F.or the people of Mead, Nebraska, the first sign of something wrong was the stench, the smell of something rotting. People reported eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds. Then colonies of bees began to die, birds and butterflies seemed disoriented, and dogs became sick, staggering around with dilated pupils.
There is no mystery as to the cause of the concerns in Mead, a farming community so small that its 500 residents call it a village and not a town.
After multiple complaints to state and federal officials and an investigation by a University of Nebraska researcher, all evidence points to an unlikely culprit: an ethanol plant that, like many others in the United States, converts corn into biofuel.
The company, called AltEn, is believed to be beneficial to the environment by using starchy grains such as corn to produce about 25 million gallons of ethanol annually, a practice that regulators generally consider to be an environmentally friendly source of automotive fuel. Ethanol mills also usually produce a by-product called distillation grains, which are sold as nutritious animal feed.
But unlike most other 203 American ethanol plants, AltEn uses seed coated with fungicides and insecticides, including those known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics,” in the manufacturing process.
Company officials have advertised AltEn as a ‘recycling’ location where farms can dispose of excess supplies of pesticide-treated seeds, a strategy that gave AltEn free supplies for its ethanol, but also left it with a waste product that was overloaded with pesticides to feed animals.
Instead, AltEn has collected thousands of pounds of a smelly, lime-green mash of fermented grains, distributed some to the fields as a “soil conditioner” and collected the rest from his plant’s grounds.
It is this waste that, according to some researchers, contaminates hazardous water and soil and is also likely to threaten animal and human health. They point to tests ordered by government officials that found neonics in AltEn waste at levels many times higher than what is considered safe.
“Some of the levels recorded are just off the charts,” said Dan Raichel, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) who has worked with academics and other environmental protection groups to monitor the situation in Mead. “If I lived in that area with those levels of neonates entering the water and the environment, I would be concerned about my own health.”
Importantly, Raichel and other observers say the situation in Mead is a warning sign – an example of the need for stricter regulations on the pesticide-coated seeds marketed by big companies such as Bayer AG and Syngenta.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers neonics in food and water to be safe with a range of up to 70 parts per billion (ppb), depending on the specific pesticide. The agency sets several standards for freshwater invertebrates in “aquatic life”. For the neonic known as clothianidin, the benchmark is 11ppb and it is 17.5ppb for a neonic called thiamethoxam.
On the AltEn site, government officials for the environment registered an amount of clothianidin as high as 427,000 ppb while testing one of the great hills of the AltEn waste. Thiamethoxam was detected at 85,100ppb, according to tests commissioned by the Nebraska Department of Agriculture.
In an AltEn wastewater lagoon, clothianidin was recorded at 31,000ppb and thiamethoxam at 24,000ppb. A third dangerous neonic called Imidacloprid was also found in the lagoon, with 312ppb. The EPA aquatic life benchmark for Imidacloprid is 0.385 ppb. The AltEn lagoon system has a capacity of approximately 175m gallons.
High levels of 10 other pesticides were also found in the plant lagoon. At least four pesticides in the corn used by AltEn, including clothianidin and thiamethoxam, are known to be “harmful to humans, birds, mammals, bees, freshwater fish,” and other living things, government regulators noted in an October letter to Alt and.
State officials have cited the plant for “ non-compliance ” with several regulations designed to prevent pollution, and said in the October letter that they were concerned that AltEn was not disposing of the waste properly and noted the possibility of contamination in the ‘short term’. and surface water and groundwater in the longer term ”.
“It’s really a major contamination event affecting the local ecosystems and the community there,” said Sarah Hoyle, who specializes in pesticide issues for the Xerces Society, an Oregon-based conservation organization that is helping investigate the problem in Mead.
Neither Scott Tingelhoff, AltEn’s general manager, nor two other factory officials have responded to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian.
Last year, Tingelhoff told a local television station that the company was working with national regulators to address concerns.
Mead residents say they were concerned about plant waste not remaining on the planting area. In addition to the amounts brought to farms to spread across the acreage, more appears to have been washed out and leaked from wastewater lagoons into adjacent watercourses.
AltEn also applies its wastewater to the acreage. Some Mead residents fear the well water their homes depend on is now contaminated, while researchers are also concerned about possible contamination of an underground aquifer supplying water in the Midwestern United States.
Nor are they satisfied with what they say has been more than two years of regulatory failure to protect the community.
“I have received a lot of criticism from people in the state,” said Paula Dyas, resident of the area, who complained to the state when her dogs became ill after swallowing some of the waste dumped on an adjacent farm field. . Her pets recovered but were so sick she feared permanent damage. “There is just no consideration of how much of these chemicals we put on land and what that will ultimately do to animals, to wildlife,” she said.
Jody Weible, former chairman of Mead’s planning committee, sought the help of state political leaders and regulators in dealing with what she calls the “poison” emanating from AltEn. The plant is about a mile from her 34-year-old home.
“I emailed the EPA, water, parks, and conservationists, pretty much anyone I could think of,” Weible said. “They all say they don’t think they can do anything.”
Other neighbors living near the factory have told state officials about strange illnesses and dead or dying birds.
After dealing with multiple complaints, Nebraska’s agriculture division ordered AltEn to stop spreading its waste to farm fields. But that has resulted in more and more piling up at the ethanol plant or washing up in the lagoons. AltEn has also begun to incinerate some of the waste and store “biochar” in bags outside on planting areas, a practice of further concern to local residents.
Dead bees
Government regulators say they have not tested any water, soil or vegetation outside of the plantation property and have no knowledge of potential greater damage from the spread of the AltEn waste. But Judy Wu-Smart, a University of Nebraska researcher who studies bee health, has done some testing and said there is little doubt that the contamination from the plant has spread far beyond its limits.
In an academic paper she shared with regulators and other researchers, Wu-Smart said that every hive maintained on a university research farm about a mile from Mead has died off losses that coincided in timing with AltEn’s use of neon-treated seed . She has also reported a scarcity of other insects common to the area, and has video recordings of birds and butterflies in the area that appear neurologically disturbed.
After finding neonic residues in vegetation and tracing waterways connecting university land with AltEn, Wu-Smart is concerned that widespread contamination from large numbers of neonates is taking a toll on the environment and possibly the people living in the area .
There is a red flag here. The bees are just a bio-indicator that something is seriously wrong, ”said Wu-Smart. There is “an urgent need to investigate the potential impact on local communities and wildlife,” she said.
Neonics are absorbed by the roots of plants during growth and can persist in the environment for years and, along with other pesticides, are blamed for a so-called “insect apocalypse”. The insecticides have also been linked to serious defects in white-tailed deer, raising concerns about the chemical’s potential to harm large mammals, including humans.
The European Union banned outdoor use of neonics clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam in 2018, and the United Nations says neonatics are so dangerous that they should be “severely” restricted. But in the US, neonics are widely used.
Not only Nebraska is at risk
Meghan Milbrath, assistant professor of entomology at Michigan State University, said the implications of AltEn’s practices “extend far beyond Mead.”
“As we’ve seen here, mishandled seed can lead to significant pollution that disrupts ecosystems and endangers communities,” said Milbrath.
The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy (NDEE) said it has “no opinion” on the source of the bee die-off and that it lacks “jurisdiction” in the matter. The state agency said it continued to “review operations and activities at the facility.”
And while the state hasn’t stopped AltEn from taking in pesticide-coated seeds for ethanol production, it has mandated AltEn to implement a groundwater monitoring plan and other mitigating measures, though the state has noted multiple compliance issues. The state has also ordered AltEn to deposit its waste at an authorized solid waste landfill.
Residents wonder whether or not that will happen and point to large piles of green waste still hanging around the facility.
Neither Tingelhoff, nor the general manager of AltEn, nor two other factory officials responded to a request for comment.
But state officials declined to be interviewed for this story, even though Blayne Glissman, an NDEE waste permits specialist, offered a defense for the ethanol operation, saying he believed AltEn officials were simply “hard-working people trying to make a living.”