Your Sewer on Drugs

Sewage is more than just filth. It’s evidence of our worst habits, everything from caffeine to cocaine, all ingested and flushed down the toilet. Now scientists are using wastewater to drug-test entire cities, and the results are sobering

By Eric Hagerman Posted 02.21.2008 at 3:51 pm 11 Comments

What Goes in Must Come Out: It’s easy to flush and forget, but chemical traces of everything we ingest end up in community wastewater. Field drug-tests sewage near Portland, Oregon. James A. Folts

Beyond shedding light on where the state’s pervasive methamphetamine epidemic is worst, Field is tackling the logistical issues necessary to implement wastewater testing on a large scale. It will require every ounce of the compact 45-year-old’s considerable energy to pull it off. Her immediate objective, when I visited last November, several weeks before she sent out sampling kits to the wastewater plants, was figuring out how to manage the multitude of deliveries. Piled high on her filing cabinet were boxes of Ziploc bags, plastic bottles, paraffin and absorbent pads that she acquired from the university’s environmental-health department. She hopes the wastewater technicians will follow her instructions to double-bag the samples. “Leaky boxes make the U.S. Postal Service very nervous,” Field says. A spilled sample would attract unwanted—and, she argues, unnecessary—attention. “There’s something nasty in the box,” she acknowledges, “but not so nasty that it needs a warning sticker.”

Raw sewage, Field explains, isn’t considered a biohazard, because it’s too dilute. Nevertheless, it has a life of its own, and it begins changing rapidly at warm temperatures. She can account for drug metabolites biodegrading in the sewer line, but to keep the stagnant samples free of microbes, Field is sending out collection bottles with a few drops of acid, which should protect the samples until she can get them in the freezer.

Once the collection work is done, she’ll test each sample for 17 substances, including methamphetamine, Ecstasy, cocaine and its metabolite benzoylecgonine, as well as the controlled yet often abused drugs oxycodone, methadone, morphine and hydrocodone. In addition, she will look for cotinine, a metabolic product of nicotine, and caffeine, which will help her refine her per-capita estimates by comparing her findings against existing information about the prevalence of these legal products.

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11 Comments

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daveywavey

02/29/08 at 6:11 pm

daveyWavey

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jabailo

03/23/08 at 3:56 pm

I just finished reading "The Ghost Map", a true epidemiology detective story to figure out what was causing cholera outbreaks in London during the mid-1800s. Turns out, it was a common well into which sewage had leaked.

We certainly live in a "global village" with stranger and more persistent disease.

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themarla

03/29/08 at 3:08 am

Oh, please come to Fresno, CA. I can almost guarantee that this entire city is being "whacked out" on chemicals, which leaves them oblivious to what is taking place right under their noses.
Think I'm kidding? I wish I was.

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dontbother

04/18/08 at 1:45 am

This might be an interesting article, but I will never know. Instead of simply publishing the story and taking the advertising revenue, Popular Science has chosen to (as many other sites do) spread the article over several pages to artificially over-inflate their page views and advertisement impressions.

If you made it through this article, you are a stupid victim of an unimaginative advertising scheme.

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Hitari0

05/15/08 at 10:13 pm

Could they simplify it to one page, perhaps?

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kardelen133 (not verified)

05/26/08 at 11:24 am

Hi All
I am a huge supporter of small wind, but I cannot think of many applicable situations for this design. This turbine seems to produce a pretty small amount of power for it's size and logistical concerns. A balloon holding up the other end of a string of turbines?? Good luck passing that through planning and zoning. I also believe that maintenence would be much more frequent with multiple turbines than some simpler designs. It's a cool idea, but before this guy spends much more time and money, he should pick up his guitar again.
saç ekimi saç ekimievden eve nakliyat evden eve nakliyat
thanks.

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worldcommander

05/30/08 at 3:28 pm

dontbother said "if you made it through this article, you are a stupid victim of an unimaginative advertising scheme."

Wow, ease up salty! This is no different than the ads on the pages of almost every published magazine, the commercials between segments of the news, or the billboards on the way to some far off destination. Stupid is being offended or surprised they're there. Stupid is also the advertiser that thinks anyone is paying attention to the ads in the first place. Stupid is hardly anybody that made it to page seven of the article and didn't feel victimized by Popular Science.

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ilahilere

07/23/08 at 4:49 pm

ilahiler
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kraloyun

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ilahilere

07/23/08 at 4:53 pm

This turbine seems to produce a pretty small amount of power for it's size and logistical concerns. A balloon holding up the other end of a string of turbines??gazete okurüya gsmodelleri1 out of 2 people found this comment helpful

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