Plan to Send L.A. Sludge to Guatemala Appears Off

Los Angeles’ hopes of exporting concentrated sewage to Guatemala--aswirl in confusion one day ago--appeared to go down the tubes Friday as the Guatemalan ambassador insisted that any such deal is off.

Additionally, city officials here put on hold their recommendation to approve the contract.

In fact, questions were raised as to why the sludge deal was considered at all. A few months ago, officials in the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City said, the Guatemalan Congress passed an environmental law that specifically prohibited the importation of human waste.

Earlier this week, Los Angeles officials had been enthusiastic about the sludge connections after meeting with Guatemalan officials and had insisted that the Guatemalan government was enthusiastic as well.

Go to Composting Plant

Under the proposal, the city was to pay $6 million to a Virginia firm, Applied Recovery Technologies Inc., which was to ship about 350 tons a day of sludge to Guatemala. There, the sludge would be put through a composting plant and used for agriculture and jungle reforestation.

Los Angeles officials had been scheduled to consider the sewage deal in a Board of Public Works meeting Monday. But late Friday, the city’s sanitation bureau announced that it has postponed recommending that the city approve the contract at the request of Applied Recovery Technologies. Company officials said they needed time to study their options.

City officials had been counting on the Guatemalan deal to help meet the terms of a consent decree to halt sludge-dumping by the end of this year. Now dumped seven miles off Playa del Rey, the gunk is blamed for contaminating Santa Monica Bay.

The proposal started to unravel publicly Thursday when Oscar Padilla Vidaure, the Guatemalan ambassador, reacted to a report in The Times by issuing a short announcement that said the sewage deal was rejected “some time ago.”

In an telephone interview with The Times, Padilla Vidaure angrily blamed Applied Recovery Technologies for deceptive lobbying practices and “trying to put pressure, American-style pressure” to accomplish the transaction.

At a recent Los Angeles meeting, the ambassador said he was not well-versed on the sludge deal and had expected other, more knowledgeable Guatemalan officials to attend as well. Applied Recovery Technologies, he said, “kept quiet from me . . . the knowledge that Guatemalan governmental officials had already rejected the project.”

Apprised of Padilla Vidaure’s comments, Los Angeles officials and officers of Applied Recovery Technologies were dumbfounded, insisting that the ambassador and several other Guatemalan officials were supportive of the project during several months of negotiations. Perhaps the ambassador was mistaken, they said.

Ambassador Contradicted

The situation became more confused when another Guatemalan official, commenting to another newspaper late Thursday, contradicted the ambassador’s announcement.

As Los Angeles officials and Applied Recovery Technologies representatives scrambled to discover the true status of the project Friday morning, Guatemalan Embassy officials in Washington refused comment, saying they were awaiting further instructions from Guatemala City. By Friday afternoon, they said they had received the word: The ambassador was right; the deal was off.

Both U.S. and Guatemala diplomatic officials said there was considerable confusion within the Guatemalan government concerning its sludge-import policy. Sludge is a byproduct of raw sewage that has been transformed into a solid, jelly-like substance, with its bacteria killed in the process.

A U.S. official said that, despite the Guatemalan ban on imports of human waste, representatives of various composting firms were carrying a letter signed by the Guatemalan president encouraging further negotiations. The official suggested that negotiations may have been futile from the start because of the law and political concerns.

Hank Valentino, president of Applied Recovery Technologies, insisted that the Guatemalan law prohibiting the import of human waste is irrelevant. “When you talk human waste, you talk raw sewage. There’s definitely a difference,” he said. Asked whether sludge is processed raw sewage, Valentino said, “I would not even categorize it that way.

“We were working with their officials both before and after the law was passed. We’ve been working with them quite awhile.”

Valentino said he will not respond directly to Padilla Vidaure’s accusations until after speaking with the ambassador. “I know we have not done anything wrong,” he said.