Turkey Manure Used to Save the Environment

Cheeko writes "CNN has an article about how 30,000 tons of manure is going to be used to create a wetland in Indiana. The thinking is that a wetland will neutralize the acidic run-off from old coal mines and the manure is being used as a basis for the formation of the wetland. Apparently you can smell the site from up to a quarter mile away."

Comments

Re:Triclosan and steroids

[aethera]

You are more right than you imagined. I just finished an environmental law class, and this was one of the issues we looked at. For the human body, more than 60% of drugs ingested are not absorbed by the body. Nor can these drugs be filtered out of the waste water at the sewage treatment plant. Tests of water downstream of these plants show high levels of virtually every drug on the market, from antibiotics to tylenol and birth control. Now, just ignoring the environmental effects of that, one of the biggest problems is that this low concentration of antibiotics in the water makes it much easier for bacteria in the water to develop resistance to the drugs that form out mainline defense against thousands of disease.

Best case scenario, drug costs go up as Pharmaceutical companies have to invest more in R+D to develop new drugs to replace a growing number of useless ones. Worst case, they can't, and simple infections, and other illnesses once easily treatable through antibiotics start to become deadly again.

Agricultural waste containing these hormones and antibiotics is far worse because this waste is often not treated at all, unlike human sewage, and ends up straight in the water supply.