Get serious about sewage (Ekklesia)

The way society deals with its sewage is indicative of its commitment to sustainability, a South African academic has told a gathering of theologians in Brazil in advance of the World Social Forum, a global event questioning exploitative globalisation.

"Our thinking about sustainability must deal with sewage because we have to live with our waste. It cannot leave the globe. It hangs around and it comes back to haunt us," Steve de Gruchy of the University of KwaZulu-Natal said in an address to the 3rd World Forum on Theology and Liberation, which met from 21 to 25 January 2009 in Belem.

"Previous civilisations may have got away with flushing the problem downstream, but in a globalised world there is no downstream, or, more correctly, we all live downstream," De Gruchy told the forum, which focused on the theme of sustainability, under the slogan "Water, Earth, Theology - for another possible world".

The question of sewage, De Gruchy said, speaking on 23 January in this northeastern Brazilian city, "is the place where economics and ecology collide … Outside of our ability to deal with our s**t, there can be no real talk of sustainability" ...

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8460

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They don't shit in their drinking water like we do

check this site out

http://www.jenkinspublishing.com/messages/messages/board-topics.html

It's on "humanure"

yeah - fertilize with your OWN shit -

somehow we don't "get it"

we even BUY manure from cows for our gardens

but flush our own shit away with drinking water

go figure . . .

January 21, 2009

NEW YORK - New York City officials will christen the newest addition to the municipal harbor fleet on Thursday _ a 2,100-ton sludge boat named the Red Hook.

They'll use a bottle of water instead of champagne for the ceremony.

The boat has a tank that can carry 1.2 million gallons of water sewage.

It will make the rounds of the city's 14 wastewater treatment plants, collecting sewage for further processing into dry fertilizer used in New York and other states. It has a crew of six ...

http://www.amny.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--sludgeboat0121jan21,0,3116082.story

By Erik Stokstad
ScienceNOW Daily News
22 January 2009

What's the downside to clean water? Dirty sludge. A nationwide survey of sewage treatment plants shows that the sludge they produce--the residue from cleaning up wastewater--contains a wide variety of toxic metals, pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and other compounds, including some antibiotics in surprisingly high concentrations. That's significant because every year more than half of the roughly 7 million metric tons of these so-called biosolids produced in the United States are applied as fertilizer to farm fields ...

Wastewater treatment plants remove excess nutrients and pollutants that would otherwise harm aquatic life. A side benefit is that the nitrogen and phosphorus in sewage is recycled and used as fertilizer on some U.S. agricultural land. But biosolids also contain chemicals, such as carcinogenic dioxins, that don't break down during treatment. In 2001, EPA conducted a survey of wastewater treatment plants and concluded the concentrations of dioxins were too low to pose a health threat. Five years later, prompted in part by public concerns over drugs in the environment, the agency started testing for a much broader range of biosolid contaminants, including 97 pharmaceuticals and related compounds.

Many of the 145 chemicals tested for were present nationwide. Biosolids from all of the 74 large treatment plants surveyed contained the same 27 metals, but only zinc, molybdenum, and nickel exceeded standards for application to fields. Almost all of the 11 flame retardants on the list were present in every sample. Twelve of the 72 pharmaceuticals were similarly ubiquitous.

Two of the most common drugs were the antibiotics triclocarban and ciprofloxacin. Although the average concentrations were similar to those in previous small-scale studies, several samples harbored up to 440 parts per million of triclocarban, which is added to antimicrobial soap and other personal care products. That's almost 10 times higher than ever reported in biosolids and "astonishingly high," Halden says. One question is whether the antibiotics harm soil microbes, or aquatic life if enough leaches into streams, Halden says. "We really don't have the answer" ...

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/122/3