WASTE TREATMENT AND PHARMACEUTICALS

Excerpt from "The Lost Language of Plants" by Stephen Harrod Buhner

WASTE TREATMENT

The average person produces about 1,300 pounds of excrement (liquid and solid) per year and all of it's got to go somewhere. Until the development of cities, most human waste was routinely deposited willy-nilly in the ecosystem—much the way it is done by all other living beings on Earth—where it was then naturally recycled back into the soil. Rarely, if ever, was it excreted in any quantity into water systems. (Wild water was, as a result, historically quite different than it is now.) As people began to concentrate in larger numbers, some cultures utilized these natural, ancient patterns in handling their waste. Many Asian nations have, for centuries, placed varying amounts of their human waste back into the ecosystem as fertilizer. But in Christian Europe of the Middle Ages a vastly different process evolved over time.

Urinating and defecating on the ground near dwellings evolved into open pit privies or outhouses, which evolved into open pit cesspools (often for larger habitations or small towns) that tended to overflow with rains, which evolved into storm sewers where excreta was funneled into—usually open—gutters where rains would drain it into rivers.

Some smaller towns or businesses in America actually built public outhouses overhanging local rivers so that excrement could drop directly into the flowing water. Many monasteries in Europe incorporated the same techniques during the Middle Ages. People in homes that did not use outhouses or have overhanging privies collected excreta in "chamber pots" that were emptied daily, usually into cesspools or open sewers. These kinds of disposal of raw sewage led to regular epidemics throughout Europe; water supplies were badly contaminated. A fear of water, of bathing or washing of any sort, soon developed.

Because of the epidemics caused by accumulating wastes, cities, during the period they developed piped water, also developed closed and buried drain systems that funneled all waste and water from homes into central collection systems. Most of these simply discharged into nearby streams and rivers. By 1862 some 136 cities in the United States were doing this, and by 1880 there were nearly 600. Cholera, long a problem from open waste collection, abated, but cities downstream of discharges suddenly found themselves struggling with typhoid. In response cities began filtering (and eventually chlorinating) the water before people drank it. Raw sewage was still not treated.

The enormous increases in population, expansion of cities, and the spreading of industrialization and technology during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century produced huge quantities of waste. Industrial wastes were blended with human wastes into one enormous waste stream; little of it was treated to reduce toxicity. By the 1950s American waters receiving sewage effluent had become so polluted that, in one celebrated case, a river in the Northeast caught on fire. In response, treatment plants to reduce environmental impacts began to appear.

The earliest treatment facilities, in what became known as primary treatment, simply strained out "floatables." Secondary treatment, a later innovation, speeded up the decomposition of wastes by oxygenating them and promoting bacterial growth. The water, cleaned of everything treatment facilities could clean it of, flowed back into ground waters and streams. Left behind was a dewatered, sticky, mudlike, black goo called sludge.8

By 1997 industry was dumping an estimated 240 million pounds of wastes with "hazardous components" alone into municipal treatment systems and American households were contributing a staggering 1.6 trillion gallons of waste-filled water to the treatment stream. And in spite of the expansions in waste treatment in the past five decades many pollutants (including significant amounts of excreted pharmaceuticals) remain in the water. Some two dozen major U.S. utilities release so much effluent to local waters that their discharges sometimes equal half the receiving streams' volume, basically only diluting discharged effluent 2:1. And much of the effluent, in spite of treatment, is still polluted.

In 1999, the Congressional Research Service commented that states report that municipal discharges are the second leading source of water quality impairment in all of the nation's waters (rivers and streams, lakes, and estuaries and coastal waters). Pollutants associated with municipal discharges include nutrients . . . , bacteria and other pathogens, as well as metals and toxic chemicals from industrial and commercial activities and households.9

Sludge contains varying amounts of any of the 70,000 different chemicals produced by industry each year as well as (according to the U.S. EPA) "volatiles, organic solids, nutrients, disease-causing pathogenic organisms (e.g., bacteria, viruses, etc.), heavy metals and inorganic ions, and toxic organic chemicals from industrial wastes, household chemicals, and pesticides."10

To get rid of sludge, coastal cities, the largest city-waste producers, initially dumped it in the ocean (often creating "dead zones" where nothing could live). Some inland cities put it in landfills or shipped it to the ocean for dumping. Still others incinerated it and put the resulting ash in landfills, spread it on the ground, shipped it via barge for ocean dumping, or sent it on huge container ships to Third World countries." When Congress outlawed the ocean dumping of sludge in 1988 cities were faced with a huge problem: What to do with the 11.6 billion pounds of sludge they were producing per year. Most of them began using it as fertilizer, plowing it back into the soil—an ironic return to Asian approaches but with a vastly more contaminated product.12

Among other things sludge contains significant amounts of pharmaceuticals. Most of this comes from pharmaceutical companies and hospitals who direct their waste streams into municipal treatment systems, households flushing unused pharmaceuticals down the drain, people excreting pharmaceuticals they are taking, and personal care products such as sunscreens and lotions that wash off during bathing. As well, large numbers of pharmaceutical chemicals enter the waste stream from illegal drug labs, expired drugs thrown into landfills (by both households and pharmaceutical manufacturers), hospital waste (incinerated and solid), and waste produced by pharmaceutical companies during the manufacture process.

PHARMACEUTICALS IN THE ENVIRONMENT HERE