Categories: News

Wastewater disasters in Florida lead environmental advocates to urge us to reconsider how we grow food

Hundreds of residents of Manatee County, Florida, were advised to evacuate on Easter weekend to avoid wastewater leaking from an abandoned phosphate plant nearby. Authorities have since drained over 170 million gallons of wastewater from the Piney Point containment area to reduce pressure on its walls, The Verge reports. The former facility traces back to the area’s history of mining for phosphate rock—a common substance used in agricultural fertilizer. What remains today are three phosphogypsum “stacks”—mounds of radiative industrial waste with pools of wastewater at their center. The long-term effects of these stacks have led some environmentalists to advocate that we rethink how we grow our food. Although phosphate is used to help grow crops, its extraction process leaves behind five tons of waste for each one ton of product; similar stacks have contaminated drinking water and natural waterways in the past.

Related Post
The Counter and The Counter
Share
Published by
The Counter and The Counter

Recent Posts

Grist acquires The Counter and launches food and agriculture vertical

Grist, an award-winning, nonprofit media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices,…

6 months ago

Is California giving its methane digesters too much credit?

Every year, California dairy farms emit hundreds of thousands of tons of the potent greenhouse…

2 years ago

Your car is killing coho salmon

Highway 7 runs north-south through western Washington, carving its way through a landscape sparsely dotted…

2 years ago

The pandemic has transformed America’s dining landscape into an oligopoly dominated by chains 

One of the greatest pleasures I had as a child growing up in the Chicago…

2 years ago

California is moving toward food assistance for all populations—including undocumented immigrants

Undocumented immigrants experience food insecurity at much higher rates than other populations, yet they are…

2 years ago

Babka, borscht … and pumpkin spice? Two writers talk about Jewish identity through contemporary cookbooks.

Writer Charlotte Druckman and editor Rebecca Flint Marx are both Jewish journalists living in New…

3 years ago