For the residents of Mead, Nebraska, the first sign of something wrong was the stench, the smell of something rotten. People reported eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds. Then bee colonies started to die, birds and butterflies seemed disoriented and pet dogs got sick, staggering with dilated pupils.
There is no mystery as to the cause of the concerns in Mead, an agricultural community so small that its 500 residents refer to it as a village and not a city.
After several complaints to state and federal officials and an investigation by a University of Nebraska researcher, all the evidence points to what should be an unlikely culprit – an ethanol plant that, like many others in the United States, turns corn into biofuel. .
The company, called AltEn, must be environmentally friendly, using grains with a high starch content, such as corn, to produce about 25 million gallons of ethanol annually, a practice that regulators generally acclaim as an environmentally friendly source of automotive fuel. Ethanol factories also typically produce a by-product called distillery grains to sell as nutritious feed for livestock.
But unlike most of the other 203 ethanol plants in the United States, AltEn has used seeds coated with fungicides and insecticides, including those known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics”, in its production process.
Company officials announced AltEn as a “recycling” place where agricultural companies can get rid of excess supplies of pesticide-treated seeds, a strategy that gave AltEn free supplies for its ethanol, but also left a very heavy waste product of pesticides to feed animals.
Instead, AltEn has been accumulating thousands of kilograms of a smelly lime-green paste of fermented grains, distributing some to agricultural fields as a “soil conditioner” and accumulating the rest in the areas of its plant.
It is this garbage that some researchers say is dangerously polluting water and soil and probably also poses a threat to the health of animals and people. They point to tests commissioned by state officials who found neonates in AltEn residues at levels many times higher than what is considered safe.
“Some of the recorded levels are off the charts,” said Dan Raichel, a lawyer 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 going into the water and the environment, I would be concerned about my own health.”
It is important to note that Raichel and other observers say the situation in Mead is a wake-up call – an example of the need for stricter regulations for pesticide-coated seeds that are marketed by large companies like Bayer AG and Syngenta.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers neonates in food and water safe in a range of up to 70 parts per billion (ppb), depending on the specific pesticide. The agency sets different benchmarks for freshwater invertebrates from “aquatic life”. For the neonate known as clothianidin, the reference value is 11ppb and is 17.5ppb for a neonate called thiamethoxam.
At the AltEn property, state environmental officials recorded clothianidin levels at an impressive 427,000 ppb in tests on one of the large AltEn waste hills. Thiamethoxam was detected at 85,100ppb, according to tests ordered by the Nebraska Department of Agriculture.
In an AltEn wastewater pond, clothianidin was recorded at 31,000 ppb and thiamethoxam at 24,000 ppb. A dangerous third neonic called imidacloprid was also found in the lagoon, at 312 ppb. The EPA reference value for aquatic life for imidacloprid is 0.385 ppb. AltEn’s pond system has a capacity of approximately 175 million gallons.
High levels of 10 other pesticides have also been found in the plant’s pond. At least four pesticides in corn used by AltEn, including clothianidin and thiamethoxam, are known to be “harmful to humans, birds, mammals, bees, freshwater fish” and other living creatures, state regulators noted in an October letter to AltEn.
State officials cited the plant for “non-compliance” with several rules designed to prevent pollution and said in the October letter that they were concerned that AltEn was not properly disposing of the waste and noted the possibility of “short-term contamination and surface water and long-term groundwater ”.
“It is a really significant contamination event that is affecting local ecosystems and the community there,” said Sarah Hoyle, who specializes in pesticide issues for the Xerces Society, an Oregon-based conservation organization that helps research the problem in Mead.
Neither Scott Tingelhoff, general manager of AltEn, nor two other factory employees 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.
Mead residents say they are concerned about plant residues that have not remained on the plant’s properties. In addition to the quantities taken to the farms to spread over the planted area, it even seems to have been leached and spilled from wastewater ponds to adjacent watercourses.
AltEn has also applied its wastewater to cultivated areas. Some Mead residents fear that the water from the well on which their homes depend is contaminated, while researchers are also concerned about the potential contamination of an underground aquifer that supplies water throughout the Midwest.
They are also dissatisfied with what they say has been more than two years of regulatory failures to protect the community.
“I received a lot of criticism from the state staff,” said area resident Paula Dyas, who filed a complaint with the state when her dogs fell ill after ingesting some of the waste that had been dumped on a neighboring farm. Her pets recovered, but were so sick that she feared permanent damage. “There is simply no consideration for how much of these chemicals we are putting in the land and what it will do to animals, to wildlife,” she said.
Jody Weible, former chairman of the Mead planning commission, tried to enlist the help of state political leaders as well as regulators to deal with what she calls the “poison” that comes out of AltEn. The factory has been about a kilometer from his home for 34 years.
“I sent an email to the EPA, water, park and conservation people, just about anyone I could imagine,” said Weible. “They all say that there is nothing they think they can do about it.”
Other neighbors who live near the plant told state officials about strange diseases and dead or dying birds.
After receiving several complaints, the Nebraska Department of Agriculture ordered AltEn to stop distributing its waste in agricultural fields. But that means that more and more have been accumulating in the ethanol facilities or taken to their ponds. AltEn also started to incinerate part of the waste and store “biochar” in bags outside the factory property, a practice that worries even more the residents of the area.
Dead bees
State regulators say they have not tested the water, soil or vegetation outside the plant’s property and are unaware of the wider potential damage from the spread of AltEn waste. But Judy Wu-Smart, a researcher at the University of Nebraska who studies the health of bees, did some testing and said there was little doubt that the plant’s contamination had spread far beyond its limits.
In an academic article she shared with regulators and other researchers, Wu-Smart said that each hive kept on a university research farm located about a kilometer from Mead died, losses that coincided with AltEn’s use of seeds treated with neonates. . She also reported a shortage of other common insects in the area and has video recordings of birds and butterflies in the area that appear to have neurological problems.
After finding neonic residues in the vegetation and tracing water courses that connect the university’s campus to AltEn, Wu-Smart is concerned that a broad event of contamination by high levels of neonates is affecting the environment and possibly the people who live in the area.
“There is a red flag here. Bees are just a bioindicator that something is very wrong, ”said Wu-Smart. There is an “urgent need to examine potential impacts on local communities and wildlife,” she said.
Neonates are absorbed by plant roots as they grow and can persist for years in the environment and are held responsible, along with other pesticides, for the so-called “insect apocalypse”. Insecticides have also been linked to serious defects in white-tailed deer, raising concerns about the chemical’s potential to harm large mammals, including people.
The European Union banned the external use of clotianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam in 2018, and the United Nations says that neonics are so dangerous that they should be “severely” restricted. But in the United States, neonates are widely used.
Not just Nebraska at risk
Meghan Milbrath, an assistant professor of entomology at Michigan State University, said the implications of AltEn’s practices “go far beyond Mead.”
“As we’ve seen here, battered seeds can result in significant contamination that disrupts ecosystems and puts communities at risk,” said Milbrath.
The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy (NDEE) said it “has no opinion” about the origin of bee deaths and has no “jurisdiction” in the matter. The state agency said it was continuing to “review operations and activities at the facility”.
And while the state has not prevented AltEn from receiving pesticide-coated seeds for ethanol production, it has ordered AltEn to implement a groundwater monitoring plan and other mitigation measures, although the state has noted several compliance issues. The state has also ordered AltEn to dispose of its waste at a permitted solid waste disposal facility.
Residents question whether this will happen or not and point to large piles of green trash still surrounding the facility.
Neither Tingelhoff, AltEn’s general manager, nor two other factory employees responded to a request for comment.
But state officials refused to be interviewed for this story, although Blayne Glissman, an NDEE waste licensing expert, offered a defense for the ethanol operation, saying she believed that AltEn officials were just “hardworking people trying to earn a living “.