Richard Honour

Richard Honour

Apr 27, 2015

Group 6 Copy 122
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Step Back A Minute

But Wait! There's more to the story of sewage sludge disposal than just the amounts scattered in our forests.

If you consider that about 25% of King County's (King County, WA) sewage sludge is disposed in the Cascade Mountains / Snoqualmie Forests, and the greater 75% is trucked over the Cascades for land disposal on our food crops and rangelands, what then is the fate of the toxins carried therein, and who evaluates and monitors for the resulting toxicity? No one!

Luckily, we don't have to eat all of the toxins in the sludge. While we do get alimentary access to the Hops that are fertilized with sludge, because they flavor about 85% of the beers in the US, and while we do appreciate the fine Washington State wines that are cultivated in sewage sludge, please appreciate that some crops do not gain benefit of sewage sludge, simply because organic farming is such a key part of the Evergreen State's inherent culture. Most "Organic" crops remain sludge-free.

However, much of Washington State's wheat is exported to Japan, Nigeria, Mexico, Iraq, South Korea, Taiwan, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Israel and several other unsuspecting locations, whereby they do get all of the benefits of the cumulative toxins applied to those wheatland soils, over about the past 40 years.

Is anyone complaining? No! No one knows about it. The adverse effects are chronic in nature, not acute, so blame it all on the weather, or Fukushima, or Hanford, or hotdogs, or genetics.

If perchance you travel through central/eastern Washington, perhaps around Waterville, and points east and thereabout, be sure to look at the thousands of square miles (not square acres, but square miles) of wheat, Canola and more that are treated systematically with King County's toxic sewage sludge, and then go home and eat a Washington Apple – good luck with that one!

For our benefit, we have discovered a mechanism whereby exposing certain soil microbes to toxic assault with sewage sludge extracts incites the microbes to produce novel compounds for their own self protection against toxic chemicals and other microbes, including against human pathogens.

Arriving at Waterville, WA, with a double load of sewage sludge, destined for disposal on the wheatlands, a 750 mile round trip. Imagine the fuel it took to do that; imagine the thousands of double truckloads per year, and the fuel it takes to do that. GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions haven't seen the likes of this previously, and with the population of Washington State expected to expand by more than 2 million toilet users in the next decade or so, the GHG challenge will choke us to death.

Dumping the trucks, loading the spreader, spreading the sludge, all in a day's work.

Mountains of King County, WA, sewage sludge, as far as you can see, all the way to Canada (That's a person standing in there). We can produce it, haul it and dump it, a lot faster than they can spread it.

With shafts of last year's wheat poking out.

But what's in it? We can't see the toxins, but we can see the hair, fibers, plastic bits, metal scraps, bone fragments, veggie stickers, and lots of what-all. Is that good for us?

What's that blue thing, amongst the hair and plastics? Has anyone evaluated this stuff? Not! Is it toxic to our precious soil? Yes!

Could that be a body part dressing, or a bandage, or a .....? And, was it loaded with infectious agents, or spores, or prions, or parasites? Again; no one knows!

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About This Project

The Precautionary Group

We've discovered a few new mushrooms thriving in this harsh environment of land-disposed sewage sludge in Snoqualmie, Washington. We're testing these mushrooms for new antimicrobial properties. Microbes that survive exposure to toxic sewage sludge engage adaptive mechanisms that transform toxins into secondary metabolites.

Blast off!

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