Boss Hog - America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste

[unpossibles]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters/1

...Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.
...
The Savages say they can keep the pig-shit smell out of their house by shutting the doors and windows, but to me the walls reek faintly. They have a windbreak -- an eighty-foot-wide strip of forest -- between their house and the fields. They know people who don't, though, and when the smell is bad, those people, like everyone, shut their windows and slam their front doors shut quickly behind them, but their coffee and spaghetti and carrots still smell and taste like pig shit.
...
Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2 million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of Smithfield's annual sales.
...
The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina. It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history, more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea, every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the millions.

[Systematic Chaos]

1. K&R, and please cross-post in GD or something.

Not enough people will read about this here, sadly.

Disgusting beyond words. :grr:

[unpossibles]

2. is cross-posting allowed? I agree more should see this

frankly I feel that people should be free to eat what they choose, but we should also be aware of our actions.

[phantom power]

3. Is this spent pig fuel radioactive?

[Dogmudgeon]

11. It's worse than radioactive

Have you ever been downwind of a pig (factory-) farm?

In this case, "PU" isn't an atomic symbol, it's onomatopoeia.

--p!

[Javaman]

4. Ironically, pig crap can be harnessed into fuel. nt

[unpossibles]

5. true. But does that lessen the environmental impact

both as fuel (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0701_040702_pigoil.html) and for the process to turn it into fuel?

Turning pig crap into fuel seems even more short-sighted than thinking that all of our problems can be solved with corn and switchgrass. I am not claiming that is what you are saying, btw, but it seems a very short-term answer at best.

Also, I don't know if this would happen or not, but friends of mine have converted grease-diesels that constantly smell like Cap'n D's.



I won't go into the ethical side of the equation because I would rather have a conversation about this than get the thread locked.

[Javaman]

6. No worries, I was just pointing it out that it can be used as fuel.

nothing more.

I agree it's a colossally bad environmental problem.

[Scott In Modesto]

7. Bio-degradable?

Last I checked, pig shit, just like any other shit, is bio-degradable, and high in Urea and Nitrogen, so why aren't they using it for fertilizer to raise more feed to feed the next batch of hogs???

Wouldn't that make logical sense???

[Javaman]

9. Now that's a great idea!

Considering the fact that as oil runs out so will the nitrogen that is used in farming.

[JohnWxy]

12. Anaerobic digesters convert animal waste into useable methane, captures CO2 and produces chemical

fertilizer that is virtually toxin free and much safer to use than untreated manuer. Plus the mehane can be used to produce electricity (replacing fosssil fuels such as natural gas or coal) or heat for various uses (closed loop ethnanol plants are being built (one in operation already in Nebraska) which use the methane to produce heat used in the production of ethanol. Thus they eliminate the use of fossil fuels!).

http://www.eroei.com/content/view/151/48/

Anaerobic Digestion Found to Produce Renewable Energy

February 22, 2006
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-- Ann Wilkie, an associate research professor with Univ. of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences

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She said anaerobic digesters can process five to 10 times more waste than aerobic systems. Because the waste is enclosed to keep oxygen out, anaerobic digestion keeps odors in. Odors, flies and pathogens are reduced by as much as 95 percent.

With anaerobic digestion, the methane produced can be used to heat water or generate electricity, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus can be recovered and used to fertilize crops.

~~
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About 40 cubic feet of methane per day can be produced from the waste of each dairy cow, Wilkie said. Each cubic foot of methane has about l,000 BTUs, which adds up to a huge amount of usable energy. A British Thermal Unit is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of water by one degree Fahrenheit.
~~
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Anaerobic digestion reduces the potential for global warming in two ways, she said. First, by capturing biogas, anaerobic digestion can reduce natural emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Second, when anaerobic digestion produces renewable fuel to replace fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, production of carbon dioxide from burning those fossil fuels is avoided.

~~

The anaerobic digester also lowers the levels of pathogens; starvation and competition with other microorganisms help kill pathogens that might be in the manure, Wilkie said.

[unpossibles]

13. from the article it sounded like they were doing some of that

but because of the high number of hogs on the farm, a lot more waste was being produced than what they could deal with. Honestly, that seems like a lazy excuse in that fertilizer can be used elsewhere, so maybe they just don't feel like dealing with it beyond what they are forced to do.

[Oerdin]

8. I like bacon

Just treat the animal waste like you would human waste and the problem goes away. The main problem is farms are allowed to stock pile untreated waste so if their containment controls fail then a flood of piss and shit rush into waterways. Make the farms hook up to municiple systems and have the sewage treated.

[unpossibles]

10. that's fine, although I wonder if we can currently do that

in my opinion, we also need to figure out how to better deal with human waste as well, but treating animal waste from factory farms the same way we do human waste would be a good start.

I know you're being funny with your subject line, but.. I don't know. It's the same answer I get from people who drive gas guzzlers, honestly. I don't have a problem with someone being a meat eater and enjoying it - I think as a species we have a pretty diverse diet range, but I do think we over-do it by far.

If nothing else, I have to pay taxes on the water subsidized by the meat industry so that your bacon doesn't cost (you) and arm or a leg, and that bothers me a bit, but I am also one who recognizes that I will gladly pay a lot of taxes I don't "benefit" from, such as school levies, because it's the price I pay to live in society.

I do think you have the right idea though, and that we need to look at this waste more as the biohazard it potentially is and treat it as such.