snicker 
Nicely done, Una, but you left out one thing: what’s the breakdown here?
Inquiring minds wanna know: what’s the percentage of alligator poo in NYC’s daily biosolids harvest?
snerk
Link to Staff Report: What happens to all the stuff that goes down the toilet? – CKDH
I still hate the word biosolids. It was a word voted into existance because a bunch of engineers decided that ‘sewage sludge’ had negative connotations. It’s also not sewage any more, it’s wastewater. I can put up with that one - sewage is often only one of the waste streams coming into a treatment plant (now known as a Wastewater Control Facility). So wastewater adds accuracy in many cases. But biosolids is a weasle word. As it comes from the secondary settling tanks into the anaerobic digesters, it averages about 2% solids. It looks and flows like black water.
Yes, I know that it can be treated to concentrate the solids. Maybe it’s just a reaction to seeing the ads in the journals asking people to come up with a better name. Maybe I’m just entering my oldfartage.
Biosolids. Bah!
Duck Duck, you’d better duck. Please provide a link to the Staff Report when you start a thread, OK?
Not only that, but there was allegedly a concerted campaign (by a large company with a stake in using sewage as fertilizer) to get the word “biololids” into the dictionary, by planting it in press releases (thence articles), interviews, etc. I’ll see if I can find a cite. In any case, I was glad to see it omitted from last year’s edition of my favorite unabridged dictionary.
I don’t know if you can find it online now or anything, but I’m pretty sure I read about the whole stupid “biosolids” campaign in Harper’s a couple years ago.
[thanks, Dex]
You know, if you go back in the Library stacks far enough, you can find the old industry journals. In the 1920s the journal was named Sewage. Now the main research one is called Water Environment Research. Same organization, but the name has morphed more times than I can count since 1920, getting prettier each time.
They’ve also spun of other specialty journals including Biosolids Technical Bulletin.
I miss being able to call sewage sewage.
(OT) It would be really cool to have a journal named “Sewage” today. In addition to wastewater treatment, it could cover politics and gossip! That’d be hilarious. You don’t have a screenshot of the cover of “Sewage” anywhere, do you? (/OT)
FTR I don’t use the word “biosolids” unless I get it from a primary source, or I’m using it in a sales and marketing report or paper. Since some of the primary sources used it, I retained the word. I am guilty of grabbing onto buzzwords in work, but mainly because steadfastly referring to coal as “coal” when a client refers to it as “black energy thingamajig” doesn’t win you a sale. And if I don’t allow them to pay me lots of money so I can do research, how can I dispell their ignorance?
If all it was in the mess was poop, the word “biosolids” would be accurate. But it’s not. Most municipalities allow certain kinds of businesses to discharge their waste into the sewage infrastructure. Chemicals, contaminated water, who knows what else. Beyond that, we’ve got soap and paint and Drano and old oil poured down the sink…
So, what the industry calls “biosolids” are actually contaminated with all sorts of chemicals and heavy metals and god knows what. And then they take that sludge and fertilize farms with it. Usually plants grown on these farms aren’t for human consumption, and there are techniques involving maintaining particular pH balances for keeping contaminants suspended in the soil (as opposed to moving up into whatever is growing or down into the ground) – but still. Fertilizing with biosolids risks introducing contaminants into the environment in ominously concentrated levels.
I mean, that’s how I understand it.