Posted on 08/05/2010 4:27:03 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Every day during the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, contractors sprayed an average 140,000 pounds of Corexit dispersant onto oil slicks on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and into the oil being released a mile below.
But what few in the public understood was that an equivalent amount of similar surfactant chemicals -- the active ingredient in Corexit and in household soaps and industrial solvents -- enters the Gulf each day from the Mississippi River, with more flowing in from other rivers and streams along the coast. 24 0 283Share
Surfactants are only one of a myriad of potentially harmful chemical substances delivered by the Mississippi and other rivers and streams to the Gulf each day, scientists say.
"We have abused the Gulf for years," said George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and associate professor of marine science at the University of South Alabama. "We have our own versions of the dead zone in Mobile Bay. The most famous is the Jubilee, which is certainly caused by nutrient-fed algae blooms and low-oxygen driven."
The surfactants in the Mississippi and other rivers are the ingredients in dishwasher detergent and industrial solvents that cause oils to disperse. They get into the Mississippi from the disposal of wastewater to sewage treatment plants and directly to the river.
According to a 1996 U.S. Geological Survey report, the median concentration of surfactants in the river was .05 parts per million. Based on the river's average flow rate, that would result in 140,000 pounds of surfactant entering the Gulf each day, said David Dzombak, director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon University and chairman of a National Research Council committee that authored a 2008 study of Mississippi River water quality.
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Algae blooms are generally tied to phosphate enrichment. This is why modern detergents have cut down or eliminated phosphate content. However farm runoff also adds phosphates to rivers and streams; we can’t just blame household cleaning products for excesses of phosphates. Surfactants per se, the sudsing and grease cutting agents in soap and detergents, don’t tax nature nearly as badly: the same microbes that eat oil also eat surfactants.
I’ve read here that some states are banning phosphate based detergents. I live in Illinois, the nanniest state of them all - I’m stocking up.
Phosphates by the way, are what gets your dishes and clothes clean.
Didn’t mean to reply to you - just misclicked.
Phosphates are powerful water softening agents, and act by binding hardness cations like magnesium and calcium into rinsable water soluble phosphate compounds so that they are not available to tie up anionic surfactants into insoluble, gummy salts sometimes called “soap scum.”
New formulations substitute carbonates for the phosphates. Carbonates capture hardness cations too, but the result is a non soluble chalk which does not readily rinse away.
My mother, who is 79, grew up in Mobile, remembers walking through the Bankhead Tunnel on opening day, still tells stories of going down to the Bay for the “Jubilee”.
The phenomenon of algae blooms (also called the “Red Tide”) is nothing new. Anyone have an idea as to how the University of Alabama’s sports teams are called the “Crimson Tide”? ... Anyone?
I have had to fill the g/kids pool 3 times so far this year @ 5,000 per fill. People at the water department tell me that our area is on a new well this year and it’s loaded with magnesium.
Last year no problems, this year we bought a filter for the end of the hose before the water goes into the pool, it helped a little but the water still looks murkey and the residue settles to the bottom. It too looks like soap scum, only very thick.
Next year we are buying them season passes to the local splashdown pool.- Cheaper.
And that’s why the bottom of my dishwasher is full of crud.
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