Muck spreading: how foul

[Nojoke Matt]

First post and I'm talking about poo! Hello all!

Yep I sympathise with you. A couple of years ago they started spreading that 'sanitised' human waste on the fields around here. The farmers left huge piles of it at the sides of the fields, one pile was right next to a public footpath. They didn't tell the locals what it was and then it was spread on the fields in the height of summer. The resulting stink was horrendous. You couldn't open windows or leave washing out etc. Now yep I accept a certain fragrance living in a rural area but this was different. It's a stink that hits that part of the human brain that says 'get away, run...bad, bad, bad...'. Plus you don't get used to it.

After complaints and a few stern letters from local businesses the council became involved. It was agreed to reduce the amount and timing. So my advice would be to find out if local businesses have felt affected.....get together with them and complain. Who is going to want to go for a meal or a pint if it stinks around there?

Incidently I seem to remember that the local farmers weren't happy about having to spread the stuff but basically had their arms bent by the water firms and also received a hefty reduction in their water bills because they took the waste.

[Green Aura]

Hi Matt, welcome to Ish. Whereabouts are you? You can put it in your personal settings then we'll all know. We're a multi-national forum you know

[Nojoke Matt]

oops will do.

[wastetech]

First post and I'm talking about poo! Hello all!

Yep I sympathise with you. A couple of years ago they started spreading that 'sanitised' human waste on the fields around here. The farmers left huge piles of it at the sides of the fields, one pile was right next to a public footpath. They didn't tell the locals what it was and then it was spread on the fields in the height of summer. The resulting stink was horrendous. You couldn't open windows or leave washing out etc. Now yep I accept a certain fragrance living in a rural area but this was different. It's a stink that hits that part of the human brain that says 'get away, run...bad, bad, bad...'. Plus you don't get used to it.

After complaints and a few stern letters from local businesses the council became involved. It was agreed to reduce the amount and timing. So my advice would be to find out if local businesses have felt affected.....get together with them and complain. Who is going to want to go for a meal or a pint if it stinks around there?

Incidently I seem to remember that the local farmers weren't happy about having to spread the stuff but basically had their arms bent by the water firms and also received a hefty reduction in their water bills because they took the waste.

The waste industry is promoting the landspreading of sewage sludge in the UK. However US research has highlighted the fact that it may contain infectious human and animal prions. This puts humans, livestock and wildlife at risk of infection.

University of Wisconsin prion researchers, working with $100,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant and a $5 million Dept. of Defense grant, have found that prions become 680 times more infectious in certain types of soil. Prions can survive for over 3 years in soils. And human prions are 100,000 times more difficult to inactivate than animal prions

Recently, researchers at UC Santa Cruz, and elsewhere, announced that Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a prion disease. "Prion" = proteinaceous infectious particle which causes always fatal TSEs (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) in humans and animals including BSE (Mad Cow Disease), scrapie in sheep and goats, and Chronic Wasting Disease in deer, elk and moose. Human prion diseases are AD and CJD (Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease,) and other rarer maladies. Infectious prions have been found in human and animal muscle tissue including heart, saliva, blood, urine, feces and many other organs.

Alzheimer's rates are soaring as Babyboomers age - there are now over 700,000 AD victims in UK shedding infectious prions in their blood, urine and feces, into public sewers. This Alzheimer's epidemic has almost 50,000 new victims each year. No sewage treatment process inactivates prions - they are practically indestructible. The wastewater treatment process reconcentrates the infectious prions in the sewage sludge.

Quotes from Dr. Joel Pedersen, Univ. of Wisconsin, on his prion research:

"Our results suggest that if prions were to enter municipal waste water treatment systems, most of the agent would partition to activated sludge solids, survive mesophilic anaerobic digestion, and be present in treated biosolids. Land application of biosolids containing prions could represent a route for their unintentional introduction into the environment. Our results argue for excluding inputs of prions to municipal wastewater treatment."

"Prions could end up in wastewater treatment plants via slaughterhouse drains, hunted game cleaned in a sink, or humans with vCJD shedding prions in their urine or faeces, Pedersen says"
(Note - This UW research was conducted BEFORE UCSC scientists determined that Alzheimer's Disease is another prion disease which may be shedding infectious prions into public sewers.)

Dreadful, isn't it - what we don't know about the dangers of sewage treatment would fill a warehouse.

[Green Aura]

And on that cheery note, welcome to Ish, wastetech.

I've removed your advert - it's against our rules to advertise until you've been posting with us for a while. Stay active and then you can put it in your signature

[ina]

It's not just the US where research into the adverse effects of sewage sludge on human and animal health is done - lots of work done here, too! Especially lack of male fertility and breast cancer are suspected to be influenced by elements in human waste. (A lot of what we take as medicines/birth control goes down the loo - and ends up in our food again!)

[MKG]

As per normal with discussions like this one, everyone seems to be right. Ina is correct to express concerns about cumulative toxicity and Stonehead is correct to express the opinion that it's stupid not to use our own waste products in a productive way rather than dump them in the ocean.

And I don't know what the answer is. Perhaps, though, it has to do with the pressure (by legislation) to do the impossible. A government which outlaws dumping at sea (sensible but just possibly as a reaction to pressure from interest groups) would be pre-conditioned to allow use of human wastes as fertiliser (sensible but just possibly as a reaction to pressure from interest groups).

All I can do is refer to an early charter (the year 958 to be precise) concerning my village. One of the boundary markers used was the "fulan broc", which translates as the "foul brook". So they shoved their s**t into a local stream. Actually, that may not have been a bad idea because that stream would have super-oxygenated the waste and by the time it found its way into the Trent, it would have been pretty harmless. But then those people didn't eat the products of a modern pharmaceutical industry.

I won't point out the obvious.

Mike

[ina]

But then those people didn't eat the products of a modern pharmaceutical industry.

I won't point out the obvious.

Mike

I think that really is the problem. What scientists are kind of hoping for (or some, anyway) is to find out which element in the pharmaceuticals it is exactly that causes the harm, then legislation could kick in and outlaw that! However, since general suspicion is that it's a whole range of stuff, this hope is rather useless... And what would happen if we told folk all over the world - sorry, you can't use life saving medicine, because it causes problems for the rest of the population? You can't use the pill, because no matter how much you don't want a child, there's people out there who do, and their chances are severely diminished by the stuff that goes out with your urine?

Anyway, that wasn't the original question. Now what do we do about the stink?

I'm sure it would be possible to inject the sludge, just as is done (sometimes) with livestock slurry. The sludge might have to be treated differently to make it suitable (I really don't know much about what they do with raw sewage to prepare it for agricultural use). And it might be more expensive - on the other hand, it could be more effective as fertiliser, because you have potentially no run off....