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

Triclosan and steroids

[ptbrown]

Great, they're cleaning up an industrial waste site by dumping a (pardon the pun) shitload of agricultural waste.

Turkeys are mostly fed cheap corn and soy. But they're also pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. Because we demand more white meat and less outbreaks of disease (such as Avian Flu which has struck a number of farms here in Virginia recently).

Now, the farmers will swear left and right that this is safe and it doesn't show up in the food we eat, and they may be right. But the one place it certainly does show up is in the waste from the turkeys. No studies have been done on the environmental impact of most of these chemicals, though I expect we'll be finding out soon. (http://sierraactivist.org/article.php?sid=7491) But common sense should tell you that hormones and antibiotics can't be harmless.

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.

Re:Triclosan and steroids

[squaretorus]

This is a growing problem. In Europe we're not allowed to pump our livestock full of these chemicals for health reasons. BUT the WTO is backing down to US pressure - and is likely to foce the EU to drop these laws and start accepting US orginated products which are full of hormones.

The fact that you get more virulent and antibiotic resistant forms of Avian Flu developing more quickly with the routine use of anti-biotics should be enough reason to ban their use - but the almighty dollar wins again!

This wetland is a seriously BAD idea for the reasons you outline. Shouldn't /. have a green category for news of this nature - where science and tech is stepping over the line.

yeah, it used to...

[msouth]

...until it got tired of being treated like shit.

(PS I have a patent on out of context pun-shots at slashdot headlines, contact me for licensing terms)

It needs treatment more than distance, all right

[Spamalamadingdong]

The problem is that the farms leave this stuff in huge piles or (if liquid) open lagoons, where it stinks to high heaven. I wonder why so few farms are using anaerobic digesters on the manure? Bacteria in the environment convert a lot of the organic matter to methane and carbon dioxide; the methane can be burned for fuel, or potentially processed for some other use. The CO2 is pretty harmless unless you need a hot flame, and the traces of H2S and the like can be removed pretty easily (a pass through a column of iron filings supposedly converts H2S to FeS and H2). Do that, and you get rid of the stink too.

Still, this is a very uncommon procedure. It is so rare that the new energy bill has specific tax incentives to do it. Why has it taken so long? This technology has been the subject of experiments since the 60's and 70's; it's not like nobody knew.

Treatment of organic effluent in general

[Spamalamadingdong]

You have a good point there; the various chemicals in livestock waste need to be kept on the farm. The problem is that these huge feedlot operations are of totally unprecedented size, regardless of how "natural" they claim they are. Perhaps we'd be best served by not allowing the beef, turkey and pork operations to run off more waste than would be made by the number of animals they could raise on feed grown on the farm itself; they should have to treat, reclaim and recycle everything else.

That's going to be a mighty tough thing to ram past the factory-farm lobby, and I doubt it can be done this decade. However, if it does, I think we'll see some huge advances in technologies like manure digestion, ozone treatment and/or carbon filtering (I haven't heard of the steroid or antibiotic which can survive a heavy ozone assault). If such treatment systems also yield enough gaseous fuel to run the rest of the farm, they might pay for themselves. The ideal future is one where the farmers can't see themselves doing it any other way, because "we respect the environment on which our farms depend".