Inside Fort Worth’s December 2022 grand opening of a wastewater treatment plant, the mood was celebratory. After years of controversy and a $59 million state loan, city officials were seeing the fruits of their labor: a facility capable of taking in tons of sewage sludge and turning it into dry fertilizer pellets for distribution across North Texas. The fertilizer, known as biosolids, previously attracted complaints from residents in rural areas around Fort Worth who experienced “horrendous” odors around sites where the fertilizer was applied.
Synagro took over the city’s biosolids processing operations in 2020, committing to create a dry product rather than a wetter, smellier cakelike material. Four weeks later, on Dec. 29, Johnson County environmental crimes investigator Dana Ames received a report from a man in Grandview. Piles of smoking biosolids fertilizer on his neighbor’s land were making it difficult for residents to breathe, he said. The call from Grandview, about 37 miles south of Fort Worth, kicked off a flurry of lab testing, legal action and media attention surrounding biosolids and the “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, they contain.
The nonprofit watchdog organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which assisted Ames’ office with scientific testing and analysis, called the Johnson County suit “the first in what may be a tidal wave of product liability lawsuits” against biosolids manufacturers.