Financing public compost facilities with a fertilizer tax

Introduction
Modern farms use synthetic fertilizers to provide soil with the nitrogen and phosphorus needed to support intensive crop production. Homeowners, businesses, and governments also use synthetic fertilizers for lawn care. Synthetic fertilizers are derived from fossil fuels and rock phosphate, both of which are extracted in ways that significantly harm the environment. The production of fertilizer is an energy intensive industry that produces greenhouse gases (GHG) as well as other toxic emissions that threaten environmental justice communities. Fertilizer application on fields contributes to emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

About 20 percent of fertilizers are lost to runoff or leach into the groundwater. This nutrient pollution eventually flows to the ocean where it fuels harmful algae blooms that kill marine life through hypoxia and/or produce airborne toxins that cause diseases in human beings. The excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the groundwater leads to a variety of human health problems, including blue baby syndrome. Nutrient pollution threatens the future of wild capture fisheries and sustainable aquaculture, endangering the nation’s food security.

At the same time, animal feeding operations (AFOs) produce massive amounts of animal manure. This manure is an air pollutant while it is being stored and a toxic water pollutant if it escapes into the water supply . But manure is also naturally rich in nitrogen and phosphorus and can be used in place of synthetic fertilizers. While liquid manure can be applied directly to fields, manure is best used when it has been composted to reduce pathogens and increase the ability of plants to absorb the available nutrients. Some composting is done on farms, but composting at scale requires intensive management and is generally done by commercial operations or municipalities. Public composting can capture food waste and lawn trimmings before they reach landfills and produces methane emissions, another potent GHG.

Taxing fertilizer would serve multiple important purposes. It would reduce the incentive to use synthetic fertilizers and internalize the external environmental costs. This would be consistent with the polluter pays principle and pigouvian tax theory. The additional revenue could be recycled by funding public composting facilities, which would further reduce nutrient pollution by capturing animal manure before it leaches into the environment. If the wholesale price of public compost was still more expensive than synthetic fertilizers, some of the tax revenue could be used on providing compost at a discounted rate to farmers. This would ensure that a fertilizer tax would not lead to a rise in food prices. There are 751 fertilizer manufacturing plants in the United States, which would make the administration of the tax cost effective if it were levied on sales from manufacturers.

A fertilizer tax could be an elegant solution to nutrient pollution while simultaneously fighting climate change, environmental injustice, and food waste.

Impacts of synthetic fertilizer production

Synthetic fertilizer is designed to deliver three essential elements necessary for all plant life: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Nitrogen and phosphorus are the primary concerns for growers and fertilizer producers. While potash production for potassium can also impact the environment, this paper focuses on nitrogen and phosphorus.

Nitrogen is generally thought of as the most important nutrient, and plants absorb more nitrogen than any other element. Synthetic fertilizer is created in ammonia plants, which produce 90 percent of the world’s fertilizer. The main ingredient in ammonia is natural gas, a fossil fuel that is mostly methane.

Phosphorus fertilizer is derived from phosphate rock, which is mined from the earth.

Feedstock extraction

Synthetic fertilizer is harmful to human health and the environment at nearly every stage of its lifecycle, beginning with the extraction of the necessary feedstocks. Drilling for natural gas is harmful because it:

• Disturbs soil, vegetation, and wildlife at the drilling sites;
• Requires pipelines that disturb land and destroy coastal wetlands;
• Pollutes groundwater through hydraulic fracturing (fracking);
• Pollutes surface water through chemical spills;
• Uses large amounts of freshwater that can never be recovered;
• Emits toxic air pollution through flaring;
• Causes explosions; and
• Causes earthquakes.

Poor communities‒disproportionately people of color‒bear the greatest environmental burden of natural gas fracking.

Phosphate rock is extracted by strip mining, which removes large amounts of land to expose bare rock surfaces. It not only destroys pre-existing vegetation, but also nearby areas for dumping the soil. Strip mining causes severe environmental impacts, including desertification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, aesthetic depreciation of the landscape, and the potential hazard of landslide and ground erosion. Mining also releases fine particulate matter, an air pollutant linked to lung and heart problems.

Toxicity at the site of production

Nitrogen

Nitrogen fertilizer production accounts for more than 50 percent of total energy use in industrial agriculture and therefore increases greenhouse gas emissions and other toxic pollution associated with fossil fuels. Like other chemical plants, fertilizer factories release toxic air and water pollution, including sulfur oxides, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon monoxide. Because chemical facilities like fertilizer plants are more likely to be located in low-income communities of color, synthetic fertilizer is an environmental injustice concern.

Phosphorus

Phosphorus is refined from phosphate rock through a process called beneficiation. Both mining and beneficiation produce toxic air and water pollution. Phosphate-based fertilizer plants also produce a radioactive byproduct called phosphogypsum. Because there is no known commercial use for phosphogypsum, fertilizer plants dispose of it in mountainous ponds filled with toxic wastewater. In 2019, one of these piles owned by The Mosaic Company nearly collapsed in St. James Parish, the heart of Cancer Alley in Louisiana. At another phosphate plant in Florida that is also owned by Mosaic, a sinkhole opened under a waste pit in 2016 and dumped at least 215 million gallons of polluted water into an aquifer.

Nutrient pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency says that nutrient pollution is one of America’s most widespread, costly and challenging environmental problems. About 20 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus from synthetic fertilizers and manure are lost to runoff or leach into groundwater. This nutrient pollution eventually flows to the ocean where it fuels harmful algae blooms that kill marine life through hypoxia and/or produce airborne toxins that cause diseases in human beings. The Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone and Florida’s red tides, which are becoming increasingly worse, are examples of harmful algae blooms. These algae blooms harm wild capture fisheries and sustainable aquaculture, endangering the nation’s food security and putting seafood harvesters out of work.

The excess nitrogen and phosphorus in the groundwater leads to a variety of human health problems including blue baby syndrome. In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that nitrates in the water supply from nutrient pollution were too high in 64 percent of agricultural and urban areas. Nutrients and algae in the water supply can also react with chemical disinfectants at water treatment plants to form dioxins, which have been linked to serious health problems, including reproductive and developmental health risks.

Climate change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear: We must radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 or the Earth faces ecological collapse. Fertilizer production contributes to climate change through methane leaks at the point of natural extraction. As mentioned above, the processing and refinement of fertilizer is an energy intensive process that also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

Once synthetic fertilizers are applied to agricultural fields or lawns, they stimulate microbes in the soil to convert nitrogen to nitrous oxide at a faster rate than normal. Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas and ozone layer depleter that is 265 more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. Its concentration in the atmosphere has been increasing rapidly since synthetic fertilizer usage increased rapidly in the mid-20th century.

Explosions

On August 4, 2020, a powerful explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, killed at least 220 people, injured more than 5,000 people, and left another 300,000 people homeless. The cause of the blast was the mishandling of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a synthetic fertilizer. This was neither the biggest accidental fertilizer explosion, nor the deadliest. A fertilizer explosion in Texas City, Texas, killed 581 people in 1947. Almost 70 years later in 2013, a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killing 15 people and injuring more than 260 others.

Synthetic fertilizer can also be used to make bombs. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used ammonium nitrate to build a truck bomb that killed 168 people and injured another 800 in Oklahoma City in what was then the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. As long as synthetic is produced in large quantities, it seems that explosions are inevitable. The good news is that there are nonexplosive alternatives.

Organic fertilizers

Manure as solution

Organic fertilizers, such as animal manure and vegetable trimmings have been used for millennia. Manure contains useful components, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and organic matter. About 15.8 million acres of cropland, equivalent to about 5 percent of all U.S. cropland, are still fertilized with livestock manure. Manure can be applied directly in its raw form or it can be composted first. Raw manure has a strong odor and contains pathogens that are dangerous to human health and can be transmitted through food.

Composting livestock manure reduces odors, kills pathogens, and reduces bulk. It is easier and more efficient to apply compost to fields than with raw manure. The nitrogen in compost is not as readily available to plants, but the availability of phosphorus, potassium and other nutrients from compost is similar to, or higher than, those from raw manure. Compost is both less expensive and more profitable to transport than raw manure due to its lower moisture content and higher market value.

A study that looked at 19 years of soil data found that compost is the key to carbon storage and sequestration. Transitioning to compost from synthetic fertilizer would transform a greenhouse gas-emitting industry to one that actively slows down or reverses climate change.

Manure as pollution

While it is possible to use animal manure in place of synthetic fertilizer, manure can also be a pollutant. In the United States, animals raised for food are often kept in confinement. An estimated 9.5 billion animals are raised for food in the United States each year. When a large amount of animals are raised indoors or kept in small outdoor pens, the manure piles up and must be disposed of. If the manure is applied to fields or stored outdoors, rain can carry the nutrients into the water supply where it can create the same problems as synthetic fertilizers, including water contamination and harmful algae blooms.

Some farms keep animal manure in large lagoons that can pollute groundwater with nitrates and other toxins. When Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina and South Carolina where there are a lot of hog farms, more than 100 manure lagoons spilled into the water supply.

Manure also creates air pollution by releasing ammonia. The ammonia combines with pollutants from fossil fuel combustion — mainly nitrogen oxides and sulfates from vehicles, power plants and industrial processes — to create fine particulate matter, a potent air pollutant. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the largest producers of manure pollution, are concentrated in poor communities that are disproportionately people of color.

Public compost facilities

Some farmers already compost manure on their farms. On-farm requires composting labor, equipment, and infrastructure to ensure that the manure does not contribute to nutrient pollution via runoff. The state of Vermont recently adopted Required Agricultural Practices that apply to on-farm composting that are designed to reduce nutrient pollution. These rules require that farms prepare a nutrient management plan and construct a structure that will prevent waste from overflowing and escaping to the water supply. But because farms are in the middle of a bankruptcy and consolidation crisis, some farms may not be able to afford to construct new composting facilities.

Other farmers contract with a company to remove the manure to a centralized compost facility. These large-scale compost facilities are capable of composting animal manure, but they can also accept food scraps and help reduce food waste. About 78 million tons of potentially compostable waste gets thrown away each year. When food and other organic waste ends up in landfills, it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas, so large-scale composting can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Municipal composting is growing in popularity. The number of curbside composting facilities grew from 79 in 2014 to 148 in 2017. Urban farming presents potentially new sources of manure, more justification for public composting facilities, opportunities to collect urban nutrients, and reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer. Collecting home grass clippings and leaf litter for public composting will also cut down on what is sent to landfills while providing composting facilities with carbon matter that is needed for the composting process

There are 5,000 composting facilities nationwide, with an average annual processing capacity of 5,000 tons. That’s an estimated total national composting capacity of 25 million tons. Animals raised on farms produce about 2 billion tons of manure per year. Our national composting capacity would have to increase by a factor of 80 to centrally compost all of our animal waste, though some of that may be composted on-farm. The largest composting facilities can now process about 145,000 tons of waste each year. A new facility in Calgary, touted as one of the world’s largest composting facilities, cost $110 million to construct, though it was estimated that a new landfill would have cost $770 million. Other estimates for the startup costs of smaller facilities that can compost 40,000 tons per year are between $5 and $9 million per year.

Total estimated fertilizer usage in the United States is about 20 million tons per year. It is not clear if this figure includes the more than 2 million tons of fertilizer used on home lawns each year. By some estimates, it takes a little less than 7 pounds of compost to replace 1 pound of synthetic fertilizer. During the process of composting, raw materials such as manure lose about half of their mass. So about 14 pounds of raw manure are needed to produce enough compost to replace synthetic fertilizer. It must be noted, though, that compost cannot perfectly replace fertilizer without other organic amendments or adapting crop choice to soil characteristics.

If no farms composted their own manure, we would need to compost about 14 percent, or 280 million tons, of the total animal manure produced each year to create the same amount of compost per year as fertilizer produced. That would equate to 1,931 large facilities or about 56,000 small compost facilities. For reference, there are about 1,250 landfills in the United States.

A survey conducted by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance reported that compost facilities create more jobs than landfills or incinerators. It found that small-scale compost facilities employ 13.6 jobs for every 10,000 tons per year processed; medium sized, 5.9 jobs; and large sites, 2.8 jobs per 10,000 tons per year composted. This means that creating new centralized composting facilities that would handle the nation’s fertilizer needs could create somewhere between 78,400 and 380,800 new, permanent jobs in addition to all of the construction and engineering jobs necessary for constructing new facilities. The entire fertilizer manufacturing industry currently supports fewer than 20,000 jobs.

Fertilizer tax

Tax base

A fertilizer tax would be relatively easy to administer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is authorized to regulate production, distribution, storage, and release of most chemicals in commerce, including synthetic fertilizer. EPA relies upon the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) and Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act to directly address the potential risks from facilities holding chemical hazards. There are 751 fertilizer manufacturers in the United States. In collaboration with the Department of Treasury, EPA could require these 751 businesses to collect a tax on every pound of fertilizer sold to wholesalers or retailers. The industry manufactures five basic fertilizer chemicals: phosphate, ammonia, urea, ammonium nitrate and nitric acid. “Straight” fertilizers contain only a single nutrient. “Mixed” fertilizers contain two or more primary nutrients. EPA tracks all of them.

EPA also regulates the importation of chemical fertilizers through the Toxic Substance Control Act. EPA can work with Customs and Border Patrol to require importers of chemical fertilizers to collect the fertilizer tax.

Tax rate

There are several factors to consider when setting the price for a fertilizer tax. Under the Pigouvian theory of taxation, the cost of fertilizer should be increased to account for externalities, which are costs of the product born by the rest of society. In the case of fertilizer, the tax would have to be equal to the damages caused by air and water pollution from manufacturing, the harm caused to human health and marine environments/economies from nutrient pollution, fertilizer’s contributions to climate change, and loss of life and property from explosions. Externalities can be difficult to calculate, but one study estimated that heavy phosphorus fertilizer application could damage a nearby water body by as much as 83 percent of its total value. Generally true Pigouvian taxes appear shockingly high to policy makers because we are so used to never accounting for externalities.
One approach to taxing fertilizer would be to use the tax to influence consumer behavior through price signals. If the tax is high enough, it will cause fertilizer consumers to use less of it or to switch to an alternative. In this case, a tax could bring synthetic fertilizer’s price in line with its organic competitor, compost. Compost is about five times as expensive as synthetic fertilizer. The federal government could impose a tax on synthetic fertilizer that would make it five times as expensive. This would also be shockingly high to policy makers and farmers.

Another approach to taxing fertilizer would be to price it so that the government is generating enough revenue to cover the costs of building out new compost infrastructure. The federal government could calculate the total cost for the construction of a given number of new compost facilities and then impose a tax that would generate that much revenue over a given number of years. For example, a fertilizer tax of $1.00 per pound would generate roughly $40 billion of revenue in the first year alone and would fund the construction of more than 360 large facilities comparable to the Calgary site. This tax would double or triple the cost of synthetic fertilizers, depending on the type of fertilizer.

Using the revenue

The revenue on a fertilizer tax could be used on any number of projects, including remediation of environmental harms caused by nutrient pollution or payments to communities who have been harmed by the toxic emissions of fertilizer factories. To stop the harmful pollution from continuing to occur, the revenue from a fertilizer tax could be used to fund alternatives to synthetic fertilizer such as composting facilities.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) already has experience with owning and operating its own compost facility. USDA could be the entity responsible for overseeing the construction and operation of new compost facilities. This would be squarely in line with the mission of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which was originally created in 1933 as the Soil Conservation Service. NRCS collaborates with local conservation districts, a network of democratically controlled local offices that link local farmers to federal agencies. There are about 3,000 local conservation districts, or about one in every county. Local conservation districts could help coordinate manure collection and compost distribution.

It must be acknowledged that any fertilizer tax could make farming and therefore food more expensive. Many farmers are already experiencing economic precarity, and farmer bankruptcies are at their highest levels since the 2008 financial collapse. If farmers are unable to absorb these costs, they will have to raise prices or go out of business. If they raise prices, then food will get more expensive. Food insecurity is on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying recession, so many eaters cannot afford more expensive food. Therefore, at least some of the revenue will be needed in the short term to stabilize food markets by either:

• Allowing prices to rise and expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to ensure food security; or
• Providing free/discounted compost to farmers who need help transitioning to organic fertilizers and keep food prices down.

Existing fertilizer taxes

States

The United States currently has no federal fertilizer tax, and only a few U.S. states have experimented with fertilizer taxes. Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania have all previously implemented fertilizer taxes. The taxes have all been nominal and serve as inspection fees, and none are actively discouraging the use of synthetic fertilizers because they have adopted other policies that support the fertilizer industry. Iowa exempts fertilizer from sales tax. Wisconsin offers tax breaks for fertilizer mixing equipment. Pennsylvania recently passed a bill to offer tax breaks to synthetic fertilizer manufacturers.

Selected international examples

Fertilizer taxes have been more common in Europe, though still rarely used. Austria, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands all imposed fertilizer taxes at one point, though Finland and Austria abandoned them when joining the European Union. Sweden abandoned its fertilizer tax in 2009 during the economic downturn. While the taxes were effective at generating revenue, they were unpopular among farmers and there were mixed results in reducing fertilizer usage, with some countries experiencing drops in usage while others did not. Economists concluded that fertilizer demand was relatively inelastic, that taxation did little to change consumption.

There are other explanations than demand inelasticity for why the European fertilizer taxes didn’t influence behavior. One is that the taxes might not have been high enough. When it was at its highest, the Austrian fertilizer tax was 24 percent of the original price. The Swedish tax peaked at 20 percent. The Finnish tax was higher and estimated to have been 72 percent above original price. Over the lifespan of the tax, Finland saw a decrease in both the use of fertilizer and the price of wheat, perhaps providing some evidence that a U.S. fertilizer tax might not increase the cost of food.

Another possible explanation is that taxes alone could not influence behavior because there was not an alternative product available to farmers who produce at scale. Fertilizer taxes may need to be combined with other policies to influence behavior, such as education for farmers about the harmful effects of fertilizers, incentivizing farmers to use agricultural techniques that can help prevent fertilizer runoff, or constructing new compost facilities to provide a viable alternative to synthetic fertilizers.

Conclusion

Synthetic fertilizer is a major pollutant that is choking our waterways, fueling climate change, and poisoning vulnerable communities. Manure from animal agriculture is also polluting our waterways, but it can be captured and composted to be a substitute for synthetic fertilizer. Right now synthetic fertilizer is cheaper than compost, and we lack the necessary infrastructure to compost even a small fraction of the manure being produced by animal feeding operations. A fertilizer tax could help address both of these problems by reducing the incentive to use synthetic fertilizers and helping to fund the composting facilities we need to process excess manure.

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