[USCC] Aliminum and Iron

[Heide Hermary]

Yes, the responsiblity of the composting industry to produce an 
environmentally healthy product  has been an underlying thread in the 
recent discussions. There is a lot of finger pointing, hand washing and  
shoulder shrugging, but in the end it comes down to integrity.  You 
guys  adopted a terminology (composting) that has a lot of positive 
health connotations, I am sure that was done intentionally. Using that 
same term for something derived from toxic ingredients, and then even 
intentionally adding further potentially toxic ingredients doesn't seem 
very enlightened.

With rights and privileges come responsibilities.  Maybe they are not 
spelled out in the constitution,  and maybe the consequence of our 
actions aren't that easy to see, especially the large scale social and 
environmental consequences. One would have hoped that our scientists and 
politicians would take it as their goal to protect the greater good, but 
it appears that's not the case. Instead they pushed that off on the 
various industries - self-regulation or self-enforcement of regulations, 
whatever it's called. Then it's up to the industry to act with great 
circumspection.

I don't know if it's reasonable to assume that "industry" - in effect a 
group of ordinary people that don't necessary have the required 
diversified training - is able to evaluate the large scale consequences 
of all their actions. That's one benefit forums like this - to broaden 
everybody's knowledge base.

Single-cause / single-effect solutions belong into the last century, 
we're seeing the consequences of that kind of narrow thinking on a 
global scale. We need to do a lot better than that in this century - in 
this decade even. We all are going to have to learn to integrate 
information from various disciplines and arrive at integrated 
"multipurpose" solutions.

Cheers, Heide

Edo McGowan wrote:

>U.S. COMPOSTING COUNCIL 15th ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND TRADESHOW
>Wyndham Orlando Resort | Orlando, FL | January 21-24, 2007
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>Heide---lots of stuff on this---go to Google Scholar and Pubmed. Some good Canadian studies (Canada pays the medical bills so, as a government it has an interest, thus an enormous data base) on early dementia and Al as well as impacts on health from Fe. You have raised a valid question that I have been arguing with Rufus for some time, unfortunately, his field is not medicine so we never seem to really communicate. The driving down of pH by land applied sewage sludge may release aluminum which may thus get into drinking water. We had this problem in Africa with certain fertilizers.
>
>Cheers--------------Edo McGowan
>edomcgowan at earthlink.net
>
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