other industries, like batteries, whose wastewater is contaminated with copper or lead, are required to internally pre-treat their effluent before it is discharged into city sewage systems. Meat and poultry factories do not have this restriction. 

“This action is warranted given that the meat and poultry processing industry discharges have the second highest nitrogen levels of any industry,” Bonta said in a statement Wednesday. 

Filed jointly by the attorneys general of Wisconsin, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Oregon, the 27-page letter aims to influence the agency as it decides new standards for the industry, which have not been updated for 20 years.  Their arguments hinged on environmental justice and taxpayer burden. While the EPA has stated it favors a less stringent regulation, the attorneys general urged them to choose the strictest option – pretreatment at the expense of the industry. 

Comments of California et al on EPA’s proposed Clean Water Act Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for the Meat and Poultry Products Point Source Category[2]

Blood, feathers, soft tissue, viscera, bone, urine, feces, soil, brine, fats, oils, greases, and cleaning compounds are either permitted to be discharged into waterways or discharged down the drain to be dealt with by public sewage plants.  

“Even well-operated publicly treatment works can remove only 39% of total nitrogen and 30% of total phosphorus,” the letter said. Most sewage plants were designed to treat domestic sewage, not industrial waste. When they discharge pass-through pollutants, they may be required by regulators to upgrade their facilities at the expense of the taxpayer. 

“The attorneys general do not believe the expensiveness of technology justifies putting this cost on the public facility and general ratepayers, rather than the polluting discharger,” the letter said. 

For too long, our nation’s waters have been severely polluted and have posed significant health risks to communities across this country, particularly those of color. AG Rob Bonta

Nitrogen, ammonia, chloride and phosphorus, adversely affect aquatic organisms. High levels of nitrogen in these surface waters can cause elevated nitrate levels in drinking water, which in turn can lead to infant methemoglobinemia (blue baby syndrome), colorectal cancer, thyroid disease, and neural tube defects, the letter said. 

“For too long, our nation’s waters have been severely polluted and have posed significant health risks to communities across this country, particularly those of color,” Bonta said. 

The letter names several sites in California, including the towns of Turlock and Livingston in the San Joaquin Valley as having some of the highest scores for environmental pollution burdens in the state. The pollution in Sonoma County comes mostly from poultry farms, said Faye, but the activists have also seen waste from cow farms. 

“There are dairy ranchers who spray cesspool water back onto their fields, and that’s one of the ways that they pollute the surface water,” said Faye. “It has a lot of different run offs from washing out the barns and washing out the milk parlor, and then it sits and develops into a slurry. Then they use it on the fields, and it has a much higher nitrogen concentrate.”  

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.