PBS News Hour

John Yang: Tyson Foods is one of the world's biggest meat and poultry producers and according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, it's also a major polluter in the United States.

A report entitled waist deep says that in the five years between 2018 and 2022, Tyson plants dumped more than 371 million pounds of pollutants into U.S. waterways.

More than half of that was in three states, Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri.

In response, Tyson defends its wastewater treatment program, which it says complies with regulations.

Stacy Woods is Research Director for the Union of Concerned Scientists and one of the authors of the report.

Stacy, what pollutants are we talking about here?

And what effect do they have on the environment on wildlife and on humans.

Stacy Woods, Union Of Concerned Scientists: Our report found that Tyson Foods dumped over 25 different pollutants into waterways in 17 states.

This pollution included nitrogen, including ammonia, and phosphorus.

And we're particularly concerned about those because when there's too much nitrogen and phosphorus in our waterways, it can cause harmful algal blooms that can kill fish and other aquatic wildlife.

And also, when people live close to these harmful algal blooms, they can experience things like asthma attacks, and bronchitis.

John Yang: And these are all byproducts of meat processing?

Stacy Woods: It comes from the wastewater in the meat processing.

Wastewater is produced in these meat processing plants, when folks working in these plants rinse off dead animal carcasses when they clean meat products, and when they rinse down these industrial equipment, and so that wastewater contains things like blood and feces and in bacteria like E. coli.

So there's a lot of wastewater that is produced when meat processing plants create meat and poultry products.

The Tyson Foods plants that we looked at produced over 87 billion gallons of wastewater in those five years.

John Yang: I want to read you part of a statement that a Tyson spokesperson gave us about your report.

It says Tyson Foods uses a robust management system to mitigate environmental risks and impact.

This report does not acknowledge our ongoing compliance with EPA regulations and certification by the Water Alliance where our strong water management practices.

What do you say to that?

Stacy Woods: The most shocking thing that we found in our investigation was that when Tyson Foods dumped these millions and millions of pounds of pollutants directly into our waterways, they were pretty much following the rules.

Now, there were a few instances where a couple of plants exceeded the rules for a few pollutants some of the time.

But by and large, they were in fact following the rules.

And we think that's a problem.

Those rules need to change.

Luckily, the EPA is actually right now working on updating those rules.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups, along with other citizens submitted comments in support of strengthening those rules so that these industrial polluters, like Tyson Foods, will be forced to clean up their act and stop dumping so much pollution directly into our waterways.

John Yang: Why is it that the these levels would sound high when you describe them are within the APS regulations?

Stacy Woods: That's a great question.

And I can't speak to the reasons why EPA has the regulation set right now.

But I can tell you is that the regulations that are in effect right now and during our study period, were enacted over 20 years ago.

In that time, there's been tremendous gains and technologies that can allow these polluters to clean up their wastewater before releasing it out into our environment, which is why it's definitely time for updated regulations that will reduce the amount of water pollution that's allowed to come from these kinds of plants.

John Yang: The report said that Tyson operates 123 plants in the United States, but that the data you analyze, only came from 41.

So could this actually be low?

Stacy Woods: Yes, our estimate is indeed an under estimate.

And the reason is that the current regulations only apply to a small sliver of the meat and poultry plants in the United States.

The EPA estimates that under the current regulations, only about 500 of the roughly 5,000 meat and poultry plants are required to report their water pollution.

So, for Tyson Foods, we had reportable water pollution for only 41 of their 123 plants.

And we would assume that the remaining plants are also creating wastewater.

John Yang: Is this a problem specifically to Tyson?

Or is this a problem industry wide for meat and chicken processing?

Stacy Woods The meat and chicken processing industry is a known water polluter across the United States.

This is not specific to Tyson Foods, but we decided to investigate Tyson Foods because they are one of the largest meat and poultry processors in the US.

So we anticipate that their influence in the overall industry pollution would be pretty high.

John Yang: Stacy Woods of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Thank you very much.

Stacy Woods: Thank you so much for this opportunity to talk about our report.