Posted on 07/15/2012 9:29:51 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Southern California soon will begin sending sewage sludge into western Kings County -- up to 500,000 tons a year to a piece of farmland the size of Clovis.
It's the San Joaquin Valley's newest mega-composting project, mixing treated human waste from 5.7 million people and woody debris from area farming.
The compost will be used as soil nutrient on scrubby land at Westlake Farms to help grow cotton, wheat, pomegranates, pistachios and other crops.
But make no mistake about this enterprise. The Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County -- serving 78 cities, including Long Beach and Beverly Hills -- bought 14,500 acres of farmland so there would be a place to send these pungent truckloads.
The first sludge, or biosolids, probably will arrive late next summer, the sanitation agency says.
The project's yuck factor lit up the Valley's west side 10 years ago when the L.A. districts bought the land. Distaste lingers today among environmentalists and residents of nearby Kettleman City.
But the $120 million project has survived appeals of its county operating permit, a lawsuit over air quality and continuous scrutiny.
(Excerpt) Read more at fresnobee.com ...
Do they get all the medical and doper’s drug residue as an added bonus?
Who gives a crap? They’re just Californians. Not to be missed.
Good point but let us expend on that. We now have genetically altered beef and many other altered products out on the market. What is to say that the fecal matter of these animals too is not effecting the food that is grow in that? We all know animals are pumped full of steroids and pass it out in the end and that worries me. What concerns me more is reading the label on lets say a can of green beans. I am amazed that they get more than two or three beans in the can with all that other crap in there.
The article further describes some aspects of the sludge treatment, but doesn’t clarify the parameters of the sludge being disposed in the agricultural sector. The purchase of the land doesn’t encourage less reporting, but probably should mandate closer scrutiny of their operating procedures.
Sludge is a byproduct of wastewater treatment, which ranges from heavy effluent after initial screening and clarification, to product which has been fully deoxidized, burnt, and void of bacteria. It is a part of the wastewater treatment process, not necessarily identifiable as sewage.
Most people associate sludge being used on agriculture with spreading manure on farmland. It isn’t the same. In many cases (most cases) sludge being disposed off site from wastewater treatment processes is not septic, nor has any odor. It likely is finer in particle size, less dense, and may be more prone to increasing dust in the air, if not adequately suppressed while handling the media.
We’ve been using it to fertilize animal feed crops around here for years.
That’s what I was thinking.
First porn films and now this.
Los Angeles....volcano of filth.
Much safer, IMHO.
Agreed. There was a lot of processing before humans ate the meat or drank the milk. It was more than 20 years ago but it seems that we were only allowed to put it on hay fields then.
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