In one of my last posts I mentioned an article that showed that the levels of vanilla and cinnamon increased in Puget Sound over the holidays. Well, we can guess where that came from, can’t we? Some things may not be fully digestible and end up “out there.” Also, kitchen wastes and so on make it into the municipal wastewater plants across the country. And out.
Remember, we rely on microbes to process all our liquid and semi-liquid wastes. These wastes make it to wastewater treatment plants that grow a variety of “bugs” (trade nickname) and these microbes take whatever nutrients are left and use them for their growth. These bugs are then wasted, thickened and composted and/or land applied. Really good fertilizer, as a general rule. And clarified, partially disinfected liquid (one hopes) makes it back into the streams.
Here in Colorado, the stream standards are starting to be more stringent so that basically trout can live in wastewater treatment plant effluent. Also, nutrients like phosphates and nitrates are being controlled so algae can be controlled. Nitrates are also being controlled at levels below what could cause “blue baby syndrome” in newborns or nursing moms. This is a good thing, even though it requires more control and cost. In the plains of Colorado, nitrate levels in drinking water found in alluvial wells can be very high because of excess nitrogen released by wastewater treatment plants and from overapplication of ammonia fertilizer. The former can be controlled, so it is a critical component of discharge limits now.
Clarified liquor or effluent (what comes out of the plant) can be chemically safe from drinking water standards, but lately new problems have cropped up. Americans are over-consumers. That is a fact. One thing we overconsume is medicines. People take antibiotics for everything. And if you take too much it enters the waste stream. This is not regulated as a discharge. Hell, this has only been recognized in the past few years. Tuberculosis and other bacterial infections are getting resistant to antibiotics. People change to other antibiotics, stronger ones, or take much more of the primary ones. These antibiotics exit your body and go into the waste stream. The waste stream is treated by “bugs” and the antibiotics are bug-killers. They pass through the wastewater plants untreated and out into the effluent and out into the world making antibiotic- resistant bacteria in the environment the survivors. So we have some antibiotic-resistant bacteria making it into the food chain. This is exacerbated by wastewater facilities trying to find chemical-free means of disinfecting wastewater effluent.
Shellfish are filter feeders. They eat zooplankton and phytoplankton. Well, if their food chain is bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics, what are the chances, through natural selection, that some really bad food poisoning will be a possibility. This is not to scare everyone, but it will happen, and probably only in small numbers. Kind of like getting E. Coli from spinach. Only it becomes more common at some time.
An endocrine disruptor is a synthetic chemical that when absorbed into the body either mimics or blocks hormones and disrupts the body's normal functions. This disruption can happen through altering normal hormone levels, halting or stimulating the production of hormones, or changing the way hormones travel through the body, thus affecting the functions that these hormones control. Chemicals that are known human endocrine disruptors include diethylstilbesterol (the drug DES), dioxin, PCBs, DDT, and some other pesticides. Many chemicals, particularly pesticides and plasticizers, are suspected endocrine disruptors based on limited animal studies.
Pesticides, plasticizers (solvents and plastics and hydrocarbons) and excess hormones that people take; these are the things we unthinkingly take in and waste that affect the environment. While I am a proponent of birth control, if you take too much or women take too much hormone replacement therapy dosages, then the hormones make the waste stream and out into the hydrological cycle. Yes, even soy products can do this. This has a very strange effect on aquatic life. There have been too may instances of fish and frogs downstream from a freshwater wastewater treatment plant outfall having an abnormally high percentage of females. In the South Platte River outside the outfall of the Denver Metro Wastewater Treatment Facility, over 99% of the fish were female or dual-sexed. Yes, I would say their hormonal balance was a little disturbed. And having one guy fish per hundred is not the same to fish as it is to humans, so don’t think they are having a good time.
- What evidence is there that environmental contaminants are causing endocrine disruption in humans or wildlife?
Recent studies of wildlife, including alligators, birds, and fish, have investigated the relationship between chemical exposure and reproductive problems. Many of these studies have shown that exposure to high doses can result in malformed reproductive organs, consistent with sex hormone imbalance at a critical stage of fetal development. Studies where very high doses of dioxin were fed directly to pregnant rats show effects on sexual development, sperm production, and sexual behavior in male pups. Directly feeding very high doses of DDT to rats has also shown adverse effects on sexual development. The dramatic results of these high-dose studies have led to speculation by toxicologists that the risk to reproductive success, associated with exposure to much lower levels of some chemicals in the environment, may be unacceptable.
In humans, a recent epidemiology study suggesting that sperm counts have declined by almost 50% over the past 50 years, and that this decline is associated with increased exposure to synthetic chemicals, has made the headlines. Other epidemiologists who have examined the same data do not reach this conclusion. Direct evidence of chemical effects on male fertility has been demonstrated in the study of workers involved in the manufacture of the older pesticides dibromochloropropane and leptophos (neither currently registered in the US). Again, such direct evidence is the result of exposure to very high doses. (I apologize, but I have lost the web reference for this article.)
On this New Year’s Day, please remember, do not take more than you need. Also, remember you affect your environment. And if you are looking at regulations for wastewater treatment facilities to further protect the environment—they are about 15-20 years out.
rojomojo
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