All living things are polluters. It’s a simple biological fact. Living things consume food, which is invariably polluted. By consuming food, a creature’s body takes the good things out of the food (nutrients) and excretes the bad things back out into the environment. In short; plants, animals, microbes and living things of every shape and kind are refiners of pollutants.
Humans are no different. If anything, what sets us apart from the beasts is we’re able to say, “Ew, get that doody out of here.” Dogs and cats might be an exception since they cover their doody, but they might have developed that habit by adapting to life with us.
In modern times, waste disposal has become a major industry. So it shouldn’t surprise us that some of the major players in the waste disposal game are going to cut corners, and that to remain competitive the rest will follow suit. That’s bad news for the rest us. It means that a hell of a lot of doodoo-ploppys are getting swept under the bath mat.
Enter the modern industrial age. Now you have people eating tons of processed foods, foods laden with pesticides and pharmaceutical products. That means the waste our bodies are refining is fouler than ever. And the waste disposal companies are not doing their part.
To put it simply, all of the bad chemicals that humans consume are being mixed into our sewer treatment infrastructure and it’s being treated as if it were just plain old human waste.
For a clearer picture, think of the cumulative effect. Take your neighbor for a start. He’s on SSRIs, which come with a host of side effects. Your other neighbor is on an antidepressant, which comes with a host of side effects. You have taken a Tylenol PM- which comes with a host of side effects- each night for a week. All of you are eating food made with pesticides and preservatives. And all of you send your waste products into the same sewer. You know mixing medications is dangerous… how dangerous is it to mix every conceivable medication with all the bad stuff that’s in food? Now, count in air pollution, because that finds its way into the groundwater too.
What you have now is a clear picture of possibly the most toxic sludge imaginable. That evil sludge is in the groundwater which gets sprayed back onto crops, fed to farm animals, and makes its way back to your dinner plate.
Much of this mixing is accidental. Just like when you vacuum your rug, some of the dirt and dust gets into the air and you breathe it. But it’s worse than that because the waste treatment companies are intentionally dropping the ball.
The first thing that waste management companies do when with the waste they process is separate the solid waste from the liquid waste. The liquid waste gets turned into the water that comes out of our faucets and is used in irrigation. The solid waste gets turned into fertilizer that grows the plants we eat the plants that are eaten by the animals we eat.
Earth is a closed system. Unless you’re shooting all of the filtered waste into space, you’re not getting rid of it. It’s still there, just being moved around and contaminating everything it touches. It’s a lot like if you were to take one rag and use it to clean everything in your house- dishes, floors, windows, toilets, showers. That one rag is all you have, you clean your toilet with it, and then you clean your dishes with it. There are no sinks or washing machines in this scenario- because the Earth is a closed system. There’s just one feeelthy rag.
In the real world, all that runoff cannot be eliminated. It can be chemically altered to take the toxicity out of it but that would be more expensive than just moving it around and the waste management industry isn’t doing it. They are pretending that medications, chemicals, and other biosludge are not there and using simple filtering processes while making billions by reselling liquid and solid waste that ends up in your dinner.
Unfortunately, choosing non-GMO foods is not going to get anyone out of the never-ending poop loop. The only answer is to hold the waste management industry responsible for the methods they use. And, inevitably, we’re all going to have to share in the financial burden that is required to have food and water that’s actually clean.