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Comment by dluan | Hacker News Reader

I live on the water in West Seattle close to a park, and by the shore we found some seaweed that we wanted to harvest and maybe, potentially eat.

I got curious about where in the sound is safe to eat things from. Pretty much the entire sound is polluted and a hazard.

https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/eh/maps/biotoxin/biotoxin.html

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My Japanese anthropology professor once told us a story about when he and his wife went to Japan for a research trip with his wife sometime in the 70s or 80s.

In Japan, when you move into a new apartment, it's customary to give a gift to your neighbors. Being a new professor, he and his wallet welcomed any chance to save a little money. When he and his wife were walking along a beach in the Tokyo Bay area, they noticed a ton of shellfish.

Thinking this would be a great gift and a budget dinner, they got some buckets, went back, and started pulling up shellfish for dinner and for their neighbors as a present.

The Tokyo Bay was much more polluted in that era (not that I know whether it would be safe to do this now), so when everyone ate those shellfish, apparently everyone got terribly sick.

So yeah, I'd be super leery of edible things in those kinds of areas in general. :(

Pollution in Japan caused a number of issues in the 60s, things were probably starting to get better in the 70s when their environmental agency was formed, but no doubt issues remained.

This maybe of interest as a reference:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Big_Pollution_Diseases_...

I'd be surprised if even back in the 70's that Tokyo bay was so polluted that pollution-contaminated shellfish could make people sick immediately. Seems more likely that it was some kind of bacterial, algae or biotoxin poisoning (which can happen even in unpolluted waters)

With longer term exposure, sure I could see health effects, but not from a single meal. Even under stringent environmental regulation, I'd avoid seafood caught in any large city's bay, since decades old contamination can still cause problems today.

Now, it is certainly safe to eat at least clam (asari) taken from Tokyo bay. Perhaps other filter feeders too.

They just dump human waste into the water. I can't even watch people eat shellfish.

"One hundred and six wastewater treatment plants, discharging as much as 97,000 pounds of chemicals each year, are located around Puget Sound."

https://news.vice.com/article/seattle-area-salmon-are-loaded...

They don't dump it in the water. They dump it in the forests.

In WA specifically, "sewage" is processed for as many contaminants as possible. Then, they put it in trucks and drive into the Cascades and spray it in the forests. They call it bioremediation - but it seeps into the groundwater, which then goes to streams. Where do all the streams end up? Puget sound.

If you wander up past the locked gates of the timber roads near Snoqualmie or Snohomish, you'll find flame retardants, opioids, caffeine, fluorocarbons, and whatever other toxins that ultimately never gets absorbed by the forests.

By the way, this practice of using biosolids in agriculture or forests is very politically charged because there's a lot of money tied up with this industry and the people who wound up writing the bulk of the EPA regulation around this industry. Every time you hear of an E. coli outbreak in some vegetable, it's because of this.

This is something I wish more people knew about, or at least stop to consider where their waste ends up.

Hmm. When you hear about E. coli outbreaks in vegetables, it's traced back to fecal contamination on the worker's or processing equipment's working surfaces.

I looked to find any sources with high quality scientific evidence showing accumulation of toxic waste in timber roads in WA. I am an open minded scientist, if you post high quality work I'll read it and change my mind.

"There are three general methods for applying biosolids to forests: 1) spray irrigation with either a set system or a traveling gun, 2) spray application by an application vehicle with a spray cannon, and 3) application by a throw-spreader or manure-type spreader. In the Pacific Northwest, the most common methods for forest applications are the throw-spreader or a vehicle-mounted cannon. Table 7.7 lists these application methods, their range, relative costs, advantages and disadvantages, and their suitability for biosolids of different solids contents."

https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/publications/documents/9380.pdf

It was the top item of the first google search for "biosolids washington forest".

Here's pictures if you're interested.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/environment/natural-resour...

Here's another article from 20 years ago about the practice: http://thewatchers.us/wef/PacNW.pdf

I was looking for articles that supported the health and sanitary claims of the up-poster. What you included shows the idea is not without merit.

This is the case pretty much anywhere near a coastline.

I refuse to eat locally caught seafood.

it’s somebodies “local coastline” elsewhere too so that might not help you

Not all fishing is coastal.

American-caught seafood has the strictest regulations in the world; and is the safest.

I very much doubt it. For example, American restaurants happily serve this crap, passing it off as "tuna": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escolar

Human calls a species 'crap' for not being good to kill and eat large quantities of... That attitude seems to me part of the problem.

I don't know if this is true or not but what do you base this opinion on?

:-/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthorexia_nervosa

:-/

The government recommends not to eat what is caught here.

Thanks for the high quality post, though.

To be fair, the Sound has hundreds of trillions of pounds of water. 97,000 pounds of anything isn't going to make a big difference. But it would be awesome if we could stop polluting it.

97,000 pounds of dioxin would kill lots of people. Some compounds are unbelievably toxic.

These are all compounds that have already gone through people's system. It's bad, but not the end of the world.

To be fair, part of this is natural and seasonal. Most of natural marine biotoxins are seasonal and the department of health tests regularly. I don't know to what extent the biotoxins are affected by pollution (e.g., fertilizer runoff), but they are a natural occurrence.

Separately, they also have permanently closed the tidelands near Seattle due to pollution. Crabbing is still open each summer, but bivalves are closed.

I was just out on Whidbey Island a couple of weeks ago where I found and ate raw oysters on the beach, then dug clams and brought them home for dinner. The pollution does concern me, but I do trust the government testing. Its also worth noting that the oysters & other bivalves you eat in restaurants come from the same waters.

Fertilizer runoff? Sure. At scale we would expect that to show up. And it does. The point here is, for anything to show up you need scale. So if something consumed by humans is showing up how many humans are consuming it? Or are you saying they're using opiods to fertilize their lawn?

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