Keith Forrester seeks to limit them at ‘the source’

Before a Congressional oversight committee issued its report in February warning of “dangerous levels” of heavy metals in commercial baby food products, Keith Forrester of Meredith, a professional environmental engineer, had already filed a patent application for a chemical process to address the risk to children’s health.

“I expect three or four competitors will also file applications,” Forrester said, “and I will submit a full application in the fall. It will all depend on who files first.” He anticipated the process may take a year.

Forrester has stalked heavy metals for nearly four decades, an odyssey that has taken him from scrapyards to infants’ stomachs, and many stops in between. He began while working at Exxon in 1980, soon after the industry began wrestling to comply with the environmental regulations introduced in the prior decade, which added to operating costs and carried criminal penalties.

Forrester explained that industrial processes manipulated naturally occurring minerals to produce compounds of greater toxicity while leaving waste material hazardous to both human health and natural environments. “The challenge,” he said, “was to tackle the problem at the source, at the micro level, by stabilizing the heavy metals and reducing the production of hazardous waste.”

The cost of transporting and disposing of untreated hazardous waste, Forrester said, ranges from $300 a ton in the United States to $600 a ton in countries where the number and capacity of landfills is limited, while the cost of treatment runs from $6 to $35 a ton.

14 patents, 40 pending

After five years with Exxon, Forrester, weary of the heat and humidity of Houston, moved to New Hampshire, joining Wheelabrator, developer and operator of waste-to-energy plants. There, he recalled, he developed processes to treat the heavy metals concentrated in the ash, which represented about 30% of the waste produced by the plant.

Forrester Environmental Services Inc. was formed in 1992. The son of a doctor who had told him, “I loved the practice, but I hate the business” and cautioned “hiring people would cause me stress,” Forrester has flown solo ever since, sharing ownership with his wife, Jeannie, the former Republican state senator who is now Tilton’s town administrator.

Since then, Forrester has been inventing, licensing and marketing what he calls “heavy metal molecular compound technologies.” These chemical applications convert heavy metals — arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury — to stable, insoluble compounds that cannot attach to hemoglobin and take a thermodynamically stable crystalline form.

“I can’t destroy the metals,” he said, “but I can convert them.” The new minerals cannot easily spread to surface and groundwater to contaminate the environment and are less likely to enter the food chain by being absorbed by plants and animals.

Working alone in the laboratory at his home in Meredith, Forrester has acquired 14 patents and has another 40 pending. His clients include a diverse array of industries: construction and demolition contractors, foundries and smelters, petroleum and chemical manufacturers, mining and mill operators, public utilities and financial institutions.

Traveling across the United States, as well as through Europe and Asia, he developed lasting partnerships and consulting relationships with many of his clients.

Soil and groundwater mediation and converting hazardous waste to useable fill, aggregate and building material has represented a large share of the business, along with stabilizing lead paint, remediating battery spills and treating spent shells on a firing range. He counts the Sumitomo Corporation, the diversified manufacturing and trading global conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, among his longtime clients.

‘A little bit of destiny’

Forrester said as he has aged he began to tire of international travel along with managing the complex logistics of a far-flung business — “doing the trucking and delivering the chemicals.” He described his foray into the baby food industry as “a little bit of destiny” and a refreshing challenge to enliven the business of coping with the familiar problem of industrial waste.

By 2019, a study by Healthy Babies Bright Futures, a nonprofit organization, found elevated levels of arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury — all known to impair the development of the infant brain. Forrester said he asked himself, “Can I apply my molecular compound technology to baby food?” He weighed two strategies. He considered a recipe for a pill that would convert and stabilize the metal when ingested, only to abandon it. Using a child’s stomach acid as a reactor, while perhaps chemically viable, would be a commercial anathema, he said. Moreover, the approval process would require running a lengthy, costly regulatory gauntlet with no assurance of success.

Instead, Forrester turned to his long experience of treating heavy metals in soils. By converting and stabilizing metals in the ground, they would be rendered safe before finding their way into the food chain as plants drew water and nutrients from the soil.

“Catch the mouse before it gets into the house,” he remarked. “Address the problem proactively at the farm, where the food is grown at the greatest distant from the child.”

Forrester said tests indicated the stabilizer significantly reduced levels of heavy metals in the leaves of plants grown in treated soils without adversely affecting their cultivation. The chemical stabilizer could simply be applied to the fields where crops are grown by conventional methods, he explained, while the alternative — introducing the stabilizer into the production process — would require extensive and expensive modification and retooling.

The initial study by Healthy Babies Bright Futures prompted formation of a congressional subcommittee, which reported in February that levels of heavy metals in processed baby food exceeded many times the limits prescribed by the Food and Drug Administration for bottled water. In May, the FDA Launched “Closer to Zero,” an initiative to reduce levels of arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury in commercial baby food.

Forrester said he was encouraged by the timely response of the FDA to the congressional report, which he expected would lead the agency to set targets for safe levels of metals in commercial baby food. He noted, while randomly testing products from the shelves of the local supermarket, he found levels of heavy metal that exceeded those of hazardous waste he had treated.

The immediate challenge, Forrester said, is for the baby food industry, from the growers to the manufacturers to the distributors, to recognize the problem.

He suggests convening a study group, consisting of representatives of all branches of the industry. First, he said, baseline levels for heavy metals at all stages of the process, from growing the ingredients to distributing the product, must be measured and evaluated. Then appropriate standards can be established and methods for achieving assessed.

Pointing to the adverse impact on cognitive skills tied to childhood exposure to lead, Forrester said of his work, “it comes with a good feeling.”