April 2025: Sludge Contaminated 10,000 Acres of Farmland. What Should be Done?, New York Times (gift link)

Another excellent piece of reporting on PFAS chemicals from Hiroko Tabuchi (see also these pieces). These widely-used “forever chemicals” tend to concentrate in municipal and industrial sewage sludge. Thus, the widespread use of sewage sludge as a fertilizer / soil additive for farmland – which at first seemed like a good way to reuse nutrients and organic matter – turns out to also be a great way to spread PFAS chemicals onto the land we use to grow food. Now South Carolina is trying to get a huge amount of farmland that received sludge from a textile factory declared a Superfund site.