The Mississippi River basin drains farmland from 31 states (41% of continental U.S.). Agricultural fertilizers and chemicals are washed into the river. (Photo by Lester Graham)
States do not coordinate efforts to reduce soil erosion or chemical runoff. Grass buffers are not required along streams that feed the Mississippi and its tributaries. (Photo by Lester Graham)
A new study says the Mississippi River is still at risk from too much soil runoff,
and that better government protection is needed. Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
A new study says the Mississippi River is still at risk from too much soil runoff,
and that better government protection is needed. Chuck Quirmbach reports:
The study by the National Academy of Sciences says the Clean Water Act has
worked to reduce much of the point source pollution in the Mississippi from
factories and wastewater treatment plants, but the report says fertilizers and
sediments that enter the river from farmland still create many water quality
problems.
Study Committee Chairman David Dzombak says even though some states are
working together on the issue, there’s not enough coordination.
“One really needs to take a system wide view and look at total loadings into the
river. These are coming from multiple states and right now the states are not
communicating with each other very much.”
Dzombak says the US EPA should to be more aggressive in coordinating and
enforcing state activities along the Mississippi. The EPA says it’s committed to
increasing its efforts with its riverside partners.
Pharmaceuticals and other toxins have been found in lakes like this one, Lake Champlain. (Photo by Kinna Ohman)
Less than ten years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey found household drugs and
chemicals in almost every body of water they sampled. Each year since then, at least twenty
studies come out showing these chemicals can affect the hormone systems of wildlife –
and some studies have begun to look at effects on humans. Kinna Ohman reports that,
despite all this, little has been done to address the issue:
Transcript
Less than ten years ago, the U.S. Geological Survey found household drugs and
chemicals in almost every body of water they sampled. Each year since then, at least twenty
studies come out showing these chemicals can affect the hormone systems of wildlife –
and some studies have begun to look at effects on humans. Kinna Ohman reports that,
despite all this, little has been done to address the issue:
Every major water body in the United States, whether it’s a river, lake, or wetland,
probably has at least one scientist keeping an eye on it. Lake Champlain is no exception.
This large lake, forming much of the border between Vermont and northern New York,
has its share of scientists… and Mary Watzin is one of them.
Watzin’s the director of the Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory in Burlington,
Vermont. She’s been studying how human pollution and activities impact the lake’s fish,
birds, and other water wildlife.
Watzin’s been around long enough to see quite a few of the big pollution problems resolved,
but you can’t help noticing some frustration when she talks about the latest issue:
“We’re cleaning up our act, at least with PCBs – we’re working on mercury – and
then there’s all this new generation stuff coming along.”
This new generation of pollutants includes the active parts of household chemicals and
drugs which have the potential to impact the hormone systems in wildlife. They’re in
detergents, cleaning products, and many types of drugs such as antidepressants, steroids,
and even birth control pills. Chris Hornback is with the National Association of Clean
Water Agencies:
“They’re coming from consumer products. In the case of pharmaceuticals, they’re
coming from drugs that our bodies aren’t completely metabolizing. Or, in some
cases, from unused pharmaceuticals that are being flushed down the toilet.”
And the problem is, once these drugs and chemicals leave our house, many of them aren’t
filtered out at wastewater treatment plants. Treatment plants were not designed to handle
these types of pollutants. So any lake or river which receives treated wastewater can also
receive a daily dose of these active chemicals.
Because these pollutants can number in the hundreds, just how to study them is under
debate. Mary Watzin says the old way just doesn’t work anymore:
“The classic way to examine one of these compounds is just to test it by itself. But
the fish aren’t exposed to these things by themselves, because they swim around in
the general milieu of everything that gets dumped out.”
But looking at how mixtures of household chemicals and drugs affect fish and other
wildlife can bring up more questions than answers. Because of this, Pat Phillips, a
hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey says we might want to concentrate on just
keeping these pollutants out of the environment:
“One of the things we see is that we see mixtures of many different compounds
coming into the wastewater treatment plants and coming into the environment.
And its very difficult to figure out what effect these mixtures have. But if we can
remove some of them, that makes a lot of sense.”
In the past, when the issue was industrial toxins, the solution was to control these toxins
at their source. This is because wastewater treatment plants weren’t made to deal with
industrial toxins in the same way they’re not made to deal with household drugs and
chemicals. But now, Chris Hornback says controlling this new generation of pollutants at
their source just isn’t practical:
“A lot of the substances that we’re talking about now including pharmaceuticals
and other emerging contaminants are coming from the households. So, those
sources are much harder to control. You can’t permit a household. A wastewater
treatment plant can’t control what a household discharges so that’s where public
outreach, and education, and pollution prevention efforts come into play.”
These efforts are really only starting. Some states have begun pharmaceutical take-back
programs to keep people from flushing unused medicines down the drain, but
participation is voluntary.
Everyone involved agrees that in order to solve this problem, it’s going to take people
thinking about what they’re sending down their drains. But just how to broach this
somewhat private topic is yet another question.
Triclosan is an active ingredient in many products claiming antibacterial properties. (Photo by Kinna Ohman)
A wastewater treatment plant which is equipped to produce sludge (or biosolids) ready for agricultural use. (Photo by Kinna Ohman)
Sludge will be sent through this press for dewatering and to get it ready for the farmer. This wastewater treatment plant provides Class B biosolids, or sludge for the farmers. Class A biosolids need to go through more complex treatment and screening. (Photo by Kinna Ohman)
After sewage is cleaned at a wastewater treatment plant, sludge is left behind. This
sludge is often used on farms as fertilizer. But the wastewater treatment doesn’t get
rid of all the drugs and chemicals we flush down the drain. Kinna Ohman reports
researchers are finding some of these chemicals are affecting wildlife and could be
getting into our food:
Transcript
After sewage is cleaned at a wastewater treatment plant, sludge is left behind. This
sludge is often used on farms as fertilizer. But the wastewater treatment doesn’t get
rid of all the drugs and chemicals we flush down the drain. Kinna Ohman reports
researchers are finding some of these chemicals are affecting wildlife and could be
getting into our food:
Take a tour of any wastewater treatment plant and you’ll soon understand the main
objective: to separate the liquids from the solids. Until the mid 90s, most of these solids,
or sludge, used to go into landfills or were dumped in the ocean. But in 1994 the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency started a program to promote the use of sludge on farm
fields as fertilizer. The EPA thought this was the perfect solution… turning waste into a
useful product.
But scientists have found something which could turn the EPA program on its head.
Rolf Halden is an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Water
and Health. He says sludge contains most of the chemicals we use:
“If you look at municipal sludge, it really is a matrix that reflects the chemical footprint
of our society.”
Halden’s focused on one chemical he’s found in sludge called Triclosan – and
there’s a lot of it out there. It’s in antibacterial soaps, and can even be in our toothpastes,
deodorants, and shampoos. Until recently, most if it was thought to break down. Now,
Halden says they found something different:
“In the work that we have done at Johns Hopkins, we have demonstrated for example that
Triclosan when it enters a wastewater treatment plant is not effectively being degraded
and half of the mass is left over.”
Halden and his colleagues found this leftover mass in sludge. And since half the sludge
produced each year in the US goes to fertilize farm fields, Halden says we might want to
think about our food supply:
“We really create a pipeline of contaminants that are first discharged into the water and
then accumulated in sludge and then applied in agriculture which opens a pathway for the
contamination of the food supply and the further distribution of these chemicals in the
environment.”
At this point, scientists are still studying levels of this chemical. They haven’t even
begun to understand Triclosan’s effects in agriculture. But there’s something they do
know about it.
Researchers found Triclosan can mimic a thyroid hormone in the North American
bullfrog and disrupt its growth. When its tadpoles were exposed to low levels of
this chemical for a short amount of time, their growth into a juvenile frog was impaired.
But this doesn’t sound like that big of a deal… the frog doesn’t die, it just doesn’t grow
properly, right? Keep in mind that this study tracked exposure to Triclosan over four
hours. Halden says by spreading wastewater sludge in agriculture, we could be exposing
wildlife to chemicals like Triclosan for their entire lives.
“When these chemicals are transported into the environment with the agricultural
fertilizer, which is the municipal sludge, then they sit there for in the soil, not only for
seconds but for days and weeks and for months and to even years and in some situations
in sediments, in aquatic sediments, they can sit there for decades and this implies that
organisms are, for their lifespan, exposed to very high levels of these contaminants.
What the outcome of that is really not fully understood right now and requires more research.”
The U.S. Geological Survey has also been looking for chemicals in sludge – or biosolids –
and they’ve found steroids, antihistamines, and antidepressants. Ed Furlong, a research chemist
with the USGS in Denver, Colorado, says they are now studying how these chemicals react in agricultural
fields:
“We’ve identified that many of the compounds are consistently present in biosolids from
across the country. We’re now trying to understand what happens after those biosolids
are applied to the soil.”
The USGS is not the only agency looking at this issue. The Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting its own survey of chemicals like Triclosan in sludge. They say the results of the survey won’t be released until next
summer. Then comes the complicated process of deciding what to do with the survey
results. A decision about whether to stop using sludge with hormone disrupting
chemicals to fertilize farm fields could be years away.
Ford Motor Company installs a permanent Fumes to Fuel system at Michigan Truck Plant after a successful pilot program at the Ford Rouge Center last year. (Photo courtesy of Ford Motor Company)
Another look at the Fumes to Fuel system at Michigan Truck Plant. (Photo courtesy of Ford Motor Company)
Pollution from factories and other places might be dollars just going up in smoke. But a promising new technology turns these ordinarily troublesome waste products into something that’s especially valuable these days: cheap electricity. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert has this
report:
Transcript
Pollution from factories and other places might be dollars just going up
in smoke, but a promising new technology turns these ordinarily
troublesome waste products into something that’s especially valuable
these days: cheap electricity. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie
Halpert has this report:
Remember the children’s story, where Rumpelstiltskin was able to take
straw, a cheap, abundant material, and magically transform it into
precious gold? Well, these days, cheap energy is like gold, and one
company has found a way to similarly generate power from pollution.
(Sound of engine running)
To see how it works, I’m standing on a roof sixty-five feet above the
ground. This is where Ford Motor Company maintains its pollution
control equipment. There are rectangular gray metal boxes as tall as I am
all over the roof, so many that we can barely walk between them. Under
the roof, they’re painting trucks. The paint emits vapors that Ford is now
capturing with these big boxes of machinery.
Mark Wherrett is Ford’s principal environmental engineer.
“We’re here at the Ford Motor Company Michigan truck plant, where the
paint solvent is collected from the process and used as a fuel to make
electricity in a Stirling Engine.”
The Stirling Engine is key. Here’s how it works. Ford’s using an engine
developed by STM Power. STM is using an old engine style called a
Stirling Engine that was once used in place of a steam engine. Instead of
using coal or wood to heat up water and make steam, STM burns the
paint fumes to heat up hydrogen and power the engine. The fumes will
generate 55 kilowatts of electricity. That’s enough to power 11 homes.
There’s not as much pollution emitted at the end, since burning can be
adjusted to temperatures where pollutants are reduced. Wherrett says
that for Ford, the technology simply has no downsides.
“The fumes to fuel process takes the environmental emissions and turns
them on their head, so instead of them being a waste product that we
have to dispose of, we can then turn it into a commodity where we can
then use that to make electricity and use that in our plant systems.”
And that means Ford doesn’t have to purchase as much power from the
grid.
Dorrance Noonan is CEO of STM Power, the company that’s redesigned
the old engine. Noonan says Ford is a perfect candidate for this
technology.
“We’re really excited about the Ford project because it offers a
tremendous opportunity to manufacturing companies and large paint
operations, who have large VOC problems that they have to deal with in
very expensive ways.”
The Ford plant is just the beginning for the company. They also plan to
deliver their portable on-site generators to landfills and wastewater
treatment plants. In that situation, methane gas is used as the fuel to
generate electricity. Noonan says his company has a bright future.
“Well, in the next couple of years, we see strong penetration in our two focus
markets, which are the landfill markets in the U.S. and the wastewater
treatment markets in the United States, and then we see that expansion
going outside of the United States to Europe and eventually to Asia.”
There are some skeptics.
Dan Rassler, with the Electric Power Research Institute, says STM’s
technology does have the potential to create viable new sources of
energy, but more companies need to actually start using it before he can
know for sure, and he says that right now the technology is still too
expensive for many companies.
“We’d like to see the capitol costs of these systems be lower than where
they are today.”
Right now, an STM unit costs $65,000. Rassler would like to see overall
costs cut by 10 to 20 percent. He says costs could decrease as more of
these units come on line.
STM CEO Dorrance Noonan says the costs are comparable to competing
on-site generators, and these expenses will be offset by using the free
fuel used to generate electricity that his engines provide. Noonan says
that continuing high natural gas prices will be his technology’s best
friend, as companies strive for ways to reduce energy costs.
New research shows that chemicals used to repel food, stains, and water are sticking just about everywhere else in the environment. They were recently found in the Great Lakes. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports, their discovery was not a surprise:
Transcript
New research shows that chemicals used to repel food, stains, and water are
sticking just about everywhere else in the environment. They were recently found
in the Great Lakes. But as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett
reports, their discovery was not a surprise:
The chemicals are called perfluoronated compounds. They’re used in products
like Teflon, Scotchgard, and Gore-Tex. They’ve been detected in animals from
Arctic polar bears to seals and birds in the Baltic.
Matt Simcik is a researcher at the University of Minnesota. His studies turned up
the chemicals in lake trout from all five Great Lakes. Simcik says a likely source
for the contaminants is wastewater treatment plants.
“Because these chemicals are used in everyday use – textiles and carpets and
things. And when you wash your clothes, or wash your carpet, that water gets
into the waste system, and eventually ends up in the lake.”
The effects of the chemicals on humans is the subject of intense debate – but at
high exposures they’ve been linked to problems including birth defects and
cancer .
One of the two known chemicals has been phased out of use. Federal regulators
are looking at the other to determine whether it should be restricted as well.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Sarah Hulett.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to relax sewage discharge rules. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports, there’s disagreement about what impact those changes would have on water quality:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to relax sewage discharge rules. As the Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Sarah Hulett reports, there’s disagreement about what impact those changes
would have on water quality:
The change would make legal a practice that’s already common at many wastewater treatment
plants. Partially-treated sewage is released when plants get overloaded, during heavy rains, for
example. The wastewater is blended with cleaner water, disinfected, and discharged.
Officials with the EPA say “blending” is a safe way for plants to avoid sewage backups in
people’s homes.
But Laurel O’Sullivan of the Lake Michigan Federation says the policy could have severe
consequences for public health in the Great Lakes region, where many sewer systems are old and
in need of more capacity.
“And the blending policy basically gives a pass to these sewer systems, in terms of trying to have
to upgrade their system’s capacity.”
O’Sullivan says the policy could result in a repeat of incidents such as a 1993 sewer overflow in
Milwaukee. The city’s water supply was contaminated by a parasite that killed more than a hundred
people.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Sarah Hulett.
The Mississippi River basin drains farmland from 31 states (41% of continental U.S.). Agricultural fertilizers and chemicals are washed into the river. (Photo by Lester Graham)
