Duff Wilson, Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 322 pages, hardcover $26, paperback $13.95.

"The modus operandi is to lie and deny."--Tom Witte

Any food that we buy today may have been grown on land fertilized by hazardous waste, and may have absorbed toxic heavy metals from the soil, including lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic. There is simply no way one can know. But with hundreds of industries "recycling" their industrial waste as fertilizer to save the high cost of storing it in a hazardous waste landfill, it is becoming more and more likely. A legal loophole in the United States allows industrial manufacturing companies to sell their waste to fertilizer companies and to dump millions of tons of hazardous waste directly on the land as fertilizer and soil amendments. When hazardous waste with "agronomic benefits" is used as a fertilizer on food crops, lawns, and gardens, it is no longer considered hazardous waste, but simply a "product." In most states in the United States, there are no legal limits to the amount of toxic heavy metals from industrial wastes that fertilizer may contain and the farmers who use it are not even told what inert ingredients are in the fertilizer. Inert hazardous materials are not listed on the label and for the most part, state and federal environmental agencies do not check the contents of fertilizers. Indeed recycling of hazardous waste into fertilizer is often recommended by state and federal authorities, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), passed into law in 1976, was meant to trace hazardous waste produced in the United States from "cradle to grave," monitoring the treatment, storage, transportation, and disposal of hazardous waste. But after the law was passed, the cost of disposal at hazardous waste landfills across the United States increased by some twenty times in the next few years and companies that stored their wastes in landfills faced future liabilities if the waste dump became a Superfund site. Companies were required to help pay for the cost of the cleanup. The slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle," became a mantra at the EPA. More and more hazardous waste began going into other products, such as fuel, asphalt, cement, glass, and building materials. Used in these ways, de facto hazardous waste would be considered just another product.

But there was another increasingly common use for waste, which was kept secret from the public. Companies could save millions of dollars on landfill costs, and enhance their bottom line, simply by recycling waste as fertilizer, dumping it on the fields where America's food is grown. While some of the waste does contain small amounts of plant food, such as zinc, for the most part, this practice is simply a way for manufacturing industries to legally dump their toxic waste on America's farmland, where it continues to accumulate in the soil and in some cases in the...