Early this year, the Guardian reported that residents of Mead, Nebraska — a tiny town of 600 near Omaha — were getting sick, and also noticing livestock and bee fatalities. The cause? All signs point to AltEn, a neighboring ethanol plant found to be processing thousands of pounds of unused pesticide-treated corn seed from all across the country.
Not your typical ethanol plant
Residents say they had no idea that treated seeds would be processed in the factory when the city approved the new plant in 2018 — they assumed AltEn would be using untreated field corn. As it turns out, the ethanol plant became one of just two in the country to process seeds coated with pesticides, after entering into long-term contracts with multinational seed companies like Bayer, Syngenta, and Dow. By 2020, AltEn was processing 98% of the treated seed discard in the U.S. — 600,000–900,000 pounds daily.
In 2019, state environmental officials recorded levels of neonicotinoids — a common seed treatment known to be harmful to pollinators — in one of the large hills of waste on the property. Regulatory benchmarks suggest that anything over 70 parts per billion (ppb) is unsafe; researchers found levels at a shocking 427,000 ppb.
Community concerns
Over the last three years of the plant’s operation, Mead residents — some who live less than a mile from the factory — began to report all kinds of health problems like sudden nosebleeds, passing out while out on a jog, and constant coughing. Since 2018, over 50 community members have made formal complaints around these concerns, as well as livestock health concerns, fatalities, and “bee kills” (sudden colony collapse). For a community of less than 600, 50 complaints is extremely high.
Early this year, state regulators finally ordered the plant to shut down until it can dispose of its piles of waste, which AltEn had originally sold back to farmers as a soil conditioner before receiving a “Stop Sale” order from the state. The plant had until March 1 to remove its waste — but AltEn chose to ignore those orders. To make matters worse, in late February, a frozen pipe burst on a four-million-gallon tank in the now-shut facility, which resulted in a spill that traveled more than four miles from the plant.
Now, the State of Nebraska is suing AltEn for failing to clean up its mess. Yet residents who have watched neighboring industries go out of business before, are worried the plant will go bankrupt and the waste will never be cleaned up.
With Mead’s disaster all over the regional and national news, Nebraska legislators have also stepped up to take action, advancing a bill to limit the use of treated seeds in ethanol plants within the state. So far, this legislation has moved forward unencumbered through Nebraska’s unicameral legislature. While it’s a good sign for the residents of Mead, the absence of corporate opposition is almost unsettling. If and when Nebraska successfully casts out the use of treated seeds in ethanol production, we could easily be facing a national game of whack-a-mole, with pressure on other states to process these seeds instead.
Though the scale of this disaster is appalling, it’s hard to feel surprised. Mead’s disastrous situation is completely tied to our broken regulatory system — one that has been shielding pesticide seed treatments from the public eye and precautious regulatory measures for far too long.
A corporate con?
Pesticide-treated seeds account for the most common application of neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides, the fastest-growing class of insecticides worldwide. Acutely toxic to pollinators and other invertebrates, researchers are also finding that neonics pose large risks to birds and large mammals — including humans. During planting and after, treated seeds are prone to drift (“dust off”) and leach into waterways and onto neighboring crops. And due to their widespread use, scientists worry about pest resistance, something we’re facing with other broadly used pesticides like glyphosate.
How widespread are we talking? About two thirds of soybean seed and over 90% of corn seed in the U.S. are pre-treated with neonics before they are sold. With natural fluctuations in how many acres of each crop are grown yearly, it comes as no surprise that ethanol plants like AltEn have arisen as a convenient final destination for unused treated seeds each year — despite the dangers to surrounding communities.
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‘There’s a red flag here’: how an ethanol plant is dangerously polluting a US village
Situation in Mead, Nebraska, where AltEn has been processing seed coated with fungicides and insecticides, is a warning sign, experts say
For the residents of Mead, Nebraska, the first sign of something amiss was the stench, the smell of something rotting. People reported eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds. Then colonies of bees started dying, birds and butterflies appeared disoriented and pet dogs grew ill, staggering about 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 refer to it as a village and not a town.
After multiple complaints to state and federal officials and an inquiry by a researcher from the University of Nebraska, all evidence points to what should be an unlikely culprit – an ethanol plant that, like many others around the United States, turns corn into biofuel.
The company, called AltEn, is supposed to be helpful to the environment, using high-starch grains such as corn to annually churn out about 25m gallons of ethanol, a practice regulators generally hail as an environmentally friendly source for auto fuel. Ethanol plants typically also produce a byproduct called distillers grains to sell as nutritious livestock feed.
But unlike most of the other 203 US ethanol plants, AltEn has been using seed coated with fungicides and insecticides, including those known as neonicotinoids, or “neonics”, in its production process.
Company officials have advertised AltEn as a “recycling” location where agricultural companies can rid themselves 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 too pesticide-laden to feed to animals.
Instead, AltEn has been accumulating thousands of pounds of a smelly, lime-green mash of fermented grains, distributing some to farm fields as a “soil conditioner” and accumulating the rest on the grounds of its plant.
It is that waste that some researchers say is dangerously polluting water and soil and probably also posing a health threat to animals and people. They point to testing ordered by state 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
Dan Raichel, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
“Some of the levels recorded are just off the charts,” said Dan Raichel, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has been working with academics and other environmental protection groups to monitor the situation in Mead. “If I were living in that area with those levels of neonics going into the water and the environment I would be concerned for my own health.”
