Slighly off topic, but it would be interesting to see what other activities have increased or decreased as well. For example, what's happened with legal and illegal pharmaceuticals? What about foods (e.g., sugar)?
What else can our waste tell us?
What else can our waste tell us?
There's been talk amongst Police Departments in whether investing in wide scale wastewater monitoring could help locate drug dealers/labs. Personally, I think this is a huge invasion of privacy, but since wastewater is a "public good" police currently can do whatever they want with it (source: I work in a wastewater testing facility).
As easy as one bad actor flushing the wrong/right stuff a few times (stuff that is known to be monitored, say a specific infectious agent) in a few public toilets across a city, and waiting for the reports to trickle in. More of a fanning the flames rather than starting a panic, since the threat would have been well-known enough to have been monitored in the first place.
So maybe keep those waste reports on a need-to-know basis, rather than broadcasting a public “daily waste report”.