Phosphate mines in Florida

Is this the waste from all those nute bottles in the hydro store?

Tampa Bay Times: Piney Point in Manatee shows why the EPA needs to crack down on ‘gyp stacks’ | Column.

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Probably more the millions of acres dedicated to agriculture in the US. Hydro store nutrients are the tiniest drop in the bucket as far as this sorta thing goes.

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Probably just a Miracle-Gro plant.

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I spent a hour yesterday reading up on the gypsum stacks, astonishing that they produce 5 tons of this stuff for every ton of ore processed. :exploding_head:

Crazy shit.
G

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“Taxpayers are paying almost a million dollars a month to clean up the pollution after the fertilizer company went bankrupt.”

The million dollars a month is for one stack.

I remember hearing guys warning me not to hit phosphate mine shutdowns when I was a millwright.

Union millwrights wade into toxic hell holes on a regular basis, so phosphate mines must be especially nasty…

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That factoid blew my mind also :flushed:

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Mining is awful for the environment. But, shit we need to function comes from inside the Earth. Yes it can be done cleaner but then everything costs more, and people complain about that too. The world food supply runs on phosphorous and it isn’t as easy to get as Potassium and Nitrogen.

Even now, the computer you’re using has gold and cobalt and lithium and everything else taken from open strip mines.

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And radioactive also, that’s why they’re so worried, plus the Algae Bloom that will surely follow if the Retaining Ponds collapse, a frigging mess for sure. SS/BW…mister :honeybee: :100: :pray: :heart_eyes: NOTE: When you relax the rules, Corporations go CRAZY!!!

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Yup. and the corporations don’t like to clean up after themselves either. they never, ever do.
They will stick the mess with the taxpayers, and let us worry about it later.
And the politicians they paid off to let it happen will just spin the stories, waiting for a bigger news story, so they can bury this one in the news cycle somewhere.

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:thinking: :coffee: :smoking:

This is one of those rare moments where I remember to “not say anything if I don’t have anything nice to say.” :rofl:

:evergreen_tree: :poop:(kinda)

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Saw it on the news the last few days. I live in that county but it ain’t near us. They make it seem like it’s in Tampa, not close at all. Hillsborough county is huge.

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The second sentence of the article says,”In Manatee County.”

Also, Tampa does have those huge phosphate mines that you can see from Bayshore across Hillsborough Bay. I’m sure those can’t be good.

The way I read it to make 1 ton of fertilizer they end up with 5 tons of gypsum . I wonder how many tons of ore that takes ?