The abandoned Galey & Lord textile mill in Society Hill, S.C., resembles an apocalyptic wasteland. Looters have hauled away the steel gates for scrap metal. Rusting tanks sit in pools of dark water. Alligators lurk in wastewater ponds.
But the real danger, environmental officials say, lies in the surrounding fields, nearly 10,000 acres of contaminated farmland, including fields still growing food, that South Carolina says should be part of an unprecedented federal Superfund cleanup.
Galey & Lord, on the banks of the Great Pee Dee River, was once known as the “King of Khaki” for its role in introducing the casual cotton twill to American wardrobes. And for decades, it took the water that had been used in making its fabrics, treated it in wastewater lagoons, then gave the sludge to farmers as fertilizer.
What those farmers and many others didn’t know: The sludge contained dangerous levels of “forever chemicals” linked to cancer and other diseases. Testing has now shown high concentrations of the chemicals, also known as PFAS, on farms where the sludge fertilizer was spread.
This would be the first known case of farmland being declared a Superfund cleanup site blamed on contamination from sewage sludge fertilizer. The abandoned mill itself became a Superfund site three years ago.
“They said that it was good fertilizer, that it would help our crops,” said Robert O’Neal, a soy, corn and wheat farmer whose fields were fertilized with sludge from Galey & Lord in the late 1990s.
“They said, ‘This is so great for you. You can have it for free,’” he said. “And they brought us all their problems.”
The use of industrial sewage as fertilizer broadens a crisis already affecting farmers nationwide.
Sludge from city sewage has been used as fertilizer for decades, a practice the federal government has long promoted. Last year, a New York Times investigation examined the widespread risks of PFAS contamination that resulted. And early this year, for the first time, the E.P.A. warned of the health risks of PFAS in fertilizer made from sewage sludge.
Factories far and wide, for example paper mills in Maine, have also provided wastewater sludge to farmers for years. Industrial wastewater has contamination risks that can go beyond city sewage.
The Galey & Lord mill shuttered a decade ago. The E.P.A. declared it a Superfund site in 2022, which triggered a federally-led cleanup of chemicals detected at the site including PCBs, arsenic, mercury and PFAS.
The yearslong cleanup could cost taxpayers millions of dollars, though there is also a mechanism to potentially force companies responsible for contamination to shoulder the costs. So far about 100,000 gallons of flammable liquid and other waste has been removed from the mill site.
It remains unclear how the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda could affect Superfund cleanups. President Trump has declared the program, and clean air and water generally, a priority. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A.’s administrator, recently toured toxic sites to talk about accelerating cleanups. But environmental experts have also said the administration’s plans to cut the E.P.A. budget by 65 percent could slow those efforts.
Now, South Carolina is saying that the federal government should add the farmland to the mill’s Superfund designation, citing widespread contamination with PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. These materials are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down over time.
According to E.P.A. records, between 1993 and 2013 the Galey & Lord mill shipped more than 45,000 dry tons of sludge to more than 300 fields totaling roughly 10,000 acres. The median property is thought to have received 2.7 tons of sludge per acre, E.P.A. scientists said.
An official with South Carolina’s State Department of Environmental Services, Laura Renwick, said that because PFAS has been found on the farmland, Galey & Lord’s Superfund status should also apply to that land. The farms should “be incorporated into the site definition,” she said.
That would be an extraordinary cleanup.
Former E.P.A. officials said that there have been other cases of farmland designated Superfund sites, but not from sludge fertilizer. In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, arsenic-laced bait was applied to fields in North Dakota to combat grasshopper infestations.
“When a Superfund site cleans up contaminated soil, the usual practice is to remove the soil that is contaminated and replace it with clean soil,” said Betsy Southerland, a former director of science and technology in the E.P.A. Office of Water, which oversees biosolids, another term for sludge fertilizer in an email. “This is an order of magnitude larger soil contamination than I have encountered.”
Patti Ghezzi, a spokeswoman for E.P.A.’s Region 4, which oversees South Carolina, said that before the agency can decide on action, it must study the farmland further. That includes assessing the risk to human health and to the environment, and considering the cost of treatment, she said.
“This is a large area, and it will take time to complete the sampling,” she said.
The use of sewage sludge to fertilize farms faces rising scrutiny. Much of the sludge left over from treating both municipal and industrial wastewater has long been dried, treated and used this way.
The practice has benefits. The sludge is rich in nutrients. And spreading it on fields cuts down on the need to incinerate it or put it in landfills. It also reduces the use of synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels.
But the sludge can be contaminated with pathogens as well as chemicals like PFAS, research has shown. Synthetic PFAS chemicals are widely used in everyday items like nonstick cookware and stain-resistant carpets, and are linked to a range of illnesses.
While the E.P.A. regulates some pathogens and heavy metals in sludge used as fertilizer, it does not regulate PFAS. In Maine, the only state to systematically test for PFAS on farmland, inspectors have found contamination on more than 100 dairy farms.
At least some of the land that South Carolina wants to be declared a Superfund site is currently used to grow food. Neither the E.P.A. nor South Carolina could say how much, or describe the potential risks. The E.P.A. said it was “in the investigatory phase of understanding human health impacts” of contamination reaching crops and livestock, and has not issued definitive guidelines.
New research published by E.P.A. scientists in Nature Communications, a scientific journal, offers fresh details on the contamination. In the groundwater at one field, levels of one type of the chemical, called perfluorooctanoic acid or PFOA, reached 1,500 times the E.P.A.’s safety standard for drinking water. Levels of perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, another type, reached 850 times the E.P.A.’s safety standard.
Earlier state testing had found high levels of PFAS compounds in nearly 50 private wells. And soil testing had shown PFAS levels up to 20 times those the E.P.A. recently said could result in “human health risks exceeding the agency’s acceptable thresholds for cancer and non-cancer effects.”
Sludge from textiles and related industries can contain high PFAS levels because the chemicals are commonly used to make water-repellent clothes.
Local officials said it was news to them that, behind the scenes, the state is seeking Superfund designation for the farmland. “I haven’t heard anything about that,” Dwayne Duke, Society Hill’s mayor, said in an interview.
“It needs to be cleaned up, no doubt, the chemicals,” he said. “But when are we ever going to see the cleanup? All they’re doing is testing.”
Because so many drinking-water wells are affected, the E.P.A. is installing well filters at affected homes, and many now receive piped-in county water.
Kim Weatherford, who lives 12 miles from the Galey & Lord site with her husband and son, learned there was a problem with her well in July 2021 when state environmental officials came to test her water. The farm across the road had used contaminated fertilizer, she was told.
A month later, officials told her family to immediately stop drinking, cooking with, or even brushing their teeth with their well water. Levels of PFAS were 30 times EPA drinking-water standards.
She has since grown concerned about her 25-year-old son, a former high school baseball star who suffers from chronic fatigue and gastrointestinal problems. She wonders if it could be related to PFAS exposure. Doctors have been unable to find a definitive cause.
“My family has been drinking, cooking, bathing and inhaling poison for years,” she said. Using industrial sludge on farmland “should never have been an option,” she said.
Any cleanup could take decades.
Christopher Higgins, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines and an early researcher of contaminants in sewage sludge, said there wasn’t yet an established, cost-effective way of cleaning up such a vast area of farmland. “It’s a can of worms that many have avoided opening: How do you do large-scale cleanup of surface soils?” he said.
Galey & Lord’s last known chief executive, Pilar Charo, did not respond to requests for comment.
Cities and states across the country, including South Carolina, have sued PFAS manufacturers accusing them of causing environmental contamination and misleading the public by denying that PFAS presented harm to human health.
Those lawsuits, as well as a recent peer-reviewed study of previously secret industry documents, have alleged that PFAS makers for decades hid evidence of the chemicals’ dangers. And The New York Times reported last year that 3M, the chemical manufacturer, informed the E.P.A. in 2003 that its research had shown high concentrations of PFAS in wastewater sludge. Galey & Lord provided sludge to farmers until at least 2013.
South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson’s lawsuit against 3M, DuPont and other manufacturers mentions that sludge from wastewater treatment plants “has greatly expanded the breadth of PFAS contamination in the State.”
3M said it continued to address litigation by defending itself in court or through negotiated resolutions. DuPont referred questions to Chemours, its chemicals spinoff, which declined to comment.
It was not supposed to be like this.
Galey & Lord, founded in 1886, was a vanguard of American textile manufacturing. In addition to popularizing khakis, it supplied uniforms for the Flying Tiger pilots of World War II.
The company, for a time part of Burlington Industries, opened its Society Hill plant in 1966, and within a decade the buildings had grown to 700,000 square feet, as big as an Amazon distribution center today, employing 1,400 people.
Manufacturing textiles requires copious amounts of water and chemicals. Michael Scott, who worked for a decade in the plant’s dye room, remembers the five dying machines churning mixtures of peroxide, sulfur and other chemicals. And he remembers that mixture being sent to be treated, with the sludge settling into large lagoons on the factory grounds to later be distributed to farmers.
“They had a truck, and they had a pump on it, and they put the pipe in the water,” he said, “and it sucks it out of the water, into the tanks, and then it gets sprayed in the fields.”
Mr. O’Neal, who raises soy, corn, wheat, as well as butter beans, peas, squash, sweet corn and about 100 head of cattle, started accepting free sludge in 1996. He estimates it went on about 400 acres of his 2,000-acre farm.
But he started having doubts. “If something’s so good, why would they be giving it away for free?” he said. He stopped accepting the sludge in 2000.
In 2021, local regulators told Mr. O’Neal that high levels of the chemicals had been detected in well water at his family farm. At one well, PFOA levels were about 550 times the E.P.A. drinking-water standard.
After the mill shuttered in 2016, the company abandoned the site and it quickly fell into disrepair. In 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded several of the wastewater treatment pools.
Today it is a labyrinth of weed-tangled paths, half-burned structures and crumpled tanks. Recently, Clifton J. Howle, chief deputy at the Darlington county sheriff’s office, picked his way through the crumbling main brick building, keeping an eye peeled for two stray dogs nearby.
The site holds so much promise, he said. Riverfront property near the heart of town. Maybe someday it could be used for a new factory, he said, or even new homes. “Imagine the potential if they could clean this place up,” he said.
At the sound of approaching footsteps, an alligator resting on the banks of a wastewater lagoon slithered down into the dark water.
Hiroko Tabuchi covers pollution and the environment for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York.
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