The Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals seeking review of a December decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to allow Mosaic Fertilizer, LLC, a subsidiary of The Mosaic Company, to move forward with the pilot road project on company property in Polk County.
Phosphogypsum is typically stored in huge stacks, but Mosaic proposed building four sections of test road that would include different mixtures of phosphogypsum in road base material, according to the EPA’s notice of approving the plan. The project is slated for the company’s New Wales facility.
The EPA said the “approval applies only to the proposed pilot project and not any broader use.” But environmental groups have long argued that using phosphogypsum in such projects could pose risks to people working on roads and to water quality.
In a news release Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity said the pilot project is part of an effort to use the material in roads nationwide.
“The EPA is directly contradicting its own science and regulations by tripling the permitted cancer risk to the public and ignoring key radiation pathways,” Ragan Whitlock, a Florida-based attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a prepared statement.
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This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.