What recycling practice stores 17 times more carbon to soil than released to atmosphere? #didyouknow #climatechange #GHG

Another Awesome Poster from King County!  I love the graphic of the pie slices in how the benefits  from biosolids (aka treated sewage sludge) break down and this quote:

• Using field measurements from the county’s project sites, University of Washington researchers calculated 2.29 metric tons of carbon credits and only 0.135 metric tons of debits (from truck and equipment emissions). This means 17 times more carbon is being stored in the soil than is being released to the atmosphere.

http://www.kingcounty.gov/environment/wastewater/Biosolids/BiosolidsRecyclingProjects/~/media/environment/wastewater/biosolids/docs/1003_BSagPOSTER.ashx

Many missing major Climate Change issues; focused on contaminant minutia

The current issue of BioCycle offers an eloquent and thought-provocating article by Sally Brown, Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. I've included a few of the great quotes from the article and a link to BioCycle to read more.

"But we aren't talking about streams. The question was about irrigating crops. I told the reporter about a new publication on the safety of reclaimed water put out by the WateReuse Research Federation that places risks into prespective. An agricultural laborer - someone who would be considered a highly exposed person to this synthetic estrogen - in a field irrigated with reclaimed water would need to spend 16,000 years working in the field to get the same exposure to the estrogen as you find in one birth control pill." 

"Instead he asked about plant update. The straightforward answer would have been to continue with the comparison, i.e., that plants take up very little if any of these compounds and that they will degrade in soils, and that you would have to eat nothing but those plants (e.g., salads) for decades and decades to get one birth control pill. But instead, I told him about studies we've done showing no plant update and I did talk to him about that one paper out of Toldedo where they had to add chemicals to the water to get concentrations high enough to even see them in plants."

 "There is consenus, certainty, within the scientific community on climate change - manmade climage change. For the general public though, more are worried about that part per trillion in reclaimed water than the catastrphic flooding, droughts, and so on."

Read more of Sally's " Keep Talking" ( Subscription required )
BioCycle July 2011, Vol. 52, No. 7, p. 42
Climate Change Connections, Sally Brown