Resource Recovery

I like where you are heading with this.

Our local wastewater authority is aproaching 80% "beneficial re-use" of the processed water on irrigated pasture for dairy and other such use. The higher levels of nutrient in that water means lower fertiliser costs for those farmers.

There has been one limitation found in the use of the final "fines" (sludge) as soil improver and fertiliser. It is initially wonderful, but due to the methods of concentration the first limiting factor is copper enrichment in the soil that limits the total (cumulative) amount that can be applied before aditional sites must be located. (Copper dissolved from inside water heaters, new pipes and other domestic sources.)

Recovered solids and grit have been trialed in making bricks and many other items with marginal success. The bricks had good colour but were brittle and would not be suited to structural use.

As far as gas recovery goes, this is potentially the big win-win area. The more efficient the plant is at converting the organics to (the right) gas, then the less there is to become sludge. There are still some issues relating to cost recovery (economies of scale) to retrofit such systems and with facility planned lifetimes in the order of 80 years there is significant lag in the take-up of such opportunity. However, like solar the unit costs are reducing each year.

Our largest plant is at 8ML/day (2 million gallons) and last review still didn't give a 20 year breakeven, even at current borrowing costs.

It may however be an opportunity for a Public/Private partnership where they "piggyback" the gas recovery onto our facility.

I know that the farmer in me sees water with nutrient as an attractive opportunity, if only I had property near that network.

I do know of one "garbage dump" that was recently "mined" to recover the copper and other metals embeded in the site.

It's a fantastic plan. Ferreting out the least cost-effective methods is key. ..Only so those methods can be given more scrutiny.

If the public could keep chemicals and pharmaceuticals out of the wastewater it would be even better. I hope these aren't in the nutrients going to the local farm?

..If the sludge doesn't make a good brick at current levels of concentration is there a level where it will not affect the bricks strength? What about with additives?

It would be great to lock these semisolids away in a usefully. road base below the road?

In Russia they have developed a way to remove gold from the smoke of coal. It's about the filtering process, but details are thin. I just hope that all the potentially clean filtering doesn't end with a potentially dirty cyanide extraction.

<...could keep chemicals and pharmaceuticals out of the wastewater...>

http://www.edp24.co.uk/business/farming/anglian_water_launches_pesticide_amnesty_for_norfolk_farmers_1_4792100

Norfolk is PlbMak's playground, BTW.

For the brick fabrication, we tried concentrations as low as 5% and still failed basic testing expectations. I suspect this has more to do with the additives we inroduce to accelerate the sludge concentration than the sludge content, but to remove that process adds around 300% to the plant footprint which brings other challenges when we have rainfall events. Sludge from our water plant (2 micron membrane) was evenworse than from the STP.

Water returned to the waterways from all our wastewater plants is usually cleaner than the raw river water that we are extracting (N, P, K, Oxygen demand, turbidity, ....) and we are at the point where local farmers who have until now received the treatment plant water FREE, at pressure at farm boundary will soon end their 10 year honeymoon and start to be billed for it. That's when we will see the economics kick in, as they still have the option to extract their own water and can make that decission for themselves.

I'm afraid that I come from a generation that looked at things and asked "What's the next use?" rather than "Where do I throw it?". As someone here once said, 'There is no "away", just further from me.'

EPA already has perfected the extraction of gold from all USA power plant stacks.

IRS does the same thing to your wallet. They do it so good you may not realize what they are doing. Them guys and gals are more stealth than a F-117.

Good Luck, Old Salt

Well not only drugs that are dangerous, but all sorts of substances that should be kept out of the loop, including prions from human waste that could form loops that could destroy civilization as we know it....Don't she it where you e at, is wisdom that should be heeeded....

..."A study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1999 and 2000 found measurable amounts of one or more medications in 80% of the water samples drawn from a network of 139 streams in 30 states. The drugs identified included a witches' brew of antibiotics, antidepressants, blood thinners, heart medications (ACE inhibitors, calcium-channel blockers, digoxin), hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone), and painkillers. Scores of studies have been done since. Other drugs that have been found include caffeine (which, of course, comes from many other sources besides medications); carbamazepine, an antiseizure drug; fibrates, which improve cholesterol levels; and some fragrance chemicals (galaxolide and tonalide).

Sewage treatment plants are not currently designed to remove pharmaceuticals from water. Nor are the facilities that treat water to make it drinkable. Yet a certain amount of pharmaceutical contamination is removed when water gets treated for other purposes. For example, some research shows that conventional treatment methods result in a 90% decrease in the amount of ibuprofen and naproxen in the water discharged from sewage treatment plants. On the other hand, treatment doesn't seem to have much effect on the levels of drugs such as carbamazepine and diclofenac (a pain reliever).

Some aspects of sewage treatment may remove pharmaceuticals from the water, but as a result, concentrations in sludge increase. Some of that sludge is used as fertilizer, so the pharmaceuticals are getting into the environment in another way."...

http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/drugs-in-the-water

Yikes!....

..."Pretreatment is no longer strictly enforced for fear of costing industries money and causing loss of jobs. There are 80,000 chemicals in commerce today - the EPA regulates only 9 toxic metals in sludge. The rest are unmonitored, untested, and unregulated. Sludge biosolids is a pathogenic soup of bacteria, viruses, parasitic worms, fungi and prions."...

..."Scientists have confirmed Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a transmissible, infectious prion disease. (Jucker, M, 2010; Soto, C. 2011; Prusiner, S. 2012) Each found that IC inoculation of AD into mice brains resulted in the development of prion disease by the mice. There are over 6 million AD patients in the US. The epidemic grows by a new victim every 68 seconds."...

..."“The brain diseases caused by prions include Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and other varied disorders known collectively as the frontotemporal dementias, Prusiner said “ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/06/21/MNC21P5A6F.DTL "...

http://www.alzheimers-prions.com/pdf/Prionsinsewagesludge-Alzheimerstransmissibility.pdf

That last link of yours should raise some credibility flags. If biosolids are concentrating infectious prions, creating a route to (possible widespread) human infection, then it should be fairly simple to confirm, as prion diseases would be prevalent in those with the highest exposure to biosolids and biosolids production....namely those in wastewater treatment.

I can't find any such correlation. Can you?

Healthy suspicion is called for when a site claims, by just reviewing current research, it has uncovered a single cause for Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's.

It's not exposure that spreads prion diseases, it's,, gulp, consumption! Biosolids from wastewater facilities contain prions from human waste, using this material for fertilizer creates a loop....Wastewater contamination of drinking water creates several hazards to human health, including a prion loop.....any animals or plants exposed to human waste can create a loop...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3268960/

..."To date, prion diseases are unique among conformational diseases in that they are transmissible—experimentally and by natural routes (mainly by ingestion). The pathway of prions to the brain has been elucidated in outline. A striking feature of prions is their extraordinary resistance to conventional sterilization procedures and their capacity to bind to surfaces of metal and plastic without losing infectivity. This property, first observed in a clinical setting, is now being investigated in experimental settings, both in animals and in cell culture"...

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/186/Supplement_2/S157.full

..."Current research suggests that the primary method of infection in animals is through ingestion. It is thought that prions may be deposited in the environment through the remains of dead animals and via urine, saliva, and other body fluids. They may then linger in the soil by binding to clay and other minerals.^[62]

A University of California research team, led by Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner, has provided evidence for the theory that infection can occur from prions in manure.^[63] And, since manure is present in many areas surrounding water reservoirs, as well as used on many crop fields, it raises the possibility of widespread transmission. It was reported in January 2011 that researchers had discovered prions spreading through airborne transmission on aerosol particles, in an animal testing experiment focusing on scrapie infection in laboratory mice.^[64]Preliminary evidence supporting the notion that prions can be transmitted through use of urine-derived human menopausal gonadotropin, administered for the treatment of infertility, was published in 2011.^[65]

Prions in plants[edit]

In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment.^[66][67]"...

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion}

All true but with one major aspect missing, prions are not new. Prions are a newly discovered vector for the spreading of protein fragments so they make the news headlines. Sometimes these protein fragments disrupt the chemical balance of a creature and thus induce a disease. Sometimes a prion can help a creature, too. It is also believed that prions maybe the vector that allow drug resistant traits to be spread to other bacteria. (While this is bad for a host, it is good for the bacteria.)

It was once believed that all bacteria and viruses (viri?) were only pathogens for disease. Then the medical community recognized the natural creation of vaccines that prevented disease. Similarly helpful bacteria that aid digestion (and other aspects) brought about the whole biome movement.

Prions are just the newest of Pandora's opened boxes we have discovered.

Prions implicated in human diseases such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, Huntington's and other brain wasting diseases, is new...as well as potential pathways of infection and the virility of these twisted specs of evil....This is one of the hottest and most hotly contested areas of biological research in the field today...and still no cure for any of these maladies....

To suggest that waste water solids would make good fertilizer may be true, but not a wise choice with what's known about these prions today....I think it should be destroyed...

..."In 1982, after a series of characterization studies, Prusiner found that the infectious agent is associated with a protein [44,45]. He termed the proteinaceous infectious agent as “Prion”, to explain the disease pathogenesis [46]. However, there are many debates against prion theory in the scientific community from the beginning [47], to the time when Prusiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of prion in 1997, and even to very recent days [48,49,50]. Prion theory was eventually well established and based on this theory, a new class of infectious diseases, “prion diseases”, had been categorized. Based on this theory, the prion diseases are transmitted by a proteinaceous infectious particle, prion."...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/292148424_fig1_Figure-1-Timeline-of-the-discovery-of-prion-diseases

http://www.nature.com/news/one-in-2-000-uk-people-might-carry-vcjd-proteins-1.13962

....or perhaps there has been somewhere around a 25% reduction in dementia. You have to be careful of those hockey stick graphs.

http://www.pbs.org/video/2365048330/

"....Using age- and gender-specific dementia rates collected from interviews in 1991, researchers estimated around 884,000 people over 65 (8.3%) would have dementia in 2011. However, fresh interviews in 2011 indicated only around 670,000 (6.5%) had dementia. This was 214,000 fewer people than population ageing alone would have predicted and represents an overall reduction of 24%...."

http://www.alzheimersweekly.com/2013/07/25-drop-in-dementia-offers-new-optimism.html

I'd say that is a welcome improvement, and a hopeful sign.

I guess you missed the last part that said 44% of dementia patients never get a diagnosis....?

That is a curious claim for such a high percentage. How does one identify a dementia patient without a diagnosis? I presume an autopsy identified some organ damage consistent with a patient with dementia. However, if symptoms never manifested then is it actually dementia?

Dementia is a symptom, not a disease. When an old fogy is labeled demented, then the care providers are essentially licensed to treat the person as they wish without the consent of the patient. My dad was labeled with dementia and the next thing I knew he was in the hospital, unconscious, on a morphine IV until he passed away. His issue? He disagreed with what the care facility wanted him to do and wanted to go home. My sister had medical power of attorney and basically rubber stamped what the doctor ordered.

There never was a cause identified for the dementia, but they had him on over 15 prescription medications, including blood thinners and blood pressure lowering medications and his blood pressure was such that he couldn't stand up without fainting.

I'm so sorry to hear about your father. You have my condolences.

Your point that dementia is a perceived symptom and not a disease is precisely my point. A symptom is an observation and not a diagnosis. Claiming that 44% of dementia patients don't get a diagnosis [of Alzheimer] is an imprecise, incomplete statement that promotes confusion instead of clarifies.

Cognitive impairment has many causes, but it is not routinely screened for in the elderly...A lot of people avoid doctors, they overcharge, overprescribe, are overbearing self-righteous, always in a hurry, don't really care what you think, never mention side effects....well, you get the idea....A visit to the doctor is rarely a pleasant experience, and the elderly tend to avoid unpleasant situations....and an elderly person with cognitive impairment is not likely to suggest a visit to the doctor, more likely to avoid it like the plague....Yes it all comes out in an autopsy, but not usually noted as the cause of death...The number of elderly patients that do get brain scans and MRI or ultrasound testing do provide a percentage number of the population with impairment in different age groups...

Pharmaceutically induced dementia is a real issue. It consists of gross malpractice/neglect at the highest levels of medical aggrandizement.

(Interpret that how you will, O high and mighty ones who pretend to be healers.)

From what I could tell, the pharmaceuticals were used to ensure compliance.

In your learned opinion on dementia,,

If a certain football player refuses to stand for the national anthem because he thinks the anthem is the voice of an oppressive state,,,

Then he shows up at a press conference wearing a tee shirt with a picture of a recently passed away dictator,,,

Would you say that this individual suffers from dementia ?

When did you get the idea that only people with dementia are capable of stupid acts?

That's demented.

Doing stupid acts must be a precursor of dementia then.

Nope. I would say he has a terminal case of cranial intra-rectal insertion syndrome. I understand this can be an extremely unpleasant and painful condition to have. I feel sorry for the jerk player. I hope his team loses every game they play until they fire him. As I understand it, he isn't much better as a player than he is as a social commentator.

No, I caught that part. Unless you think that the percentage going undiagnosed is growing counter to prevalent medical trends, then it doesn'the affect the implications of this study.

One only has to watch the evening news to see all of the wack jobs running around carrying signs protesting everything under the sun, the yes, the undiagnosed is growing,, and current medical trends are struggling to try and keep up.

OK, so the other ones in the initial population with dementia already passed away... doh! You know you didn't think of that, now did you?

Cute.

Yes, there are many things I have not considered....most of those things are irrelevant.

I think you realize that the population of those over 65 has grown from 1991 to 2011. Anyway the numbers shrank on a percentage basis as well as gross numbers.

My so-called point was that if they are dead, they are no longer participating in the study.

I understood that.

It is not a study of the same people 20 years later. It is a study of people 65 and over in 1991 and another study of people 65 and over in 2011.

Neither study poled dead people. It probably isn'the easy to clearly show that dead people are demented, yet I'm not sure it is easy to demonstrate they are not demented either.

Let's figure out what's going on with dementia among the living before we start expanding the research to the deceased.

..."Estimates of the prevalence of dementia vary considerably by the age group on which the estimates are based. Prevalence among those age 85 and above, for example, is likely to be considerably higher than estimates based on those age 65 and above. In addition, prevalence data are often categorized more broadly or more narrowly than "dementia." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, cites prevalence data for specific causes of dementia, typically Alzheimer's disease, while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) subsumes dementia under the category of Serious Mental Illness. Data on the prevalence of Alzheimer's indicate increasing prevalence. Starting at age 65, the risk of developing the disease doubles every 5 years. By age 85 years and older, between 25% and 50% of people will exhibit signs of Alzheimer's disease. Up to 5.3 million Americans currently have Alzheimer's disease (Hebert, Scherr, Bienias, Bennett, & Evans, 2003). By 2050, the number is expected to more than double due to the aging of the population. Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and is the fifth leading cause among persons age 65 and older (Heron et al., 2009).

A recent meta-analysis (Prince et al., 2013) found global prevalence of dementia from all causes to be between 5% and 7% of adults age 60+. Two recent studies of dementia prevalence have shown some indication that prevalence may be declining. In one (Matthews et al., 2013), prevalence surveys of adults age 65+ were conducted almost 2 decades apart (1989 and 2008). After controlling for differences in the patient populations, the researchers found that the 2008 cohort had significantly lower prevalence of dementia. The second study (Christensen et al., 2013) took a slightly different approach. Those researchers assessed two cohorts of patients. One cohort was born in 1905 and was assessed in 1998 at age 93. The second cohort was born 10 years later, in 1915, and was assessed in 2010 at age 95. The 1915 cohort was found to have significantly lower prevalence of dementia. Both research teams concluded that the likely explanation was improved primary prevention of causes such as stroke.

Neither of the research teams found changes in the prevalence of Alzheimer's specifically, and it should also be noted that one study was conducted in the United Kingdom and the other in Denmark, so it cannot necessarily be concluded that primary prevention efforts in the United States have been similarly successful."...

These changes if I were to guess would be linked to the increased use of blood thinners.....

"Nursing Home Patients on Anticoagulants

Percentage of patients receiving at least one dose per week

Includes Coumadin, warfarin, heparin and other new anticoagulants

Data for first quarter of 2015"

...but there's a flipside to this....

https://www.propublica.org/article/popular-blood-thinner-causing-deaths-injuries-at-nursing-homes

http://www.asha.org/PRPSpecificTopic.aspx?folderid=8589935289&section=Incidence_and_Prevalence

Trust me, if they found their way to Lucifer's domain, the intensity of the situation requires dementia if not present during their lifespan.

I agree that if there is even one shred of hard evidence (e.g. detection) to support prions as probative to several of the disabling brain diseases, it will also become key to find ways to stop the spread of the prions in human population, and also ways to treat patients with very specific agents to remove these pesky proteins from the brain.

You misunderstand my important nuance. Prions are not new. Our discovery of the existence of prions is new. Protozoans were new to Anton van Leeunwenhoek but protozoans have been on the Earth long before any human knew they existed.

Now that we know of these protein fragments (prions) and the problems they can cause we will certainly learn better methods to prevent a variety of diseases. We will also learn if and how to use a prion to our advantage. We will also learn how we already live with prions. This medical field is so new that we shouldn't panic.

Exposure of the type likely to be experienced by those working in wastewater treatment would almost certainly lead to ingestion regularly.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/294945.php

If just flushing your toilet can launch fecal material onto your toothbrush, think how far some of those wastewater aerators/agitators could toss some prions....probably right into someone's talking mouth.

Well I don't think there is any living creature that is not exposed to prions....what it comes down to is the type of prion, level of concentration, length of time, and susceptibility, susceptibility being at least 2 categories, one the genetic precursor which is not known for all the variants, and 2, the health of the natural defenses of an individual, and the method of compromise, which I believe has been speculated here to be antibiotics or natural die offs of human gut bacteria that provide a natural defense of the blood/brain barrier mechanism...There has also been speculation that having ancestors that practised cannibalism might have a genetic variant that affects susceptibility....

As the human population increases, the concentration of pollution of all types is likely to continue, and the likelihood of a mass die off, a possibility....This may be the motivating factor that prompts a human migration to another planet...although the possibility of long term survival does not seem likely unless an Earthlike planet can be found that is within our range of travel....While that doesn't seem possible yet, at some point in the future it may be so, let's hope we can make it that long.....

'....There has also been speculation that having ancestors that practised cannibalism might have a genetic variant that affects susceptibility...'

I was really hoping the link you provided mentioned something about the speculation. Any chance you know where you saw that?

No but I can guess the source as it was about 15 yrs ago....There is still a lot of research being conducted and everything must be taken as current thinking....or what is currently known.....There appear to be a multitude of different variations of prion diseases....these need to be addressed individually for specific information....from 2006, 2008, 2015...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361719/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2576515/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4589088/

In Washington D.C. the prions go the 'other way'.

Do you mean they emitted by the politician speaking, and then are absorbed rectally by the electorate? OMG!

They don't call it Capital Hill for nothing. SH** rolls downhill, and payday is on Friday.

I do approve of this approach. However there is a hidden drawback. After everything that can safely be returned to the environment has been returned the remainder is now a concentrated hazard that must be handled carefully.

Agreed.. That's another place where locking the final concentrate into a crushed road bed material might be useful.

I remember reading about methods of heating radioactive. medical, or other waste waste in a plasma furnace? It lock's any residual material that's not burned and filtered into a glass / rock type substance.

At that point it's no longer capable of leaching toxins.. or so the story goes.

If you run the 'plant' at off peak hours using wind /hydro /wave power that is otherwise 'wasted' at night. The process would be very green.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/proceedings/2008-ALT-1/documents/2009-02-17_workshop/presentations/Louis_Circeo-Georgia_Tech_Research_Institute.pdf

http://www.dep.state.fl.us/air/emission/construction/geoplasma.htm

http://www.geoplasma.com/

Excellent link's.. And thanks.. I'd say I was being facetious, but no.. It looks as if it's underway. We'll see what comes of it.

I stand corrected on the energy use. The waste heat is more than enough to generate enough power to operate the plasma torch. Gas? Biomas.. Seems pretty doable in those terms.. We have plenty of it.

What confuses me is why these injection wells are used to dispose of hazardous waste when it can be used as a clean energy source and eliminated from the environment absolutely via plasma torch methods....?

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

"Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.

In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells(Wow that's a lot of wells) nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking."...

continue reading....

https://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us

https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/371154-uic-well-inventory-2010-2

https://www.epa.gov/uic/underground-injection-control-well-classes

30,000,000,000,000 gallons? That't about 1.5 Olympic swimming pools full of our most foul detritus for each and everyone of us in the US?!. Tell me that's wrong..

What could go wrong?

Sometime when you learn something new each day.. It put's a pit in your stomach.

I'll be reading more into that.

I've never really been one for the whole. "Write a letter to your congressman if you want change / answers". thing.. but jeeze.. Where does one begin?

Perhaps taking stock would be a prudent first move.

http://archive.tcpalm.com/business/st-lucie-officials-decide-to-terminate-geoplasma-contract-ep-382725872-331589641.html

http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/07/22/waste-energy-gasification

The concentrated hazard might be treated in a number of ways:

1) disposal in active volcano (instead of throwing away perfectly good virgins)

2) HIRF (high intensity radio frequency) or microwave gasification at temperatures beyond the survival of any amino acids.

3) general solid waste from POTW should be at least minimally treated by extensive air exposure (helps with denaturation of proteins), plenty of sunlight, and drying conditions. This pretty much points at hauling all such wastes to the middle of some waterless, hot place like the Middle East or the American Sonoran desert, or North Africa, or the interior of Australia, or some parts of western China.

It could be even be viewed (with a non-jaundiced eye) as a means to reclamation of marginal lands, for some intended purpose that could eventually re-enter the food chain, but only after some long years of fallow. Verification would be necessary prior to reintroduction of "normal" agriculture.

How are we supposed to live on Mars, if we cannot even master our own world in the least inviting places, and make these places once again a habitat for something other than foxes?

I would also be interested if there were any correlated "prion" disease incidence statistics for power generation workers where treated effluent is used as a water source for open cycle cooling (cooling towers). I believe that 99-100% of installations that rely on this source of water are treating with either slaked or un-slaked lime in clarifiers prior to use in the cooling system. Is that a way to remove prion activity (by either design or accident)? How much worth is heavy chlorination of the waste water effluent upstream?

What about golf courses watered in such a way? The list can go on and on.

Emerging water treatments such as plasma discharge over water (with TiO₂ present)can produce OH• radical (the known top top oxidant). Another one is something really new about incorporating absorbent materials as dextrin into cotton threads. Could this also play a role?

Yup.
One problem is we've moved from the "make do and mend" mindset of the wartime and postwar generations (especially in the UK) and have become a nation of consumers driven by advertising (I blame the Americans ).
Also a lack of basic scientific education perpetuated by stupid stereotypes that the "science bit" is too hard, uncool etc for vacuous teens who are too busy preening and taking selfies.
The whole mobile phone culture sums it up... YOU DON'T NEED A NEW PHONE

Especially when the new one has poorer battery life, so many apps and alerts it is unusable and every useful facility has been given a new name and hidden in the depths of an obscure menu structure.
Quiz of the day:- What shall we call silent mode on our new phone? It must have more words and be less comprehendable!... how about Do not disturb mode or incognito mode or .... Oh and add to that the possibility of adjusting the sound level down to zero and you have plenty of room for confusing what is in essence a simple binary function....
Rant Mode OFF ... or maybe I've just turned it down a tad
Del

Blame the Americans?! I blame the post war generation's mindset. Now that Fidel is dead I'll be blaming Cuba.. (not really) And I'm talking WW1..

it was roughly a hundred years ago that baby food suddenly needed to be jarred. Were the babies behind the front lines needing an MRE? I really don't think so.

It's literally been a "from the cradle to the grave" phenomenon for longer than any of us can remember. Surly it was the US who were the early adopters of this mindset, but it's not something that can be blamed on the millennials an their Amazon addiction. ..Ironically.. You must to travel to far flung places.. like the Amazon to escape the grip of consumerism.

.. But really? There is far too much needless waste.. whether you're buying a new phone every time you turn.. Or a new TV every time the new spec's become affordable.. Or live in a town/state where visible rust on your vehicle is punishable by law..or you make a weapon that not used to hunt with, but more for show and maybe a little practice.

the list goes on and on.. But the fact of the matter is we're locked into a vicious global cycle of mass consumerism that can be blamed on Great Grandpa Ford and his affordable mass production.. Or was it Dr. Pepper with his marvelous Phosphates?

Point is? What is the point.. Oh yeah.. It's been made. It's time to mend er.. blend. melt and make again.

This is what happens when you avert your eyes for even a moment.

..Come to think of it.. those pharaohs

were hoarding for the afterlife on a monumental scale. I blame them too!

Once you recycle 100%, then archaeological history disappears.

Or you get the shoe event horizon.

How about "ON", and "Bloody OFF"! Oh heck, that is two words, just "OFF" then.

Instead of all that startup crap, how about instant on and instant off. I want a phone like that, and a hippopotamus for Christmas (advertisement jingle stuck in left cranium).

Listen, big boy, you can have all the room you want. I would not dare get in the way!

Hippos kill more people in Africa than crocodiles.

I found it fascinating to learn that thanks to the illegal drug trade and war on drugs, that there are now feral hippos in Columbia that comprise a growing breeding population.

Christmas morning!

That was awesome. I expect they could really wreck a living room in short order!

This is just a bunch of liberal, touchy-feely nonsense. Don't solve the problem, change the language and pretend you solved the problem.

Generating power from sewer gas is dubious, at best. I've got experience with one such plant. Oh, sure, they could generate a bunch of electricity from the gas--but the gas ate up valves in the engines at an alarming rate. They were lucky to get an engine to run for a week without pulling the heads. Their 'free' electricity cost a fortune.

It will not go beyond the curiosity or laboratory stage because of money $$$$$$$$$$$$. All this, with questionable return on investment (ROI) will be much too expensive to be investigated enough to be safe in our world for/to human beings, animals, the environment and the earth. If this is to be thoroughly safe it must be tested well beyond what is now done for present materials. High cost for development, research, development, pilot plant, extraction, transportation, equipment design and construction, operation, finished goods transportation, by-product (the same path as this must be done) marketing and sales, commissions, advertising and whatever comes down the pike.

The recovered products must be competitive with the use of natural resources. Can water derived with the "RRF" method and all energies supplied by it compete with the use of by-product heat from a manufacturing process be used to distill water? Newspaper recycling is a highly competitive market recycled vs. pulp. How would RRS compare to them?

Very few people, corporations or agencies want to spend their money on something more expensive than other sources. Who is going to fund all this?

Good Luck, Old Salt

Please be advised that it would be less expensive for us to process the water from the wastewater plant to drinking water quality expectations than it is to process "river" water. What is stopping us is the "YUK" factor and social acceptance.

If we were allowed to "polish" the end product from our wastewater plants for direct potable use, our operational costs would reduce along with associated reductions in pumping costs for potable water, extraction point sizing, storage reservoir sizes and so on. Reduced capital value to be serviced would lead to lower consumer bills, reduced cost to process would lead to lower consumer bills.

We would still need our primary source, but currently around 80% of what we supply as potable comes back as sewage. Our STP's are close to the community while the WTP is close to the water source. We research "beneficial re-use", but the community does not want us to cross over the threshold to direct potable.

One thing that I would advocate is that any city system should be mandated to return their processed wastewater UPSTREAM of their raw water intakes. Motivation to get the job done properly, but also creating a semi closed system,

The 'Yuk' factor isn't logical. Fish and birds and otters and raccoons and many other things poop in the river.

Regarding the "YUK" factor, engineering and science supporters fully understand, but when subjected to democratic process (voting), the media grabbed the highest sales/profit/sensationalist alignment and ran with that.

It was just not "news" to educate the public, so they ran the images of "floaties" etc.

As a matter of interest, we do have one water treatment facility directly utilising the STP output water. It's only a demonstration model at 1000L/day (250 gallons), but eachyear we run "taste testing" with local politicians, media and prominent public figures. Side by side, bottled water, normal tap water (from us and our neighbouring utilities) and the re-treated wastewater.

The re-treated wastewater has always been judged best or second of the options.

For us in Aus, there are no racoons, but our catchment is typified by dairy farms, wilderness (kangaroos and reptiles), agriculture and domestic wastewater treatment systems.

I must admit though, that I'm still an advocate for domestic water tanks. At home, we are "off the network" as far as water supply is concerned and have not needed to supplement that for over 18 years. (Though, if everyone did that, I'd probably be out of this job. I'd be advising people on home water supply systems.)

I used to cringe at the word "re-purpose" until I "re-purposed" some crap and made something new and cool. I realized in my mind that there is no "waste" except that which isn't "re-purposed".

Then we got a Corgy. I call her "Hoover" because she "re-puposes" everything on the ground as "food". This dog has bigger poops than the kibbles we feed her, so we know she is "re-puposing" things to sustain her in-bred gluttony.

So, there is no "waste" except for that which you choose not to "eat"! (The Corgy eats everything even if she has to try more than once!)

All of our landfills are potential goldmines if we know how to mine them. And if we learn how to mine them, then we can learn how not to create them in the first place. All of our waterways can be protected naturally by not sending any "waste" into them, ever, because "waste" is in-efficient economically and mechanically, and ecologically.

My thinking is that the Queen of England likes Corgys because they eat any poop they poop in the pallace! Walkies is for dumping the dog out so nature can take over and re-purpose the "waste".

Prefix with 'Viable' - then it might gain some mileage.

As long as 'viable' is defined on engineering feasibility and not the status quo comfortable in their sinecures where doing nothing is the easy profitable option for them.

I have a masters in environmental science specializing in contaminant hydrology. The use of waste plant effluent as fertilizer first showed up as irrigation water for golf courses and the use of solids was recognized as a major source of unanticipated sprouting tomato plants.

My wife has MS which was diagnosed definitively by MRI in about 1998. Prior to 1994, MS was diagnosed solely by exclusion of every other possible condition. MS certainly existed prior to 1994, but didn't have a smoking gun diagnosis until the MRI came on the scene. I'm still not convinced that MS isn't a spectrum of possible autoimmune causes that aren't just lumped together because there is no convenient method to further segregate the diagnosis.

With repurposing waste treatment outputs, we've added some new potential pathogen vectors and we probably won't know what wonderful opportunities we've created for advancement of medical accounts receivable enhancement for many years in the future. There are many great future diseases we just haven't gotten around to inventing yet.

My water bill tells another story. With the closed loop recycling, my bill has managed to go up about 700% over the last 20 years and shows no sign of stabilizing any time in the foreseeable future, mostly driven by clean water initiatives and political administration.

When I took my degree, the conventional wisdom of the day was that the best polishing filter for effluent, both liquid and solid, was to build a swamp and feed the effluent to it. The biomass and bacteria were extremely effective and adaptive to digest and sequester any available organic and inorganic content and provide an output cleaner than the local surface water.

The bottom line: avoid crapping into your food source.

With all the drugs in the waste water it's hard to imagine what, if anything, may be crawling out of that swamp.....

As long as it's estrogen and antidepressants, at least it can be expected to have curves and an upbeat attitude.

Ha more likely...

Before getting involved in sophisticated and exotic recycling schemes look at something basic we already do.

I have to sort my household rubbish - plastic - paper - metal - glass, and put it in the appropriate bin, and it is easy to think through the process of making something useful out of the waste already sorted. We are not told what it is.

But we hear stories that it is all taken to the same dump and mixed back together again. Thus we are all wasting our time which makes a mockery of of the whole exercise. Making it hard to understand why we should make the effort.

But it provides entertainment for those with thyme and time on their hands.

Wise words of from the sage of CR4 - We have a green bin for thyme and other garden waste.

The world sees resource recovery (a notch less efficient than reuse) as a waste stream backend solution. Bottle deposits, etc. are a scratch on the surface of the front end solution. All products and shipping (packaging) features entering the market (consumer, construction, industrial, etc.) should be cradle to grave in design. That is, the packaging for the gizmo from Amazon should be fully reusable as a container with pneumatic form fitting for contents of a great variety of dimensional and functional properties. For example, packaging for low shock and fragile glass ware, electronics, art works, etc. in volume increments of the smallest around 0.001 through 0.01 to around 0.1 cubic meter increments up to the 30-40 kg capacity with the contents fully suspended in a pneumatic bladder for each discrete container, even for a bundled shipment. All containers rectilinear with most being cubes.

Of course, fishing poles, plants, and such stuff with extreme dimensional aspect ratios may need another series of generic category containers. I recently received a shipment of stainless steel plates of various gauges and dimensions. There was no way such a split shipment could be accommodated by round trip packaging. But the vast majority of the business and consumer freight I receive every year could be in the types of packaging described above. Then, of course, we have a whole different issue with merchandizing packaging, as opposed to shipping packaging; again, a back end solution is largely unavoidable unless we stick diamond bracelets in MRE packaging.

How about instead of gas inflatable bladder, there could be a lightweight bag filled partially with "squishy" stuff that holds its shape when not being pressed on mightily?

Some sort of gel perhaps (that is stable for years), non-hazardous when spilled, non-corrosive, etc. Then the bladders could "easily" be re-shaped for the next use. The user might have to stand on a small rectangle or square of plywood, to conform the upper and lower halves to the item being boxed up. Not good for Ming dynasty vase you were sending to your mother, etc.

When thinking about this, one has to consider the thickness of material required to protect any object, compared to its angularity, and its density, along with G to be applied in transit, or Izod impact, and possibly some other parameters. Maybe this is accomplished by trial and error, where it is thought to err on the side of zero damage.

To maximize the efficiency of all transport, the density of all items being stacked into a trailer is important. Thus, there is a small trade-off necessary.

Well if we could just pack everything in twinkies....

How do you expect to reuse them when the people in the mail room keeping eating the packing material?

We could make them low fat...?

Do not mess with the Twinkie!

Your response is very cogent. My background includes a massive solid waste management/resource recovery/reuse study project for a 2 million population waste shed in the mid-1970's when the ''in-thing'' at the time for the combustible fraction was to create a material called ''refuse-derived fuel'' (RDF) to be co-fired with ground (powdered) coal. The interest in the waste management topic on CR4 is commendable.

We have both barely touched the surface of front end waste management. From the mid-1970's era to the present very little has been done for front-end solid waste management, more effort (and really not all that much) having been applied to creating a waste stream of which constituents are more suited to manual separation (by generators and at materials recycling facilities or MRF's) and pure mechanical separation for recycling/reuse. One of the enduring debates is ''to burn or not to burn'' as opposed to recover materials from combustible materials, and, if ''to burn'', how ''to burn''.

I recall at least two occasions (one in NY and the other in The Netherlands) in which old about 100 year old closed ''dumps'' were core drilled for ''ore'' evaluation. Of the interesting stuff found was that both had copper concentrations exceeding the virgin ore of most active copper mines. It is only a matter of time when mining ''dumps'' of all genre will begin. The cottage industries we see occasionally on the news of entire families living in and off the findings of Third World ''dumps'' is gradually spreading to the developed world, but with the mom and pop variety inserting themselves between generators and the ''dumps'', especially as the salvage material prices are slowly rising since the 2008 debacle.

Some far-from-thorough thoughts on your comments. The gel has merit, but it also has weight and, itself, waste properties of concern. When I passed through freshman chemistry, Linus Pauling had just received his Nobel for various achievements, including his ''cubic close packing'' principle, which fascinated me to no end at the time. The same applies to the ever burgeoning consumer and commercial online trade and the reduction of ''dead-head'' freight inefficiencies through the use of reusable freight containers for the vast majority of what is shipped in the trade. For a, say, container shipment of rectilinear parcels within a specified weight and size range reasonably sorted in a mechanical system (e. g., as in a baggage origin-destination pattern), it should be possible to develop an algorithm for loading this parcel family to optimize use of the container's volumetric and weight capacity from depot to depot while comparatively simultaneously stacking for the least crushing damage to parcels and their contents.

Basically, it all comes down to how hard to squeeze the buffalo, or just go look for new, richer (more profitable) resources.

Re-mining the landfill seems a really nasty job. I would not want it. If machinery did all the handling, then perhaps not so bad. Those microwave destruction machines for solid waste use a lot of power, but they generate even more power, so net gain. The gases like hydrogen chloride are recovered, and probably CO2 can be also recovered before sending the fuel gas this produces over to the turbine generator. Even better, use an Allam cycle to burn off the fuel, and there will be no emissions because there is no stack. CO2 is pipeline grade and at pressure suitable. Water (pure) is the other major co-product besides electric power.

The metals, silicon, and some non-metals will all end up in what is known as "black glass" and I understand this typically is a suitable paving material additive, with little or no leaching of metals, toxins etc.

Maybe we just need more seagulls....?

http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/3348

Seagulls are the primary reason for:

(1) Severe paint loss and corrosion on east and west coastal areas of the United States

(2) The song "Birdie Birdie in the sky, why you do that in my eye?" - I am really glad hippos can't fly.

(3) The great trash islands in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, associated with the Great Mid-Pacific Gyre.

(4) "Mine, mine, mine...mine, mine, mine"

(5) You have never heard of Jonathan Livingston Hippo.

(6) all of the above

(7) none of the above

(8) IDC

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113416706/gut-bacteria-parkinsons-disease-link-120316/

..."Humans have co-evolved with the trillions of microbes that inhabit our bodies and that create complex, body–habitat-specific, adaptive ecosystems that are finely attuned to relentlessly changing host physiology. Dysbioses in the microbiome have been associated with numerous diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes (types 1 and 2), allergies, asthma, autism, and cancer [1–5]. Like the concept of the pathogenicity of a single microbial taxon, dysbiosis of a microbial community can be difficult to define but could be considered as a perturbation that departs from an otherwise balanced ecology [1] to prolong, exacerbate, or induce a detrimental health effect. "...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4848870/

That's nice to know, I guess.

But a microbiome in a dysbiosis condition can clearly be the cause of some maladies. They can also be a symptom of a malady. I heard a report today of one "healthy" microbiologist that tracked their biome for a year. They found that their biome varied more and less than one might think with location and eating habits. But they never delineated which might be cause and which effect condition.

This is a great new field for research, we have a lot of information but really no definitive answers as to what constitutes a normal gut bacteria village...There's little known other than there is a connection between several diseases and gut bacteria profile, it leaves me wondering if it's a chicken or egg quandary even though we have some definitive proof that altering the bacterial mix does eliminate symptoms in some cases....This would lead me to believe that this is an important area for attempting this approach for several diseases and monitoring gut bacteria profile for really all types of ailments as it might lead to fresh approaches to treating all sorts of disorders including some of the big ones that we have no cures for at all....A naturopathic approach is always preferred with no side effects to worry about....It certainly seems like a good idea to have some probiotics on hand to take from time to time, especially if one is experiencing digestive disturbance of one sort or another, and maybe just as a good preventative regime...

http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/features/what-are-probiotics#1

Probiotics are just one route...

Fecal transplant.

Is that an offer or a solicitation? haha... yes I would consider that a last resort, but also a treatment for a rather specific malady....Man, how miserable would you have to be to try that....I wonder if my health care offers biome tracking...?

https://ubiome.com/

One would thing it would be last resort, or at least low on the things to do list.... de gustibus non est disputandum.

I that Latin for: "The Shittan is in the details?"

Malo mala mali quam mala equui

Lupus in fabula.

The taste is more worrisome, rather the smell.

I think there is probably a time element involved....In other words you can be deficient in some substance that is a product of a certain bug for a certain amount of time before any effect is noticed, but then if the deficiency continues over a longer period of time perhaps even under certain circumstances, then some system begins to fail.....this is probably all tied in with your genetic profile and environmental conditions, as well as age, general overall condition(keep moving), medical history and other factors....Yes it sounds very complicated but this is simple for a super computer, it just needs all the relevant data....

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/05/insidedna-looks-deep-into-your-dna-to-determine-the-best-drugs-to-cure-what-ails-you/?ncid=tcep&google_editors_picks=true