from Hacker News

Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals

by yasp on 8/31/24, 12:12 PM with 44 comments

  • by rapjr9 on 8/31/24, 2:54 PM

    So this has been going on for more than half a century now. Wisconsin started using Milorganite in 1926:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorganite

    "Since its inception, over four million metric tons of Milorganite have been sold"

    Teflon was trademarked in 1945:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene

    Everything alive has likely been poisoned, including children and pets. Certain diseases have been on the rise for a long time, this might be part of the explanation for why. It sounds like the solution will be to stop manufacturing PFOS and related chemicals until there is a scalable way to destroy it and then control its use and destruction, find a way to get it out of people, and probably dilute it where it is found in the environment (it is not possible to chemically process 1/5 of all the soil on agricultural lands. Is it in water tables?) Then hope what remains doesn't do too much damage. Milorganite is only sold in the US so perhaps only the US is contaminated, though I'd suspect the EU may have adopted similar practices. Possibly the US will have to outsource a lot of food production for a long time, though a lot is already outsourced.

  • by jkic47 on 8/31/24, 12:27 PM

    I spent 7 years getting rid of the PFOA-derived chemical across all our product lines. they are super useful, but they cross the placental barrier and have a half-life of 6.5 years or so. They were replaced by not-PFOA chemicals that had similar chemical properties so not sure that it did a whole lot of good in the long run.

  • by _heimdall on 8/31/24, 5:42 PM

    Joel Salatin's Beyond Labels podcast had a good episode talking about this a few months ago. I can't find a good URL, their site is focused on paid subscriptions, but it was episode #145 from June 13th.

    Its pretty amazing what regulators meant to protect the public allow in and on our food, even with labels like "organic."

  • by NFVLCP on 8/31/24, 2:43 PM

    For the record, we're already dumping hundreds of millions of kilos of poison on our food in the form of glyphosate and other pesticides, albeit not PFAS. Whereas the shock here is that we're already so full of poisons that our own sewage is untenable for use as fertilizer.

  • by razodactyl on 8/31/24, 12:19 PM

    I remember being the "general public" unaware of PFAS. Anything "non-stick" contains it, you realise that it's everywhere in modern society.

    Blissful ignorance was nice while it lasted.

  • by zug_zug on 8/31/24, 1:50 PM

    Great, since the FDA won't do anything I can't for the day that whole foods to start selling non-PFA grade food.

  • by OutOfHere on 8/31/24, 9:18 PM

    Biosolids should be completely banned for agricultural use. They will never be safe to use. It is literally just dried sewage. Use it once and the land is contaminated for ten thousand years.

    There is a right way to do it though, which is to compost what's compostable, grow good soil using it, then test it thoroughly for PFAS, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, etc., and only then consider using it if all tests pass. Each batch has to be tested.

  • by mitchbob on 8/31/24, 12:15 PM

  • by pfdietz on 8/31/24, 12:20 PM

    What I'd worry about is not PFAs, but excreted drugs. Some drugs (or their byproducts) are persistent, and have been deliberately selected to have biological effects.

    I take metformin. This drug is mostly excreted in feces. The dry mass of feces might be 1% metformin for someone taking typical doses. The drug does break down in the environment, but only slowly.