Seattle sewage story...Holiday treats impact the environment.
DarkStar
Posts: 734
A new twist on the idea of "local flavor." Somewhat scary, but a very interesting take on how "the holidays" can impact the environment.
The Sound is flavored by the holidays
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/297137_vanilla25.html
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The Sound is flavored by the holidays
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/297137_vanilla25.html
Yule never believe what scientists are finding in Seattle's sewage: a spike in vanilla and cinnamon when the holiday season hits.
It's remarkable enough that the University of Washington's Rick Keil and Jaqui Neibauer, using sophisticated laboratory equipment, were able to track the uptick.
But consider that they also were able to estimate the number of "home-baked cookie equivalents" the people of Seattle gobbled down over the Thanksgiving weekend -- all in the name of figuring out how to protect Puget Sound.
The message?
"Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness."
Don't worry about gobbling that snickerdoodle, though. There's no evidence that cinnamon or vanilla harms sea creatures, and, in fact, the choice of those spices was something of a lark.
But the research does raise serious questions, particularly as fish rely heavily on their sense of smell to locate food and, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream to spawn.
"All the spices have odors associated with them, so it's interesting to ask whether they are there in sufficient concentration (for fish) to smell them," Keil said.
The UW testing of treated sewage headed for the Sound from the West Point Treatment Plant in Magnolia showed that cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla all rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike on the weekly test right after Thanksgiving.
Natural vanilla showed the largest increase that week, "perhaps indicative of more home baking using natural vanilla," Keil and Neibauer wrote.
"This conjecture is weakly supported by a verbal communication between Rick Keil and an employee of the Wallingford QFC who felt that natural vanilla peaked during the holiday seasons," the scientists' preliminary report says. "This will be investigated more thoroughly."
Using benchmarks from a published scientific study, they were able to estimate that people in Seattle and a few outlying areas served by the sewage treatment plant scarfed down the daily equivalent of about 160,000 butter- or chocolate-chip-type cookies and about 80,000 cookies containing cinnamon during the Thanksgiving weekend.
The fact that spices are making their way into the Sound isn't really a surprising finding for the people in charge of King County's sewage treatment plants. You've probably heard the expression that what goes up must come down, and those folks have a corollary: What goes down the drain has to come out somewhere.
That's why King County's Wastewater Treatment Division has long urged people not to put pesticides, industrial chemicals or anything else that would hurt the environment down their drains or toilets, officials there say.
County officials said they were happy to cooperate with UW, in part because it helps reinforce that message.
"It's an ability to look at a whole population's behavior through one pipe," said Randy Schuman, a King County science and technical support manager who helped arrange the wastewater testing.
King County did not spend any money on the study, county spokeswoman Annie Kolb-Nelson noted.
Keil's findings present a light side of what scientists say is potentially a serious situation. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies have documented that antibiotics, contraceptives, perfumes, painkillers, antidepressants and other substances pass through people's bodies and the sewage system into waterways.
Prozac, birth-control pills, Tylenol -- name a pharmaceutical and it probably has been found in a river or bay somewhere. A 2002 Geological Service study examined 139 waterways from Florida to Massachusetts to Washington to Southern California, finding drugs and other chemicals used by people in four-fifths of the streams studied.
Here in Seattle, King County researchers several years ago even sought to figure out whether this hypercaffeinated city was having an effect on the Sound, so they took caffeine measurements.
"It was everywhere," Schuman said. "There's an effect (from) humans on the Sound and it's almost ubiquitous. It's not just at the end of the (discharge) pipe."
In those tests, caffeine was found in more than 160 of 216 samples -- up to 640 feet deep.
King County officials are interested in looking at a wide range of chemicals in the sewage, including those that disrupt animal body systems that are controlled by hormones. Already, where raw sewage formerly was dumped into Elliott Bay on a semiregular basis, scientists documented a female protein in male fish -- sort of like egg yolk being found in a rooster.
So while the vanilla study was lighthearted, it has implications for the cleanup of the Sound, said Schuman, who served on the science advisory panel for the Puget Sound Partnership, the group appointed by Gov. Chris Gregoire.
Those scientists would like to know the relative contribution of sewage treatment plants to the pollution of the Sound, along with other sources, Schuman said.
But one thing is clear, after looking at the sewage, he said: "This isn't someone else's problem. It's all of ours."
P-I reporter Robert McClure can be reached at 206-448-8092 or robertmcclure@seattlepi.com.
It's remarkable enough that the University of Washington's Rick Keil and Jaqui Neibauer, using sophisticated laboratory equipment, were able to track the uptick.
But consider that they also were able to estimate the number of "home-baked cookie equivalents" the people of Seattle gobbled down over the Thanksgiving weekend -- all in the name of figuring out how to protect Puget Sound.
The message?
"Even something as fun as baking for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Keil, an associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it shows the connectedness."
Don't worry about gobbling that snickerdoodle, though. There's no evidence that cinnamon or vanilla harms sea creatures, and, in fact, the choice of those spices was something of a lark.
But the research does raise serious questions, particularly as fish rely heavily on their sense of smell to locate food and, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream to spawn.
"All the spices have odors associated with them, so it's interesting to ask whether they are there in sufficient concentration (for fish) to smell them," Keil said.
The UW testing of treated sewage headed for the Sound from the West Point Treatment Plant in Magnolia showed that cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla all rose between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike on the weekly test right after Thanksgiving.
Natural vanilla showed the largest increase that week, "perhaps indicative of more home baking using natural vanilla," Keil and Neibauer wrote.
"This conjecture is weakly supported by a verbal communication between Rick Keil and an employee of the Wallingford QFC who felt that natural vanilla peaked during the holiday seasons," the scientists' preliminary report says. "This will be investigated more thoroughly."
Using benchmarks from a published scientific study, they were able to estimate that people in Seattle and a few outlying areas served by the sewage treatment plant scarfed down the daily equivalent of about 160,000 butter- or chocolate-chip-type cookies and about 80,000 cookies containing cinnamon during the Thanksgiving weekend.
The fact that spices are making their way into the Sound isn't really a surprising finding for the people in charge of King County's sewage treatment plants. You've probably heard the expression that what goes up must come down, and those folks have a corollary: What goes down the drain has to come out somewhere.
That's why King County's Wastewater Treatment Division has long urged people not to put pesticides, industrial chemicals or anything else that would hurt the environment down their drains or toilets, officials there say.
County officials said they were happy to cooperate with UW, in part because it helps reinforce that message.
"It's an ability to look at a whole population's behavior through one pipe," said Randy Schuman, a King County science and technical support manager who helped arrange the wastewater testing.
King County did not spend any money on the study, county spokeswoman Annie Kolb-Nelson noted.
Keil's findings present a light side of what scientists say is potentially a serious situation. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies have documented that antibiotics, contraceptives, perfumes, painkillers, antidepressants and other substances pass through people's bodies and the sewage system into waterways.
Prozac, birth-control pills, Tylenol -- name a pharmaceutical and it probably has been found in a river or bay somewhere. A 2002 Geological Service study examined 139 waterways from Florida to Massachusetts to Washington to Southern California, finding drugs and other chemicals used by people in four-fifths of the streams studied.
Here in Seattle, King County researchers several years ago even sought to figure out whether this hypercaffeinated city was having an effect on the Sound, so they took caffeine measurements.
"It was everywhere," Schuman said. "There's an effect (from) humans on the Sound and it's almost ubiquitous. It's not just at the end of the (discharge) pipe."
In those tests, caffeine was found in more than 160 of 216 samples -- up to 640 feet deep.
King County officials are interested in looking at a wide range of chemicals in the sewage, including those that disrupt animal body systems that are controlled by hormones. Already, where raw sewage formerly was dumped into Elliott Bay on a semiregular basis, scientists documented a female protein in male fish -- sort of like egg yolk being found in a rooster.
So while the vanilla study was lighthearted, it has implications for the cleanup of the Sound, said Schuman, who served on the science advisory panel for the Puget Sound Partnership, the group appointed by Gov. Chris Gregoire.
Those scientists would like to know the relative contribution of sewage treatment plants to the pollution of the Sound, along with other sources, Schuman said.
But one thing is clear, after looking at the sewage, he said: "This isn't someone else's problem. It's all of ours."
P-I reporter Robert McClure can be reached at 206-448-8092 or robertmcclure@seattlepi.com.
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And no one sings me lullabyes
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky....
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky....
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