A small recompense for decades of jokes at Mexico’s expense, eh?

  • Tempus Fugit@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Lmao. I was at a grocery store the other day and buying some grapes. Some old 70+ year old lady said I shouldn’t buy Mexican produce because they use poop for fertilizer. I laughed looked her in the face and asked her what she thought we used for fertilizer. She didn’t like that.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      Just published today in The Guardian:

      The Trump administration has killed proposed regulations for sewage sludge contaminated with Pfas and spread on farmland as fertilizer, a practice that has sickened farmers, destroyed their livelihoods, killed livestock, polluted water supplies, and poisoned meat and food products sold to the public.

      • TriplePlaid@wetshav.ing
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        4 days ago

        Allowing continued spreading of PFAS contaminated sludge is beyond horrible because those chemicals will stay there permanently. Around 1/3 or so of USA cropland is already polluted from spreading of sludges. There is nothing in nature that can break PFAS down, so all that polluted land will have to literally be removed and stored similar to hazardous nuclear waste.

        When we finally realize the damage and start work to repair it, it will be the largest remediation project in human history.

        • ati@piefed.social
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          4 days ago

          I think nature will evolve/select some sort of bacteria that will digest PFAs and plastics, making it a problem that will solve itself. It’ll only take a few hundred thousand years I reckon.

    • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      My god it would have been so hard for me to reply to that politely.

      Good on you for finding a way to do so.

    • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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      4 days ago

      There’s a way to safely use poop for fertilizer. You have to compost it to kill pathogens first.

      Neither counties do this, and that’s one reason people get e-coli, parasites, and other diseases

      • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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        3 days ago

        The Romans did not understand this. Archeology digs in Roman latrines concluded most Romans carried parasites.

        • quick_snail@feddit.nl
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          3 days ago

          Were those latrines lined? Did they place them sufficiently far from rivers and ground water?

          I don’t think they understood much about disease vectors and germ theory, in general.

          • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca
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            3 days ago

            Pete Hegseth says germ theory is fake.

            The concept of bacteria didn’t appear until almost 800 years later. Romans used poop to fertilize fields, but did not treat it.