Worldly PFAS

I have been thinking a lot about PFAS and spreading sewage sludge lately, as it’s been in the news. At the same time, my fascination with off-grid, homestead, self-reliant living and fascination with the Amish continues to be on the top of my mind.

The solution to PFOAs in mind of many liberals seems to be bigger landfills, greater mounds of garbage on the outskirts of cities. Rather then spreading sewage sludge on fields where the nutrient value can be recovered, they’d rather focus on encapsulation and disposal via mounds  of massive quantities of poop and toilet paper the cities generate.

The Amish are often dismissed as being overly religious and trying to avoid “worldy” concerns like pollution from their farms and homesteads. They burn plastic netwrap and garbage, shit in outhouses that if poorly sited can pollute waterways and allow their cows and livestock the ability to shit in creeks, and don’t file detailed nutrient management plans with their local ecology or environmental department like the big commercial farms do. While many feed and mix food waste into manure as compost or fertilizer, the stuff that doesn’t burn or have scrap values like broken machinery parts gets dumped into the gully.

But really is the Amish in generally have quite sustainable livestyles compared to the typical American household that flushes their poop and toilet paper down the toilet, where it goes to a sewage treatment plant, and its placed in the landfill in outskirts of town. Where their garbage is picked up every week, and added to the landfill on the outskirts of town. Where they consume hundreds of watt-hours of electricity, usually generated from coal or natural gas and buy tons of food packaged in plastic and paper, shortly destine to landfill. Or constant stream of electronic devices and gadgets, mined, glued together with toxic soup of chemicals, and then smashed and buried in that same mound of literal crap.

Truth is I actually like the Amish model of living in many ways, and I think it’s quite sustainable notwithstanding. I like the idea of composting toilets, humanure, or even the basic outhouse which if it doesn’t immediately turn the poop into night soil, it’s still returned to the ground and will eventually become soil even if it not immediately used. I get the concerns about disease and patheogons, however a well managed outhouse or for that matter a composting toilet or humanure system can kill them and turn what is literally being used to build mounds on the outskirts of our cities into something useful or at least non-harmful.

Nearly every office I’ve worked in the city overlooks a literal mound of garbage. So much of our enlightened industrial system is about extracting material, using it briefly and discarding it. Food is no exception – what isn’t tossed directly from the grocery store or kitchen shelves into dumpster and landfill is run through the sewers, filtered out and hauled to landfill. We are told this is the enlightened solution, the one that keeps PFOAs out of fields and our food. It protects human health. But I’m not convinced.

Now I’m not saying the Amish or off-gridders are perfect people. In many ways the way they manage waste poses risks. But they generally generate less waste, and dispose of it in ways that is more sustainable with less of an impact on nature – and with fewer mounds of literal crap on the outskirts of town. We should definitely be stopping the production of PFOAs but I question how much we should fear the trace amounts of the toxic chemical that is in widespread use in our clothing, kitchenware and lives.