I don’t use these and don’t know anybody that’s does.
I’m posting the link in case anybody on og does.
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awesome post, thank you
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Thats basically every bag of cheap “compost” at every box store in the US. They call it biosolids.
They are literally selling people their own shit back.
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As a grower that started blending my own organic mix up, then store it in totes until I need it. You can smell the biosolids as well. I believe it is what gives off a petroleum type of smell. I could not get my preferred brand of compost, and bought a localish brand. Once I spread it out on the tarp in the basement, and each layer has a distinct smell to it. Once I dumped the unknown compost out the reek of petroleum was very strong. When I read the back of the bag, yeah it reads ALMOST like anything on the Dr.Earth type of websites. I knew after one use, I’ll never buy that shit again.
So yeah there maybe something to this article. I’ll see if I can gather up the brand names of the local shit I’ll never use again as I hated that smell.
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This is the reason I prefer organic gardening loaded with Worm poop lol 
Thanks for posting and looking out for the OG’ERS.
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My bag was from The Frey Group from Lancaster PA.
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Milorganite works very well on lawns though lol.
From the people of Milwaukee…to you.
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I learned about it in ecology in small town wisconsin in highschool in like '98ish.
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Over forty years ago we could get sewer sludge / Bio Solids for free . They would pump the sewer sludge from the waste water treatment plant out into holding ponds to dewater . The dry treated sludge was bagged and sold as Bio-solids . They use a lot of chemicals to treat sewage I don’t want it in my grow .
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I think that term biosolids is used loosely here. A definition would be useful in a discussion of such things.
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It’s all the solids extracted from the liquid slurry after treatment and filtration of sewage.
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Selling your shit isn’t the main issue. It is all the chemicals people dump into the system. People used people poop and had no issues. They just washed produce.
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Not quite shit, or “night soil”…it’s completely enzymatically and bacterially digested. Like a super fast complete composting. People used to get sick as fuck from night soil, very hard to wash certain things to an acceptable degree. A tomato, no problem…rice you cook, something like lettuce or cilantro would be very bad. Which is why cilantro often makes people sick these days from workers defecating in the fields.
That being said…IDK how dangerous the contaminants actually are at those levels, how much of that actually ends up in the plant tissue after a growing season and processing.
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I wash mine.
PFAS, PFOA, and PFOS is a real concern and has links to asthma and immune disorders. It’s also know as ‘forever’ chemicals due to their long half lives (4.1, 8.1, and 17 years). A major contributor include the firefighting foams but it also utilized in many products including the production of Teflon.
poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) and epidemiologic evidence for impacts on cancer, immune function, metabolic outcomes, and neurodevelopment
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There’s a very good reason(s) people don’t fertilize with human shit, especially for vegetables and fruits for direct consumption. It really doesn’t matter if you wash it or not, no way you’re getting every nook and cranny of a head of lettuce. It makes people sick from the fecal bacteria.
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sadly a lot of municipal (sewage) treatment plants take PFAS-containing water from industrial sources in exchange for cash and run it through the sewer plant, which dumps PFAS into rivers which are often drinking water supplies.
The problem Is PFAS and PFOA, they should be banned off the face of the earth. IMO there are hundreds if not thousands of toxic chemicals that need to be banned right away. We are living in an epidemic of cancer, autism, and many other chronic diseases that are far worse than COVID. The biggest lie of all is the war on medicinal plants over the last 100 years as we green-light thousands of toxic synthetic chemicals.
These toxic biosolid fertilizers are reminiscent of fluoride being added to drinking water supplies in the USA - a process which began as a way to monetize the fluoride waste left over from aluminum smelting. Today all the fluoride that the government of Massachusetts dumps into drinking water is actually waste product from alumimum smelters in China.
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Fluoride prevents cavities and the resulting tooth decay which used to be a much more significant problem that people have forgotten all about. It isn’t some scheme to sell incredibly cheap fluoride that every municipality in America is somehow “in on”. By that logic, iodized salt is just Big Iodine at it again lol.
Some medicinal plants have value…like weed and poppies. Most are just folk remedies that do nothing, or in some cases, make things worse.
Something isn’t automatically better or worse because it’s synthetic. Plenty of perfectly natural shit will kill you dead. Most of our diseases are simply lifestyle issues and the fact that we are living much longer than we did a few generations ago. 100 years ago, someone just “took ill and died”…today we could say cancer killed them.
Our advancements are overwhelmingly positive.
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Yea… but we are flooding the environment with chemicals that we know are bioactive. Even if they are individually safe at low levels, there are now thousands of individual pollutants that are impossible for modern humans to avoid interacting within our bodies with unknown effects. I wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to long lasting endocrine distrupting chemicals accumulating in the environment for which we have limited or no long term data.
I am just a typo and gaff machine today. I’m putting down the keyboard now.
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My mom used biosolids(New York city sludge) in her garden when I was growing up, she grew some kickass plants, not weed but flowers, fruits and veggies. I think long term we’re going to need to shift towards recycling biowaste for most fertilizer. It’s more sustainable than mining for phosphorous, and can be environmentally friendly if done right.
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