associated press

Mystery Unclogged Part II

citizengoat — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:43:45 -0400

(Read Part I of this two-part series on our national wastewater problem.)

In Part I we examined the contents of our wastewater and how the most common wastewater treatment systems work. Now we will examine how well the systems work at keeping those problematic wastewater contents from being released into the environment.

The State of Our Infrastructure

In the American Society for Civil Engineers’ 2005 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, wastewater management in the United States was given a grade of D- (down from a D in 2001). Here is a summary:

Aging wastewater management systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated sewage into U.S. surface waters each year. The EPA estimates that the nation must invest $390 billion over the next 20 years to replace existing systems and build new ones to meet increasing demands. Yet, in 2005, Congress cut funding for wastewater management for the first time in eight years. The Bush administration has proposed a further 33% reduction, to $730 million, for FY06.

The Pharmaceutical Problem

Just this March the Associated Press released the results of its investigation on pharmaceuticals in the nation’s drinking water. The A.P. reported that the drinking water of at least 41 million Americans was found to contain, among other things, antibiotics, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers, and sex hormones. The reason for this, of course, is that Americans dump their unused rugs down the drain.

Sources of Water Contamination

The Natural Resources Defense Council 2007 report Testing the Waters offers a comprehensive examination of all of the sources of water contamination across the country. Included in the report are the following statistics:

The EPA estimates that more than 10 trillion gallons of untreated stormwater make their way into our surface waters each year.
Combined sewer systems (CSSs), which carry raw sewage from residences and industrial sites and stormwater runoff from streets, discharge 850 billion gallons of raw sewage every year during overflows.
Although an EPA policy that aims to reduce these overflows has been in effect since 1994, nearly all combined sewer systems continue to overflow when it rains. As of 2004, only 59 percent of communities with CSSs had submitted their plans for controlling them.
Sanitary sewer systems (SSSs) carry only raw sewage from residences and businesses. The EPA has estimated that between 23,000 and 75,000 overflows of these systems occur annually, discharging a total of 3 to 10 billion gallons of sewage per year. In January 2001, the EPA proposed SSS regulations that would have required improvements to the systems. The Bush administration failed to act on these recommendations.
The American Housing Survey of 2001 reported that 6 percent of septic systems fail annually, resulting in improper treatment of 66 billion to 144 billion gallons of sewage.

Your Dreams Down the Drain

Peer down into the depths of one of your drains. You are looking at your future. Whatever goes down that drain is going to come back at you sooner or later in some way.

Some of what you flush gets broken down by bacteria. Some of it gets eliminated with chemicals. But a lot of it doesn’t.

Up to 70 percent of wastewater treated by primary treatment systems gets released. Nitrogen, phosphates, pathogens, and organic materials are washed away by flooding and heavy rain, washed away by underwater springs, absorbed into groundwater, or carried to bodies of water like lakes and oceans where they kill aquatic life. And, even though bacteria are helping us break down all of this waste, they are depleting the oxygen in our bodies of water.

We watch as our inconveniences wash away, but they don’t wash away far enough. In the world of climate change, one that combines increased rain and flooding with water shortages, what you flush is going to affect me and what I use in my washing machine is going to affect you. What each of us sees going down the drain is not only what we don’t want but potentially also a great deal of what we do.

Image by Chris Darling, 2005, Creative Commons license

Solving The Food Crisis

scleaver — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Food riots, protests, and rising food prices across the globe are now common news fare. But, even as food prices force Americans to eat more peanut butter or eat out less, there are larger discussions at stake, like: how do we farm and is that contributing to food unrest?

The Associated Press ran an article on just that subject over the weekend (David Koop’s “Behind the Food Riots: A Debate On How Best to Farm”). Governments, writes Koop, are applying “Band-Aid” solutions left and right—sending in troops, raising wages, banning exports, suspending trading, promising food aid—when what we should be doing is figuring out how to change how the world gets its food so that we’re not re-bandaging the food industry in the future. “However,” writes Koop, world leaders are “deeply divided about which way to go.”

1. Invest in small farmers, not in “letting them sink in a free-trade world.” The U.N. would “level the playing field” by cutting subsidies to agri-business, reducing tariffs, and upping investment in small-farms, one at a time. "This could be a window of opportunity for governments to relaunch the small-farming sector and traditional farming," Fernando Soto, the policy chief for Latin America and the Caribbean with the [Food and Agriculture Organization’s], told the AP.

2. Increase free-trade policies like NAFTA so that the current farm subsidies don’t increase and make everything worse.

Whether you’re for free-trade or against it, small farmers seem to get the brunt of this—they’re growing food, but can’t afford foreign food imports, and eventually leave farming as a result. In Mexico, since NAFTA, 200,000 Mexicans leave the country each year for cities or the U.S.

3. Get used to it: biofuels, oil prices, huge developing countries will keep demand and prices for food high.

4. Innovate: After the last 1970s food increase, the “green revolution” reduced costs. “If we don’t mess this up,” Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University told the AP, “we can expect the same today.”

In the meantime, “the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 820 million people go hungry in the developing world, and … the crisis could force as many as 100 million people deeper into poverty,” according to the AP. The world has 420 million farms that are smaller than five acres, out of 525 million farms total. So, what should we do with those small farms and the farmers who work them, and how?

Photo from a World Bank article about Food Prices in Africa.

Impending Corn Crisis

scleaver — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

Spring is here, and with it, planting season. It’s not news that the price of corn is higher than ever (thanks to ethanol, feeding tons of corn to cows in CAFOs, etcetera). As we head into the 2008 growing season, the Associated Press discussed how farmers planting decisions could affect our wallets. (Read the article, “Farmers’ Crop Choices May Affect Consumers” as printed in the Detroit News, HERE.)Last year was a good year; farmers planted fields and fields of corn, weather was good, and the harvest produced record amounts of corn. This year, farmers and industry experts alike don’t expect a repeat. The economic lesson in a nutshell: if farmers plant as much corn as they can, prices may stabilize (for reference, they’re currently at $5 a bushel, a record high). But, if farmers plant soybeans (a good thing—they’re rotating crops which helps the soil) or if we have a bad season, the price for corn could go even higher. Corn has a ripple effect on the economy. Three-quarters of the operating costs for poulty, beef, and pork companies is corn feed. The one constant: land. (And that bad weather or a bummer crop is bound to happen eventually, and then what?)So, the question going into the 2008 season: how high can corn prices go? And, are we getting too dependent on the little yellow kernel? (Grass fed beef anyone?)

Photo from It's a Green, Green World blog’s rant about corn.