The ruling will allow Mosaic company to test a roughly one-mile road using phosphogypsum at its New Wales Mine in Mulberry, in Polk County. The roughly one-mile long road would use up to 1,200 tons of the material. It's a byproduct of fertilizer production that produces radioactive gas that may cause lung cancer.
Ragan Whitlock is with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, which has opposed the plan. He say this ruling comes despite a lot of public opposition.
"EPA has now accepted a cancer risk threshold that is three times higher than what is the regulatory ceiling," he said, "and this is the first time that this material will be put in roads in decades since the science emerged showing the cancer risk to road workers and harm to environment."
Mosaic has said this would be one way to whittle down gypstacks, which have caused several environmental catastrophes in recent years due to spills into waterways. Whitlock said this would be a tiny fraction of the amount now stored in those manmade mountains, mostly in Polk, Hardee and Hillsborough counties.
"This will do nothing to alleviate the pressure at our gypstacks," he said. "There's more than 1 billion tons of phosphogypsum stored in gypstacks across the country, and the industry produces more than 40 million tons of it annually."
Gypstacks have been blamed for polluting Florida's waterways, including a leak at Piney Point in 2021, which led to hundreds of millions of gallons of polluted water being released into Tampa Bay.
In 2020, the EPA moved to allow the use of phosphogypsum in roads, but after backlash from environmental groups across the country, the agency rolled back its decision in 2021. Many other countries around the world use it in road beds.
Whitlock said this is only the beginning of the push to use phosphogypsum in construction.
"Both Mosaic and EPA have listed this project as the intermediate step between laboratory testing and full scale implementation of this idea nationwide," he said. "It will start at the New Wales facility in Mulberry, Florida, but soon this risk could be nationwide."
