world’s farmers turn to raw sewage for irrigation
Posted by admin on 19 Aug 2008 at 10:04 am | Tagged as: toxic life
Says an article on New Scientist.
The future may not smell too rosy – it may lie in sewage. As cities and industries suck up ever more of the world’s scarce water resources, agriculture is destined to rely increasingly on recycling the contents of urban sewers, according to a new international study of “wastewater agriculture”.
The good news – for farmers at least – is that the irrigation water from sewers comes with free fertiliser in the form of the nitrates and phosphates bound up in human faeces. The bad news is that this coprological cornucopia is filling vegetables sold in city markets with heavy metals, pathogenic bacteria and worms.
An estimated one fifth of the world’s food is growing in urban areas, with perishables like vegetables to the fore. But a 50-city study by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) – a World Bank-backed research agency based in Sri Lanka – finds that often the only source of the essential irrigation water to grow many of those crops is city sewage.
More madness. Putting our waste into water in the first place is madness, but then to allow industry to flush toxins into the sewers and then allow farmers to use it for irrigation… bah humbug!
Now, if someone could convince the world to compost their waste, and then use it on farmland. That would make sense and we wouldn’t be wasting drinking water to flush away excrement. It would be seen as the resource that it actually is. Historically cities used to collect night soil, to transport outside to fields, but this isnt as efficient as composting near to the point of production, and using it to green the city and grow food within the city.
