at great cost.18
Cow and pig manure from factory farms used as biofertilizers contains concentrated metals and toxic elements. In China, this situation has become especially severe, with copper, arsenic, and zinc bioaccumulating through animals, manure, and soils. Chicken waste is the most significant source of metal pollution from manure in China, as in the United States, due to the deliberate addition of arsenic.19,20,21
Reusing excrement from both livestock and human populations is an age-old practice, but never before in history have these by-products included so many hazards in one application.
Cattle sludge from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) add to the soil other pollutants such as antibiotics, pharmaceutical compounds, hormone mimickers, and hundreds of types of bacteria, which carry their own potential risks (see the “Animal Feed Contaminants” section on page 185 for more information). Many critics of CAFO practices believe this sludge by-product to be a potential culprit in recent E. coli outbreaks in the nation’s produce.22
Arsenic-treated wood
About 90 percent of the arsenic produced for industrial purposes is ultimately used in wood preservation in the form of chromated copper arsenic (CCA). While CCA has now been phased out, it still permeates much of the existing infrastructure. This arsenic compound has been used in lumber treatment to both prevent rotting and to act as an insecticide that kills termites, ants, and other unwanted pests.
This arsenic-treated wood has been almost universally used in utility poles and for fencing and wooden decks around businesses and residences.44 The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act now prohibits the use of CCA-treated wood in residential areas, but decades of nearly ubiquitous use has left an enormous exposure footprint on the environment.
The EPA has warned parents not to allow their children to play anywhere on, under, or even near patios and decks that were built with arsenic-treated wood, as the highly toxic arsenic compound is known to leach into the surrounding dirt or soil, as well as the surrounding landscape and any water sources.
Even worse, CCA-treated wood also contains chromium VI, better known as hexavalent chromium, the element that caused so many people in Hinkley, California, to get sick after industrial contamination (as portrayed in the based-on-a-true-story film Erin Brockovich starring Julia Roberts). Hexavalent chromium leaches into the environment at greater levels than arsenic and is considered a genotoxic carcinogen, meaning that it is linked with both cancer and damage to the DNA structure itself.
In addition to these concerns are neighborhood fences, electric poles, picnic tables, and playgrounds. In conjunction with its facilitation of the lumber industry’s voluntary “phasing out” of what was once widespread CCA treatment, the EPA has provided oversight for “focusing on children” by assessing “the potential exposure of children to playground equipment built with CCA-treated wood” since 2001, while considering ways to deal with the countless structures in society that were built with components saturated in this harmful compound.45
Testing performed in areas around utility poles that had been heavily coated with a CCA treatment has confirmed that significant levels of both arsenite and arsenate had leached into soils and groundwater in the area.46
Some mitigation treatments have successfully converted the toxic inorganic arsenic trioxide to a less harmful pentavalent arsenate form; however, this form readily competes with phosphorous inside the body and thus has been known to impair essential bodily functions.
As far back as 1972, the EPA knew of the toxicity issues with arsenic-based pressure treatments and injection treatments including arsenic acid, arsenic pentoxide dehydrate, sodium arsenate, sodium hydroarsenate, and disodium arsenate, but the agency considered the implications of the loss of use to be a “national disaster” and thus downplayed the real environmental implications.
Arsenic in food
More than a century ago, it was arsenic that helped pave the way for modern reforms to clean up the food supply. In a case in Bradford, England, in 1858, which later spurred the Pharmacy Act of 1868, a sweetshop worker misidentified and then accidentally mixed some 12 pounds of arsenic trioxide into delicacies. Even though several of the experienced workers thought the sweets looked odd, they were still sold, prompting one vendor to demand a discount. Subsequently, twenty people were ultimately killed and at least two hundred others were sickened.47 This haphazard poisoning opened the door to regulations that took on food adulteration as a major issue.
Though subsequent regulation has banned the use of many arsenic-based pesticides and curbed some of the chemical’s industrial use, arsenic accumulation in the soil has thoroughly contaminated many areas throughout the world, thus severely affecting the food supply. Even low levels have shown carcinogenic effects through chronic exposure, raising serious concerns about staple food crops.
This problem is compounded by the volume of food exports coming from China and other countries where environmental standards are often lax.
By far the biggest source of total arsenic in foods comes from seafood, including fish, crustaceans, and seaweed. The CDC reports that the “biological half-life of [organic] ingested fish arsenic in humans is estimated to be less than 20 hours, with total urinary clearance in approximately 48 hours.”48 Most researchers have dismissed the role of organic sources of arsenic in causing any harm, but inorganic forms are widely recognized as being harmful to human biology. This difference is why a key question we’re examining in our forensic laboratory concerns the ratio of organic versus inorganic arsenic in ocean-derived products. Many seaweeds sold for human consumption, for example, contain very high levels of arsenic. If most of that arsenic is organic arsenic, however, it likely poses no real long-term health risk to those who consume it.
CHINA’S TOXIC POLLUTION CATASTROPHE: IT’S “IMPOSSIBLE TO GROW TRULY ORGANIC FOOD” IN CHINA
China, the world’s largest exporter, is also officially the world’s largest carbon pollution emitter. While pollution is discussed by government organizations and on the news as an abstract but important environmental issue in America, the poor condition of the environment in China is so severe that toxic smog has from time to time closed down everything from roads and bridges to public schools.
In December 2013, emergency health warnings were prompted when record levels of severe air pollution descended over Shanghai, reducing visibility within the city to a mere 60 feet. Hazardous particulate matter in the air reached levels so high, it was well above even the highest warning level of the United States, prompting officials to cancel public school classes for seven consecutive days and ground hundreds of flights.1 That same month, a deputy minister of China’s Ministry of Land and Resources declared that 3.3 million hectares of Chinese farmland was too polluted to grow crops.2
Sadly, daily life-altering air-pollution levels are a common occurrence in China. The media has actually dubbed these events “Airpocalypse.”3 Pollution has even caused the blooding of rivers in China. Residents in northern China’s Henan province panicked in December 2011 when they awoke to find the Jian River running blood red. The horrifying sight was later attributed to an illegal workshop that had been dumping red dye into the city’s storm water drains. When China’s Yangtze River, the world’s third longest river, dubbed the “golden waterway,” turned a murky red in 2012, the dumping of artificial coloring was thought to be the cause.4
In early 2013, Beijing’s Environmental Protection Chief Bao Zhenming was offered more than £20,000 to take a 20-minute swim in a local river completely polluted with
