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 The hog industry, through a multi-million dollar public relations
campaign, blames water pollution on public sewage treatment plants.
Everyone knows that city sewage must be controlled. But this finger pointing seriously downplays the environmental dangers of hog factories and blurs the fact that
sewage treatment plants are tightly regulated.
- Human waste is extensively treated to get rid of dangerous disease-causing organisms. Hog waste is not.
- Agricultural runoff, including runoff from fields saturated with hog waste, continues to be the number one source of nutrient pollution in North Carolina - by far!
- In fact, hog factories pour more nitrogen pollution into the air in eastern North Carolina than all of the municipal and industrial sources combined.
Sewage treatment plants have been regulated for decades. Hog factories were almost entirely unregulated until 1993 and, even now, are exempt from many of the environmental rules that
apply to sewage treatment plants.
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