More info on recycled sewage.One of my other PhD friends, Bill, a retired biologist sent me this little snippet from ‘The Conversation’. 

The thick plottens! 

They may have to do further treatments to BioWaste to cope with increasing amounts of PFAS, or ‘Forever Chemicals’ that are showing up in our waste stream.

‘Forever chemicals’ have made their way to farms. For now, levels in your food are low – but there’s no time to wastetheconversation.com

The author, Ravi Naidu, from Newcastle Uni, Points out that there are treatments to neutralise PFAS chemicals, but isn’t very forth coming on what they are.

He does recommend heating the boiwaste to create biochar, which would destroy or break down the chemicals.

However, later on in the article, he recommends reading the following link;

Read more: ‘Forever chemicals’ are everywhere – here’s what you need to know about them

Which points out that they are very high temperature stable, and aren’t easily broken down by heat. It’s a worry. and far beyond my ken, but then later there is this link to another publication about the breakdown of PFAS.  break down Which is more positive.

Bio char is well known to be very beneficial to soil health and fertility. We use it. We make our own. Janine sieves out all the charcoal pieces from our fire place ash when we make ash glaze. I add the charcoal ‘crumb’  to the soil in the veggie garden. Being extremely porous, it absorbs and holds water releasing it slowly over time, as well as its nutrient value. I believe that it helped our garden survive the recent drought. 

As all the wood that we burn is collected from our own land, there is little chance of it concentrating any heavy metals and /or PFAS in our garden soil.

PFAS are a major ingredient in non-stick kitchen pans. Luckily I like to collect and re-use old stainless steel lined copper pans for cooking, so we only own one non-stick item, a modern copper fry pan with a non-stick coating. I only use it for poaching/steaming delicate soft white fish, as it doesn’t stick and break up when lifted out of the pan. I’ll have to try harder. I’ll need to put it away and go back to plain stainless steel lined copper.

If nothing else, it makes me feel a lot better about growing all our own vegetables and fruit here, using our own compost. However, our system fails when I use chicken manure from outside as a fertiliser! No easy solutions. Mea Culpa again.