Growing Crops With Biosolids

Treated water is used for things like oil extraction, greenhouses, watering your lawn. This causes chemical fertilizers, heavy metals and bacteria that were on lawns, fields and in human waste to flow back to treatment plants and be returned to the ecosystem. When bacteria in the water get these rich nutrients, they grow, die and in the process of decomposition, use all the free oxygen in the water. When fish or crustaceans must live in this oxygen deprived water - they die. The Mississippi 'Dead Zone' is an annual ocurrance, caused by fertilizers and human waste that creates a lasting body of water in the Gulf of Mexico that nothing survives.

I pour a glass of water from the filtering pitcher in my fridge into a clean glass tumbler, and admire how pure it looks; how clean it tastes. How many wars have been fought over that glass of water? (More than have been fought over for oil!!) What would someone who must drink and cook from a river full of untreated human waste give for that pure glass of water? And I wonder why I unriate into this water and flush it into the river to add to this dead zone. It's always bothered me that we take the time and money to purify this water, and most of it ends up this way. Why can't we use it better?

Many Countries as well as Provinces in Canada allow the treatment of human waste and the resulting 'biosolids' to be used to grow crops. Cities like Toronto, Kingston and Calgary all have programs to use treated human waste, and really, it smells much better than pig or chicken manure that many farmers use now. Better for the environment than chemical fertilizers too. If more sewage effluent were provided to farmers as a cheap source of fertilizer, would our water usage not decrease and crops be easier to grow? In feudal Japan, it was actually the job of some people to go around to all the houses, collect the nightsoil, and deliver it to rice farmers to spread in the rice paddys.

Now, don't get me wrong - the thought of tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers in my salad all swimming in yesterdays beer and tacos does not appeal to me ethier; but what about processed crops such as canola, wheat, corn or flax? Should we not stop wasting money on polluting treated water, and start saving money by not throwing away a good source of fertilizer?

What about multiuses? Letting the effluent release some of it's methane, using the methane for power generation and then using the leftover compost on the fields?



Note: 'Dead Zone' Countries Provinces Toronto Kingston Calgary