Big Chemical says higher pollution levels are safe in West Virginia because residents don't drink water, and are so fat that poisons are diluted in their bodies

boing
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I realize that there is likely contamination by airborne pollutants (depending on when the rain falls, and what’s in the air), but do you know if any of the West Virginians living in Chemical Valley have turned to rainwater harvesting?

I ask because I am wondering if this could be a viable alternative to poisoned groundwater/surfacewater.

Here’s someone asking the same question, but of Flint, Michigan:
https://greenfiretimes.com/2016/04/could-rainwater-harvesting-solve-flints-water-crisis/
and here, again, re Flint’s toxic water:
https://www.reddit.com/r/flint/comments/82xl22/rainwater_catch_system/

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I found this an interesting read. So many industries in WV in the 20th century! Mother Jones was working to organize what is now Chemical Valley:

https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1271

The effort to establish the miners’ union, and the operators’ resistance, played a major role in shaping the history of West Virginia in the 20th century. The United Mine Workers of America made little progress during the first decade of the century, although the octogenarian labor organizer Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones had sporadic success in the Kanawha Valley. UMWA President John Mitchell came to Charleston in 1907 to launch a major union offensive, only to be defeated by injunctions and company guards.

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I am from northern WV, and would be flat out guessing. Maybe?

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Yeah, let me know when you narrow that R.O. system for lead down, because my likeliometer just twitched noticably. Also the likeliometer was real chipper about a sedimentation tank involving 10-100gal. of water for drinking (and brewing, thanks so much, and showering, please) that grows a reasonably dark preticipate of things like lead oxide and lead thiofluoride with thanks to an anode rod and a bias circuit that is also keen to exchange anode matter and sweep up the exchange (lead) ion flocculant etc. [Citation Bedankt, mea culpa*] Angewandte Chemie managed an entry this week about getting -all- the Technetium Oxide out of groundwater using a MOF (with fine affinity for it and nothing else.)

Maybe just put the showroom for that (low background stainless and less metal-y conductive basins) next to the one for flowing lava and liquid air as a chemical gratitude (and really, battery and thermal energy storage,) showrooms.

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Reminder that this is what the Democratic Party has offered to West Virginians in recent years:

Why would anyone vote for a party represented by those men?

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The disturbing thing is, even though citizens in a state continue to favor a policy and a policymaker that harms the nation, and harms them and their state in particular-- when the results of this policy become more and more clear (people dying), it will still come back to: Buttery Emails.

NYT has an article that Trump is now being seen as biblical Israeli King Jehu (it had been Persian King Cyrus). As long as you fight for zygotes and promise them the world will end in fire soon, these people will follow.

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Raintanks, and rain barrels, are usually on a building’s exterior and sometimes they are easy to spot. Thanks for your input though, because it may be one of those abandoned technologies–namely, cisterns–whose time may have come again.

Wondering here too if a Berkey water filter would be effective in addressing the potable water needs of Chemical Valley residents.

https://www.berkeyfilters.com/

An Austin (TX) woman did a one-year trial, drinking rainwater that came from her roof (which I seem to recall was common asphalt shingle and thus its rainwater would likely have contained heavy metals) that had been filtered through a Berkey filter system, and she wrote a book about her experience (can’t find much about it but here).

ETA: punctuation

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Berkey sells both an activated carbon filter and a ceramic nanofilter for their units. I have one and use it for our spring when power goes out. (We have a deep well, no power, no water.) But I suspect the carbon filters, which would be the only ones of any use at all for the chemicals in question, have never been tested against these particular nasties. Probably falls in the “use at your own risk” category.

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Solar Power companies are a form of “business.” Business is not inherently bad either.

I think everyone is pretty clear that when we say “Big Chemical Companies” we aren’t talking about “all companies that deal with products made of matter” but specifically “companies that produce industrial chemicals on a commercial scale.”

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If Donald the Orange Gimp will drink nothing but the local water, I’m all for it.

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Agreed. Definitely.
And water testing by a decent lab is expensive.
I’ve mostly used Berkey carbon filters (not exactly cheap).

All solutions are complicated, fraught.
Was casting about for what could be workable, effective, relatively inexpensive.

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Please promise me that if you find such a rainbow-farting unicorn you will let me in on it! :grin:

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At exactly the point when they’d prefer to admit that they were stupid than die. I think we all know when that is.

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I worked for a few decades at an environmental engineering firm has been successfully engaging such unicorns periodically. There’s a lot I could say but basically… this:

Not woowoo but well-accepted by peer-reviewed scientists:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/bioremediation
etc.

We did some work in the Lower Ninth Ward, post-Katrina, with surviving residents who definitely did not have much budget to work with. Targeted for reduction / removal from soil around their homes: MTBE, heavy metals… petroleum-based contaminants.

Soil was tested before and after our site remediation work. Soil samples were sent to a reliable lab, and the results therefrom were the standard we used. No guesswork. Not when it comes to human health.

Bioremediating water is differently hard compared with soil bioremediation, but I think it can be done. And depending on what contaminants are targeted for reduction/removal, the remedies can be not-crazy-expensive.

NB: it is often the case that biomass at the end of its bioremediation service life must be bagged and sent to a landfill as it has become in the course of its growth the matrix holding toxins etc. It cannot be burned, composted, etc. It’s basically toxic waste. Some fungi metabolize toxins and render those less harmful.

… is a whole 'nuther process and talking point.

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This.

And I am getting personally tired of hearing the word big in front of anything someone doesn’t like. Even though I don’t like most of it anyway. It just makes the person saying it sound like an uneducated petulant child whining about big bad whatever.

I propose calling them by what they are because it sounds more sinister anyway: The chemical industry lobby. Everyone hates lobbyists. Connect to that with industry which brings up connotations of industrialist robber barons from the 1900s and you have a way to not separate yourself from the mindset of the people you speak to and gain their trust in a mutually beneficial way, that’s also honest.

This big concept you rightly called out is one of the things that even makes me, a fairly damn progressive liberal, call people I even side with childish or elitist.

If the general Trope is that progressives generally find themselves more aware of the world and smarter even if they should be more humble about it I wish they would use the smarter part along with the humble part more often and think about how their very wording immediately makes even other liberals tune out and roll their eyes, because I do occasionally. And I’m a Bernie and Warren kind of guy. If it does that to me, imagine how many conservatives stop listening immediately

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Not to drift off-topic, but it occurs to me that President Camacho was arguably a better president. I mean yes, he was incompetent at any thing other than bread and circuses and pretty corrupt, but unlike Trump Camacho actually did hire the best people available to him, knew when to delegate, and by appointing Joe Secretary of the Interior managed to turn around an ecological collapse.

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I was going to ask if you had read Paul Stamets work, then I got to your last reference. Experimenting with some of that on my property. Not enough experience to say more than it is encouraging.

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President Camacho would be the best President the US has ever had.

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Saying Big Chemical is no more the same as using chemical as a scare word than Big Pharma refers to all pharmaceuticals or Big Hospital refers to all medical care. Context matters.

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Hi Chris,

(I am replying by email because Discourse thinks I am replying to you too many times in-thread to be acceptable. The latest Discourse update is annoying in several ways, including the “let’s welcome first-time poster so-and-so” when I though posting a “velcome comrade!” image was plenty ok.)

I digress.

Stamets’ work is solid enough to catch the attention of the U.S. military, which is in the business of getting results. Paul Stamets is definitely on to something even if I have come across people who whine that his experimental documentation in an academic, citable, rigorous way could be… eh… improved. I value Stamets as a messenger, a pioneer, and as a resource. Back in ancient times, there were oh so few places to purchase a variety of spores and inoculants apart from Fungi Perfecti. These days, there are more commercial sources (and admittedly some have better viability with higher germination rates, or so say the culinary mushroom cultivator friends I have in the sprawling Austin-5-county-metroplex).

I learned about mycoremediation from (now Dr.) Rafter Ferguson, when he was a Glenrose co-worker. He left to work his way to his PhD in agroecology+sustainable ag, and along the way he did some research trials with things-mycological:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rafter_Ferguson

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WayLUlQAAAAJ&hl=en

And his work continues to interest me, well over a decade since we worked together. I have no idea if he can be a resource to you and/or your community, but in case, I include him here.

Something that caught our interest (later) at Glenrose Engineering. I still find it tantalizing:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1002016017603114

You are pursuing mycoremediation on your own property, and I find that thrilling. I am in impossible nerd this way. If you are inclined and have any way to document your results (such as they be), please let me know. I am not fussy. Anecdotal or informal is fine. I know first-hand how expensive it is to test soil and water samples by a reputable lab.

If you are blogging your efforts, all the better. I am grateful for your willingness to try bioremediation on any scale. Nature is good at sequestering a great many things, and often for way less money than so many man-made systems.

I am cc:ing my work-work email, so if you do reply (and it’s fine if you don’t want to), please reply:all.

All the best,

Jeanine

in CenTX (not precisely Austin but close enough to feel the burn of spiraling property values / costs of living)

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