I’ve just finished some research about the use of biosolids (human sewage sludge) as farm manure. The results will keep me awake at night.
¾ of biosolids in the UK are spread on farmland. The rules about what it can contain are not fit for purpose. Please read and share this 🧵
Biosolids typically contain a wide range of synthetic chemicals, including antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, personal care products, microplastics and persistant organic pollutants, among them “forever chemicals”. Yet testing is restricted to a small number of contaminants.
Spreading them across the land means spreading them through the foodchain and the ecosystem. There’s plenty of evidence of uptake of many of these chemicals by crops, earthworms and other soil animals, and of large-scale antibiotic resistance developing among soil bacteria.
When soil is blown or washed off the land, these chemicals enter the air and water. Some seep into groundwater. We're likely to eat, drink and breathe them. It’s hard to say what the health thresholds are, or what the combined impact of this cocktail of synthetics might be.
Yet the issue has been wilfully neglected by governments. Regulation is negligible. Farmers in the UK are “responsible for knowing the levels of any potentially toxic elements” before spreading sludge. But how? With an on-farm lab that can test for 80,000 possible contaminants?
There’s no enforcement anyway. Even if there were strong rules, the crippling of the regulatory agencies by government cuts would ensure they remained a dead letter. There are scarcely any inspections or enforcement even of the existing rules.
What is the cumulative impact on human health?
What is the cumulative impact on ecosystems?
We haven’t the faintest idea.
One thing I haven’t discovered is whether biosolids are also being sold as garden fertilisers. I can’t find any garden fertiliser or manure application on sale which states that sewage is the source. Does anyone know?
In theory, we *should* be able to use biosolids to grow food. Closing the nutrient loop is an important aspect of the circular economy. But at the moment, in closing the nutrient loop we are opening the chemicals loop, spreading potentially dangerous toxins far and wide.
I can't vouch for it, but I've been sent a link to a process (HTC Gasification) that claims to "destroy contaminants, microplastics, PFAS (forever chemicals), and pharmaceuticals from biowaste." If true, it could be the breakthrough we need. somaxhtc.com
I realise that it might not light everyone's fire, but in my strange inner world, a better way of processing human faeces, if demonstrable, is exciting.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

16 Feb
I keep being asked why I don’t go into politics.
There are a few reasons:
1. I'd be rubbish at it.
2. I mean really rubbish.
3. I'd prefer to see women, people of colour and young people entering politics, rather than someone else with my profile.
But more importantly … 🧵
4. To create change, we need an ecosystem: people with a wide variety of skills, performing a wide variety of tasks.
We need researchers, journalists, campaigners, organisers, supporters, fundraisers, administrators etc, as well as politicians.
5. Some of these tasks are incompatible. For instance, if I went into politics, I wouldn’t be free to decide what I think, or to change my mind as soon as the evidence changes. I would have to bite my lip and follow a party line. In other words, I couldn’t do the things I do now.
Read 5 tweets
16 Feb
The government is trying to prevent a "re-evaluation" of our imperial past. What doesn't it want us to see?
In this thread from last year, I list some of the skeletons it is seeking to keep in the closet.
Quick, look the other way!
Here's another thread on the UK's hidden colonial atrocities and their connections to today's power structures, which intersects with the first one, but draws on more examples:
Behind these histories lies an even bigger and more sacrilegious truth. It's that the system we call capitalism, which exists vaguely in our minds, but that most people see as "something to do with buying and selling" is really a system of global theft.
Read 8 tweets
15 Feb
Billionaire power exists in conflict with democratic power.
Billionaires happen because of regulatory failure (weak anti-trust, employment, environmental laws etc).
They persist due to fiscal failure (not enough tax).
No one, in a functioning democracy, should be this rich.
When billionaires become sufficiently powerful, and governments become sufficiently weak, people start believing that they can solve the problems that made them so rich, and which they have almost certainly exacerbated.
You might as well believe in magic.
But we are now creating a superman myth, investing people like Musk and Gates with powers they either do not or should not possess.
In doing so, we enhance their power, and democracy is further weakened.
Read 9 tweets
14 Feb
Perhaps it's unsurprising that a billionaire has no interest in structural and political change. But @BillGates's belief that he can save the planet with technologies alone, while dissing popular movements and systemic transformation, is as naive as it is arrogant.
Moreover, his attack on divestment campaigns suggests he hasn't grasped even the basic dynamics of preventing climate breakdown:
It doesn't matter how many solar plants you build unless you simultaneously, and proactively, shut down fossil fuel investment.
Otherwise the political power of those with sunk costs will impede and stymie transition. Technical change is essential, but it's only a partial answer to economic power, and no answer at all to political power.
Read 9 tweets
11 Feb
It would be madness to build these roads in the midst of a climate emergency, and when businesses are at last adopting 21st Century technologies for meetings, instead of sending people all over the country.
We should be retiring roads, not building them.
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/f…
These days, new roads tend to be built not for the benefit of travellers, but for the benefit of contractors.
There is an interesting, perverse logic which ensures that the very worst schemes get selected. I try to explain it here:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Read 4 tweets
8 Feb
Revolting. And please remember the "justification", which is the justification for mass slaughter of this kind the world over:
To protect livestock.
Why must the natural world have to give way, across so much of the planet, to cattle and sheep?
In the UK, we've wiped out our larger predators, but our wildlife is still being slaughtered, at the behest of the same industry.
Even moles are massacred, for fear that they might spoil cattle feed.
Read 6 tweets

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