There's even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

And bog land isn't exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

It's complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn't consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.

FIFO if you know what i mean

Pathogens are less of a problem, they die off before they cannot infect a plant. But chemicals from medication and contraceptives, as well as heavy metals, are.

We truly are in the metaverse era.

They found a way to convert physical shit into virtual shit.

So this is what they plan to do with all the game studios they bought over the years.

Engineer here. We arent talking about directly tossing it on fields. We are talking about having it be anaerobically fermented at high temperatures for about 30 days, with the biogas captured and used for energy.

the new thing to do then is burn the remains and recover the phosphate from the ashes, where certainly no biological threat remains

These type of plants are currently built on many larger wastewater treatment plants in Europe

MicroShit

Treated waste water sludge is very commonly used here in Sweden albeit using anaerobic digestion rather than regular composting. High temperature composting would kill any pathogens so you can absolutely get permission to use a composting waste system in small scales. For larger scale waste treatment it is with anaerobic digestion, as mentioned.

The captured methane is typically used for fuel, e.g., in public transport.

As far as I know the sludge used for fertilizer needs to be certified under something called REVAQ. Some controversy does exist surrounding safe levels of the various harmful substances and perhaps PFAS in particular.

I've been calling them that for years

Depends on how the wastewater would have been treated before.

Wastewater treatment does release CO2, however the sludge can be fermented to biogas. So in relative terms not that much. Also the sludge contains phosphate that could be recovered for fertilizing or chemical industry purposes.

It would probably be far more effective to build renewables with that money than to bury things for which a treatment process already exists.

Apart from the questionable practice of buying CO2 credits (or whatever the practice is called), pumping shit underground does not seem like the best way to save the ecosphere. It could've produced energy and/or useful products in various ways but oh no, that would have been too expensive.

This prevents it from being dumped at a waste disposal site, where it would eventually decompose and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

This is the only reason this practice is deemed carbon-emission-friendly. Color me skeptical.

But that's fertilizer! WTF?

Just gotta lie on the questioner:

Has any PFOAS filled American pooped on this toilet in the past process cycle?

Technically it's more common to pay investment firms with forest land to not cut down the trees they weren't going to cut down to begin with.

My first thought was...how is this a good thing, we get a lot of our water from ground water...and now we're pumping toxic shit into the ground. The fuck

No. Carbon offsetting is a scam and does not do shit for the environment.

Devil's advocate says: 5000 ft is probably below groundwater level. But tbh idk. Hell, they could even use spent oil reservoirs.

That's a trap question, we're all PFOAS filled.

I'm curious how much phosphate we would be able to capture with this method?

I know it is a critical resource we are flushing away daily and -SHOULD- be doing this. Just like peak oil there is a concept of peak phosphorous.

Probably mucroplastics too?