Toxic pet flea and tick treatments are polluting UK freshwaters, says paper | Hacker News Reader

Toxic pet flea and tick treatments are polluting UK freshwaters, says paper

phys.org

16 pointstapper6 comments

I think it is time we treated domestic wastewater with reverse osmosis before release into the environment.

It would solve all kinds of low level contamination with long life contaminants like this.

Reverse osmosis isn't too energy intensive as long as the water is mostly salt-free.

The rejected water from reverse osmosis could then be multi stage flash distilled, and the waste from that incinerated.

The cost is high, but not insane right now, and the theoretical minimum cost (ie. Of necessary raw materials and energy) is low.

Here in New Zealand, we dump raw sewage into waterways every time it rains more than a millimetre or two. It’s actually disgusting what is tolerated.

Even treated sewage typically means 'we bubbled air through it for a few hours, and then called it treated'. Such treatment is, IMO, far short of what we should be doing considering all the nasty things people pour down the drain, legally or otherwise.

no the way to do it is with hollow fiber technology and other zeolite filters all which will need backflushing with detergents/bleach. Then you can run it into a R.O. array but the pressure needed is high so the system needs to overcome that.

Evaporative technologies are the other method to accomplish the same thing and if incorporated into a facility/structure that can use evaporative cooling because the draft of air over the water will need to be powered.

Underground sewer systems can be designed to hold more life, pass more water over more life, just like premise behind slow sand filtration and this will effectively treat the water as it flows. This is a first line treatment IMO. using sewer water to cool industrial facilities where the steam can be sequestered should be utilized too. Facilities that incinerate trash at high temperature with palladium catalysts can use sewer water to produce power.

how about builders find a way to build a impermeable membrane downward around the plot line of a property slowing ground water movement, then use septic systems with water treatment facility apparatuses in the home. I could burn my own trash, biodigest my own sewage and spectrogrpahicaly test it too for cheap.

Why on earth are people not doing this?!

Bad for the environment and also bad for us- its likely that low dose, ecosystem wide exposure will breed for resistance

It not only can and will, it does. The local pet store cycles through different formulations to keep the effectiveness up. The vet gets access to formulations earlier in the cycle so they always have access to what's currently the most effective.

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