12 ms·

Leaky sewers are likely responsible for large amounts of medications in streams

155 points by hhs 5y ago

post_break 5y ago
Shouldn't we be placing the blame on people flushing meds down the toilet? Or are they leeching from peoples urine and waste?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sandworm101 5y ago
  It is in the urine. Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's Pandora's box. A parallel question is whether the body of a deceased patient should be treated as hazardous. We do tend to bury or cremate them without a thought towards whether these drugs will survive and impact the local environment.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Get sick. Get put on a crap ton of medications. You found out that most have all sorts of crazy effects on the body. Ones not listed as side effects, or very rare, or even common but doctor has never heard of. Or your fun ones where 2 conflict in crazy ways. Poor fish downstream don’t stand a chance.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    >> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's pandora's box. So here's the bit that I don't get. When my friend had to get her cat a medical scan, the cat had to have radiactive contrast ingested/injected. She was then told to carefully, without touching it, collect all poop made by the cat in the next 7 days, put it in this special container, then bring it back to the vet for safe disposal. However, when humans have the same procedure done....no one cares? You drink radioactive contrast, then pee and poop as normal, it all goes down our drains. How does that make any sense?
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      It’s the same reason radiology technicians leave the room before imaging a patient. You want to reduce exposure to unnecessary radiation.
    - mh- 5y ago
      Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Or at least their caregivers assume they don't.
      - MichaelGroves 5y ago
        > Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Well.. not usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan
        LinuxBender 5y ago
        Also composting toilets.
      - sandworm101 5y ago
        Correct. We poop into a pipe that takes it to a wastewater treatment facility where government employees handle it.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Do wastewater plants use Geiger counters/data loggers on waste streams?
        nick__m 5y ago
        I don't think that there is a need for monitoring since radiotracer usually have a short halflife, they usually use fluoride-18 (half life 110min) to replace a -OH or a well placed -H in a molecule that bind to the site of interest (ex: glucose -> fluorodeoxyglucose, levodopa -> fluorodopa).
  - triceratops 5y ago
    > The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. I thought that was common for patients on chemotherapy drugs? I remember seeing some sign in a hospital room's bathroom about it, but the details escape me.
    - freeone3000 5y ago
      Yes, but, this is sort of "priced in" so although your waste is measurably radioactive it enters the same stream.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. Not even drugs necessarily. The theory is out there that a hidden but significant influence on society is large-scale male consumption of estrogen via contamination from women's urine.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      It's not a theory, it's a debunked hypothesis. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...
      - andai 5y ago
        > Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation's drinking water supplies > Some research cited in the report suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of estrogens in the environment. Other research estimates that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise 15 percent of the estrogens in the world's water supply.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        There are two rather distinct questions: 1. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from birth control pills? 2. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from women's urine? (There are other similar questions, of course.) These two questions are related in that #1 is mostly a subset of #2. But concluding that #1 is an insignificant source of estrogen doesn't tell you much about #2. Women produce estrogen on their own.
      - tristor 5y ago
        It appears that article say the source being urine waste of women taking birth control pills is debunked, it says nothing about the long-term health impacts of drinking water being contaminated with estrogen or what the sources of the other 99% of estrogens found in drinking water are. So while the causal link may be false, the underlying claim is still a concern. It's actually a massive problem in the West, especially the US, that the average person is exposed to tons of endocrine disruptors in the food and water supply, everything from estrogens in the water to plasticizers in your food wrappings on your take out or in the store.
  - stainforth 5y ago
    What does a libertarian have to say about market players preventing normal functioning of the market by restricting knowledge like actively resisting studies on products?
    - fuzzer37 5y ago
      Don't like it? Move where there isn't radioactive water. /s
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Even if that was true, why should we shift the blame away from an entity with plausible ability to solve it, and towards the great mass of people who are impossible to hold accountable?
  - post_break 5y ago
    So you're saying if it were coming from people throwing meds down the toilet, we should blame the drug makers? Is that what you're saying or am I misunderstanding?
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > we should blame the drug makers? No, of course not. What I am saying is that our best shot at getting pharmaceuticals out of fresh water is better sewer & water treatment. We can control that. It is implausible to control people who are, within the privacy of their bathroom, chucking random things down the toilet. The only thing that would stop that behavior is immediate consequences to them personally. Edit: And this assumes it is all people chucking drugs down the toilet. If it's coming through their urine, then we're definitely back to water treatment being the only plausible answer.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    "entity with plausible ability to solve it" I didn't see a mention of an overall solution in the article. I see they mention that leaky pipes could be the cause for that stream. Is there evidence to suggest that the sewage treatment facility actually removes these chemicals?
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      A quick google search suggests that a typical basic sewage treatment plant doesn't do a great job of removing pharmaceuticals. But we already do have some plants which are pretty good at it. So this isn't even really an engineering problem at this point, it's a political(funding) problem.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  "You killed him." "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." - Collateral (2004 film)
- moate 5y ago
  Part of the idea of wastewater treatment plants is to address things like chemicals in wastewater. If the pipes on the way leak the tainted water, it can't be treated. Of course there are also "forever chemicals" that we can't neutralize, but we have no hope of dealing with chemically tainted water that never gets to the locations capable of addressing it.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    So we should all pee in bottles and ship them to waste water plant. Perhaps we could build some sort of hyper loop to send them in bulk to speed up the process. Diagram of the idea, reversed https://xkcd.com/1599/ https://xkcd.com/1599/
    - jdavis703 5y ago
      No, we should pay the taxes or user fees needed to maintain our infrastructure in a state of good repair.
      - h_anna_h 5y ago
        Sadly it's not the taxpayer that decides where the money goes. Getting new military airplanes, putting them in their own pockets, and bribing the media with it seems to be preferable for politicians.
        jdavis703 5y ago
        The federal government doesn’t maintain sewer lines anywhere in the US except maybe on military bases and the like. At least in California we have special tax districts that are managed by a voter-elected board. The voters literally get to decide on infrastructure spending, at least in California.
      - treeman79 5y ago
        Okay perhaps this joke was to subtle for the crowd here.
- flatline 5y ago
  A bigger question in my mind is whether this is a real problem, or ever could be with higher concentrations likely to occur in this way. Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer than having any, but what amount of what specific chemicals is likely to have a downstream effect? This poses a much broader question about low dosage toxicity for any number of chemicals in fresh water, ranging from agricultural run-off to industrial waste and spillage. Hard to study.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >> Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer Except for fluoride and chlorine. Small amounts of those chemicals in water are a net health benefit. Society has to be careful about adding anything, but 100% pure water isn't the healthiest choice no matter what the commercials say. Also iodine in salt.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      It's possible water without chlorine is beneficial too. Doesn't Paris use ozone and/or UVC instead? I also wonder about fluoride's benefits if we use toothpaste and mouthwash that has it. For example, I know people on well water or city water without it that don't have teeth issues.
      - sandworm101 5y ago
        Paris still uses chlorine. It may also use UV but nothing kills bacteria as effectively and constantly as bleach. In a large population with lots of ancient pipes not using chlorine would be very dangerous.
        giantg2 5y ago
        I wonder where I heard that, or if it's a different city. Also, they are generally using chloramine, not sodium hypochlorite.
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Do you want to go and stage some awareness campaign to tell people not to flush their meds and hope they don't, or would you rather we be proactive about the reality we're in and do something about it now?
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I don't know anyone who flushes their meds. Is this really a big issue? I thought it's mostly waste based sources.
  - post_break 5y ago
    I have seen many news reports of free medication drops offs and asking people not to flush them. Does that answer your condescending question?
darig 5y ago
Doesn't everything in the sewer eventually end up back in some body of water that feeds the streams anyways? It's all pipes, Jerry.
shadowgovt 5y ago
If that's the case, we should be seeing correlation: higher amounts of medication in the waterways of older US cities, where sewer and stormwater systems were built to an earlier idea of best-practices. This should be relatively straightforward to investigate.
- moate 5y ago
  Sure, assuming anyone has a desire to pump money into a large comparative study like this. It's an extremely reasonable hypothesis but you also have other factors to deal with (size of city resulting in more wear and tear on infrastructure, other environmental factors that could cause deterioration of pipes, water hard/softness, quality of wastewater processing facilities). Age would likely be a major factor but not the only factor.
aurizon 5y ago
Most is kidney passthrough into pee. Second is combined sanitary AND rain runoff sewers - which bypass treatment when there is high rain. Third is treatment plant pass through - many drugs are not eliminated in sewage plants (it varies a lot with the drug)
- MichaelGroves 5y ago
  > Second is combined sanitary AND rain runoff sewers - which bypass treatment when there is high rain. This is a very difficult problem. If the sanitary sewers aren't in great condition, rising ground water levels can leak into the sanitary sewers. Sewers that were initially well made might be damaged over time by people digging, the ground shifting, or tree roots pushing things around. One way or the other, when high ground waters get into a sanitary sewer, you now have a situation where those sewers are overflowing. And what can be done with that overflow? Let it pool up in the streets? Sending it down the storm drains is about the best you can do at that point.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Combined sewers that are in perfect maintenance include provisions to overflow by design.
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
      I'm not talking about combined sewers. Systems in which the sanitary sewer and the storm sewer are completely separate can become combined sewers when the sanitary sewer is inundated with more infiltration/inflow than it can handle. When this happens, the sanitary sewer overflows into the street or people's homes. That sewage overflowing into the street will then make its way into the storm sewer. There is no easy solution to this. Building the sanitary sewers bigger is the obvious solution, except that costs more money and a lot of places don't have much money to spare (corruption, poverty, etc.) Furthermore, just how over-designed does a sanitary sewer have to be? Climate change makes this difficult to predict decades in advance. BTW [intentionally] combined sewers are problematic even when they're not overflowing. Diluting sewage with a bunch of water increases the cost and decreases the efficacy of treatment.
saalweachter 5y ago
So if I'm reading the article correctly: 1. It doesn't say anything about whether the medications would have been removed if they went through a wastewater treatment facility. 2. It's basically saying we accidentally performed a tracking experiment by adding compounds that don't occur (in those levels) naturally to wastewater, and then seeing where we could find those chemicals unexpectedly -- it's like dumping fluorescent dye down your drains to see if you can find it spotting in the yard, but with pharmaceuticals.
- nerpderp82 5y ago
  Caffeine is often used as that free "marker chemical" for tracing where sewage ends up. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Determination-of-caffeine-as-a-tracer-of-sewage-in-Chen-Pavelic/b866e60242c84938190a2a859e0e143f388dd3b8 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Determination-of-caffe...
  - arsome 5y ago
    Acesulfame potassium (an artificial sweetener commonly known as Ace-K) which passes through in urine has also been used to determine the concentration of urine in pool water.
    - Scoundreller 5y ago
      Wouldn’t that dépend a lot on the consumption of the pool’s entrants?
      - Johnny555 5y ago
        For a private pool with a few users, sure, one person could skew the results with a diet coke big-gulp, but for a busy public pool with thousands of users, then I'd think that some assumptions about average intake would give reasonable results.
        after_care 5y ago
zabzonk 5y ago
> Shouldn't we be placing the blame on people flushing meds down the toilet? Obviously, people shouldn't do that. But some antibiotics go through the body almost unchanged. When penicillin was first developed they used to recycle the antibiotic from the patient's urine over and over because they had so little of it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  And if you didn’t pee it out, it wouldn’t get to the right spot to treat a urinary tract or kidney infection.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    If you didn't pee it out it would remain in your system longer, limiting treatment options if it is in any way toxic. Or, if you don't pee it out it might over time break down into more toxic substances.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > if it is in any way toxic That's its whole purpose. Just look at the name "antibiotic"...
      - dgoldstein0 5y ago
        Toxic to bacteria is different than toxic to humans cells
    - Scoundreller 5y ago
      Or break down into less toxic substances, or things that are more likely to get excreted.
    - moralestapia 5y ago
      There's only one way out*, so you always pee it out somehow. * Ignoring minute traces of minerals that are lost through transpiration
erwolf 5y ago
I've looked at countless sewer inspection videos--those pipes can be up to 80 years old and are often in pretty bad shape. Sewage leaking into the groundwater is a major problem but is very hard to detect and locate unfortunately. Shameless plug: We're a startup building AI to detect leakages in sewers and tell cities when to fix their underground pipes. If you want to help us solve this problem and make cities more sustainable, let me know at ew@hades.ai :)
- Thorentis 5y ago
  On the surface, this looks like just another "We're using AI to detect X" cash grab. Are you just using image recognition for a novel application or what?
  - tdeck 5y ago
    That's kind of a harsh way to express curiously, but I was also interested. If you go to https://www.hades.ai/ https://www.hades.ai/, you can see that they use image recognition on videos. I can imagine why that might be an improvement over manually watching hours of sewer videos looking for cracks.
dyeje 5y ago
Sometimes I wonder if placing all this important infrastructure under ground was a big mistake. Seems like issues like this and the Flint water crisis would be alot easier to remediate if the pipes were easily accessible.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Not apples-to-apples, but having living in places with above-ground and below-ground power supply, I know which one I've found more reliable. Yes, maintenance gets more expensive, but that maintenance should be far less frequent. And hopefully more predictable (true maintenance vs emergency repair).
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I’m not sure above-ground pipes makes a lot of sense. Now every building has to maintain a pump to get sewage high enough off the ground that vehicles can pass under the pipes. And if those pumps fail (e.g. power outage), all of a sudden everyone is dealing with sewage backflow. Something I’d like to see more of is utility tunnels where all utilities are undergrounded in a single tunnel with with easy access. Yes it’s expensive, but could work out in the long run. Just look at how much utility relocation can drive up the cost for simple projects like BRT.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    Let's not forget that the standard place to put water and sewage pipes is "below the frost line".
  - xwdv 5y ago
    How do pipes work when terrain isn’t leveled but rather very sloped?
    - PicassoCTs 5y ago
      Sewage pumps in the pipes and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebeanlage https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebeanlage (sorry do not know the english word for that) Synthetic fibres in tissues are a huge issues for these pumps..
988747 5y ago
Medications in streams are good right? At least fish will be healthy. /s

155 points by hhs 5y ago

Shouldn't we be placing the blame on people flushing meds down the toilet? Or are they leeching from peoples urine and waste?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 5y ago
It is in the urine. Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's Pandora's box. A parallel question is whether the body of a deceased patient should be treated as hazardous. We do tend to bury or cremate them without a thought towards whether these drugs will survive and impact the local environment.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Get sick. Get put on a crap ton of medications. You found out that most have all sorts of crazy effects on the body. Ones not listed as side effects, or very rare, or even common but doctor has never heard of. Or your fun ones where 2 conflict in crazy ways. Poor fish downstream don’t stand a chance.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >> The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. That's pandora's box. So here's the bit that I don't get. When my friend had to get her cat a medical scan, the cat had to have radiactive contrast ingested/injected. She was then told to carefully, without touching it, collect all poop made by the cat in the next 7 days, put it in this special container, then bring it back to the vet for safe disposal. However, when humans have the same procedure done....no one cares? You drink radioactive contrast, then pee and poop as normal, it all goes down our drains. How does that make any sense?
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    It’s the same reason radiology technicians leave the room before imaging a patient. You want to reduce exposure to unnecessary radiation.
  - mh- 5y ago
    Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Or at least their caregivers assume they don't.
    - MichaelGroves 5y ago
      > Humans don't poop in a box and have someone else handle it? Well.. not usually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedpan
      - LinuxBender 5y ago
        Also composting toilets.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Correct. We poop into a pipe that takes it to a wastewater treatment facility where government employees handle it.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Do wastewater plants use Geiger counters/data loggers on waste streams?
        nick__m 5y ago
        I don't think that there is a need for monitoring since radiotracer usually have a short halflife, they usually use fluoride-18 (half life 110min) to replace a -OH or a well placed -H in a molecule that bind to the site of interest (ex: glucose -> fluorodeoxyglucose, levodopa -> fluorodopa).
- triceratops 5y ago
  > The necessary implication would be that waste from patients on certain drugs should be treated as hazardous, or even radioactive. I thought that was common for patients on chemotherapy drugs? I remember seeing some sign in a hospital room's bathroom about it, but the details escape me.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    Yes, but, this is sort of "priced in" so although your waste is measurably radioactive it enters the same stream.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Drug companies have long resisted any investigation of the impact of their drugs once they have exited the first patient. Not even drugs necessarily. The theory is out there that a hidden but significant influence on society is large-scale male consumption of estrogen via contamination from women's urine.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    It's not a theory, it's a debunked hypothesis. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101208125813.h...
    - andai 5y ago
      > Contrary to popular belief, birth control pills account for less than 1 percent of the estrogens found in the nation's drinking water supplies > Some research cited in the report suggests that animal manure accounts for 90 percent of estrogens in the environment. Other research estimates that if just 1 percent of the estrogens in livestock waste reached waterways, it would comprise 15 percent of the estrogens in the world's water supply.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        There are two rather distinct questions: 1. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from birth control pills? 2. How much estrogen gets into the water supply from women's urine? (There are other similar questions, of course.) These two questions are related in that #1 is mostly a subset of #2. But concluding that #1 is an insignificant source of estrogen doesn't tell you much about #2. Women produce estrogen on their own.
    - tristor 5y ago
      It appears that article say the source being urine waste of women taking birth control pills is debunked, it says nothing about the long-term health impacts of drinking water being contaminated with estrogen or what the sources of the other 99% of estrogens found in drinking water are. So while the causal link may be false, the underlying claim is still a concern. It's actually a massive problem in the West, especially the US, that the average person is exposed to tons of endocrine disruptors in the food and water supply, everything from estrogens in the water to plasticizers in your food wrappings on your take out or in the store.
- stainforth 5y ago
  What does a libertarian have to say about market players preventing normal functioning of the market by restricting knowledge like actively resisting studies on products?
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    Don't like it? Move where there isn't radioactive water. /s
rootusrootus 5y ago
Even if that was true, why should we shift the blame away from an entity with plausible ability to solve it, and towards the great mass of people who are impossible to hold accountable?
- post_break 5y ago
  So you're saying if it were coming from people throwing meds down the toilet, we should blame the drug makers? Is that what you're saying or am I misunderstanding?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > we should blame the drug makers? No, of course not. What I am saying is that our best shot at getting pharmaceuticals out of fresh water is better sewer & water treatment. We can control that. It is implausible to control people who are, within the privacy of their bathroom, chucking random things down the toilet. The only thing that would stop that behavior is immediate consequences to them personally. Edit: And this assumes it is all people chucking drugs down the toilet. If it's coming through their urine, then we're definitely back to water treatment being the only plausible answer.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "entity with plausible ability to solve it" I didn't see a mention of an overall solution in the article. I see they mention that leaky pipes could be the cause for that stream. Is there evidence to suggest that the sewage treatment facility actually removes these chemicals?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    A quick google search suggests that a typical basic sewage treatment plant doesn't do a great job of removing pharmaceuticals. But we already do have some plants which are pretty good at it. So this isn't even really an engineering problem at this point, it's a political(funding) problem.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
"You killed him." "No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him." - Collateral (2004 film)
moate 5y ago
Part of the idea of wastewater treatment plants is to address things like chemicals in wastewater. If the pipes on the way leak the tainted water, it can't be treated. Of course there are also "forever chemicals" that we can't neutralize, but we have no hope of dealing with chemically tainted water that never gets to the locations capable of addressing it.
- treeman79 5y ago
  So we should all pee in bottles and ship them to waste water plant. Perhaps we could build some sort of hyper loop to send them in bulk to speed up the process. Diagram of the idea, reversed https://xkcd.com/1599/ https://xkcd.com/1599/
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    No, we should pay the taxes or user fees needed to maintain our infrastructure in a state of good repair.
    - h_anna_h 5y ago
      Sadly it's not the taxpayer that decides where the money goes. Getting new military airplanes, putting them in their own pockets, and bribing the media with it seems to be preferable for politicians.
      - jdavis703 5y ago
        The federal government doesn’t maintain sewer lines anywhere in the US except maybe on military bases and the like. At least in California we have special tax districts that are managed by a voter-elected board. The voters literally get to decide on infrastructure spending, at least in California.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Okay perhaps this joke was to subtle for the crowd here.
flatline 5y ago
A bigger question in my mind is whether this is a real problem, or ever could be with higher concentrations likely to occur in this way. Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer than having any, but what amount of what specific chemicals is likely to have a downstream effect? This poses a much broader question about low dosage toxicity for any number of chemicals in fresh water, ranging from agricultural run-off to industrial waste and spillage. Hard to study.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> Certainly not having medications in the tap water seems safer Except for fluoride and chlorine. Small amounts of those chemicals in water are a net health benefit. Society has to be careful about adding anything, but 100% pure water isn't the healthiest choice no matter what the commercials say. Also iodine in salt.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    It's possible water without chlorine is beneficial too. Doesn't Paris use ozone and/or UVC instead? I also wonder about fluoride's benefits if we use toothpaste and mouthwash that has it. For example, I know people on well water or city water without it that don't have teeth issues.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      Paris still uses chlorine. It may also use UV but nothing kills bacteria as effectively and constantly as bleach. In a large population with lots of ancient pipes not using chlorine would be very dangerous.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        I wonder where I heard that, or if it's a different city. Also, they are generally using chloramine, not sodium hypochlorite.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Do you want to go and stage some awareness campaign to tell people not to flush their meds and hope they don't, or would you rather we be proactive about the reality we're in and do something about it now?
- giantg2 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who flushes their meds. Is this really a big issue? I thought it's mostly waste based sources.
- post_break 5y ago
  I have seen many news reports of free medication drops offs and asking people not to flush them. Does that answer your condescending question?

darig 5y ago

Doesn't everything in the sewer eventually end up back in some body of water that feeds the streams anyways? It's all pipes, Jerry.

shadowgovt 5y ago

If that's the case, we should be seeing correlation: higher amounts of medication in the waterways of older US cities, where sewer and stormwater systems were built to an earlier idea of best-practices. This should be relatively straightforward to investigate.

moate 5y ago
Sure, assuming anyone has a desire to pump money into a large comparative study like this. It's an extremely reasonable hypothesis but you also have other factors to deal with (size of city resulting in more wear and tear on infrastructure, other environmental factors that could cause deterioration of pipes, water hard/softness, quality of wastewater processing facilities). Age would likely be a major factor but not the only factor.

aurizon 5y ago

Most is kidney passthrough into pee. Second is combined sanitary AND rain runoff sewers - which bypass treatment when there is high rain. Third is treatment plant pass through - many drugs are not eliminated in sewage plants (it varies a lot with the drug)

MichaelGroves 5y ago
> Second is combined sanitary AND rain runoff sewers - which bypass treatment when there is high rain. This is a very difficult problem. If the sanitary sewers aren't in great condition, rising ground water levels can leak into the sanitary sewers. Sewers that were initially well made might be damaged over time by people digging, the ground shifting, or tree roots pushing things around. One way or the other, when high ground waters get into a sanitary sewer, you now have a situation where those sewers are overflowing. And what can be done with that overflow? Let it pool up in the streets? Sending it down the storm drains is about the best you can do at that point.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Combined sewers that are in perfect maintenance include provisions to overflow by design.
  - MichaelGroves 5y ago
    I'm not talking about combined sewers. Systems in which the sanitary sewer and the storm sewer are completely separate can become combined sewers when the sanitary sewer is inundated with more infiltration/inflow than it can handle. When this happens, the sanitary sewer overflows into the street or people's homes. That sewage overflowing into the street will then make its way into the storm sewer. There is no easy solution to this. Building the sanitary sewers bigger is the obvious solution, except that costs more money and a lot of places don't have much money to spare (corruption, poverty, etc.) Furthermore, just how over-designed does a sanitary sewer have to be? Climate change makes this difficult to predict decades in advance. BTW [intentionally] combined sewers are problematic even when they're not overflowing. Diluting sewage with a bunch of water increases the cost and decreases the efficacy of treatment.

saalweachter 5y ago

So if I'm reading the article correctly: 1. It doesn't say anything about whether the medications would have been removed if they went through a wastewater treatment facility. 2. It's basically saying we accidentally performed a tracking experiment by adding compounds that don't occur (in those levels) naturally to wastewater, and then seeing where we could find those chemicals unexpectedly -- it's like dumping fluorescent dye down your drains to see if you can find it spotting in the yard, but with pharmaceuticals.

nerpderp82 5y ago
Caffeine is often used as that free "marker chemical" for tracing where sewage ends up. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Determination-of-caffeine-as-a-tracer-of-sewage-in-Chen-Pavelic/b866e60242c84938190a2a859e0e143f388dd3b8 https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Determination-of-caffe...
- arsome 5y ago
  Acesulfame potassium (an artificial sweetener commonly known as Ace-K) which passes through in urine has also been used to determine the concentration of urine in pool water.
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    Wouldn’t that dépend a lot on the consumption of the pool’s entrants?
    - Johnny555 5y ago
      For a private pool with a few users, sure, one person could skew the results with a diet coke big-gulp, but for a busy public pool with thousands of users, then I'd think that some assumptions about average intake would give reasonable results.
      - after_care 5y ago

zabzonk 5y ago

> Shouldn't we be placing the blame on people flushing meds down the toilet? Obviously, people shouldn't do that. But some antibiotics go through the body almost unchanged. When penicillin was first developed they used to recycle the antibiotic from the patient's urine over and over because they had so little of it.

deleted 5y ago
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Scoundreller 5y ago
And if you didn’t pee it out, it wouldn’t get to the right spot to treat a urinary tract or kidney infection.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  If you didn't pee it out it would remain in your system longer, limiting treatment options if it is in any way toxic. Or, if you don't pee it out it might over time break down into more toxic substances.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > if it is in any way toxic That's its whole purpose. Just look at the name "antibiotic"...
    - dgoldstein0 5y ago
      Toxic to bacteria is different than toxic to humans cells
  - Scoundreller 5y ago
    Or break down into less toxic substances, or things that are more likely to get excreted.
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    There's only one way out*, so you always pee it out somehow. * Ignoring minute traces of minerals that are lost through transpiration

erwolf 5y ago

I've looked at countless sewer inspection videos--those pipes can be up to 80 years old and are often in pretty bad shape. Sewage leaking into the groundwater is a major problem but is very hard to detect and locate unfortunately. Shameless plug: We're a startup building AI to detect leakages in sewers and tell cities when to fix their underground pipes. If you want to help us solve this problem and make cities more sustainable, let me know at ew@hades.ai :)

Thorentis 5y ago
On the surface, this looks like just another "We're using AI to detect X" cash grab. Are you just using image recognition for a novel application or what?
- tdeck 5y ago
  That's kind of a harsh way to express curiously, but I was also interested. If you go to https://www.hades.ai/ https://www.hades.ai/, you can see that they use image recognition on videos. I can imagine why that might be an improvement over manually watching hours of sewer videos looking for cracks.

dyeje 5y ago

Sometimes I wonder if placing all this important infrastructure under ground was a big mistake. Seems like issues like this and the Flint water crisis would be alot easier to remediate if the pipes were easily accessible.

alistairSH 5y ago
Not apples-to-apples, but having living in places with above-ground and below-ground power supply, I know which one I've found more reliable. Yes, maintenance gets more expensive, but that maintenance should be far less frequent. And hopefully more predictable (true maintenance vs emergency repair).
jdavis703 5y ago
I’m not sure above-ground pipes makes a lot of sense. Now every building has to maintain a pump to get sewage high enough off the ground that vehicles can pass under the pipes. And if those pumps fail (e.g. power outage), all of a sudden everyone is dealing with sewage backflow. Something I’d like to see more of is utility tunnels where all utilities are undergrounded in a single tunnel with with easy access. Yes it’s expensive, but could work out in the long run. Just look at how much utility relocation can drive up the cost for simple projects like BRT.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  Let's not forget that the standard place to put water and sewage pipes is "below the frost line".
- xwdv 5y ago
  How do pipes work when terrain isn’t leveled but rather very sloped?
  - PicassoCTs 5y ago
    Sewage pumps in the pipes and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebeanlage https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebeanlage (sorry do not know the english word for that) Synthetic fibres in tissues are a huge issues for these pumps..

988747 5y ago

Medications in streams are good right? At least fish will be healthy. /s