The Other Dark Matter: The Planet has a Poop Problem | Slate
Lina Zeldovich was a fellow in the 2017 MBL Logan Science Journalism Program (SJP), during which she researched a chapter of this book on the impacts of nitrogen pollution in coastal waters. Linda Deegan, then a senior scientist at MBL and quoted here, was the faculty director of the SJP that year. This article is adapted from Zeldovich’s new book, The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, published by the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
Our waste kills coastal marshes and fuels algal blooms. We need to harness it as a resource.
The next time you go grocery shopping, take a look at where your food came from. If you live in colder climates, most of it isn’t local most of the time. In the northern United States, your strawberries likely come from California or Florida, your asparagus from Mexico or Chile, and your bananas from Ecuador or Costa Rica. Your salmon probably comes from Alaska, your beef likely originates in Texas, and your pork sausages aren’t stuffed by your local butcher either. Most of the food that gets put on our tables these days is shipped, trucked, flown and in some cases even helicoptered to us from far away.
As it grew, our food had to extract the nutrients from the soil, in which it was planted. Then it was shipped to us—using fossil fuels. Next, we eat the food—and we excrete the unused nutrients, which ultimately end up in a local body of water, probably closer to your house than you think. The marvels of modern engineering, our industrial sewage plants separate the so-called biosolids from the wastewater and clean that wastewater from germs—but not from the nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, all of which are potent fertilizers. The sewage plants release that nutrient-rich effluent into the lakes and the rivers, which carry it down to the ocean, where it fuels algal blooms and destroys coastal marshes. Read more of the article here …
Source: The Other Dark Matter: Human poop is causing problems for the planet