Solution to Pollution? Drink it!

The phosphate fertilizer industry has a waste problem. Their manufacturing process creates a hazardous waste that is so toxic its disposal has become a great financial burden to the industry.

Decades ago, before this waste was regulated, it was released into the air out the chimneys of smokestacks, and this toxic plume reeked havoc upon the neighboring farms. Crops were destroyed, and cows in the field were reduced to crawling on their bellies because the toxic emissions reacted with their bones, fusing the joints together until their legs became useless.

Industry is longer allowed to release this product into the air, nor can it be dumped into a lake or stream–or even the ocean, so they started using a smokestack scrubber. A spray of water inside the smokestack traps the gaseous chemicals in an aqueous solution called the scrubber liquor. This waste product is extremely corrosive to the skin and mucus membranes. Those handling this stuff must be equipped with a full-body HAZMAT suit. If spilled, this material will dissolve concrete. The cost to dispose of this toxic soup was in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

But, to every problem there is a solution, and the solution to this problem was quite ingenious: Drink it.

The material is called fluosilicic acid (sometimes referred to as hydrofluorosilicic acid). It contains fluorine, and for this reason it is now sold to water companies as a low cost of water fluoridation. Their solution to pollution is dilution. By injecting small amounts of this material into our drinking water, they have eliminated the costly fees of hazardous waste disposal, and now are actually making hundreds of millions of dollars every year by municipalities who are paying them for the privilege of drinking their waste.

To make matters worse, there is much more than just fluoride in this toxic soup. The National Sanitation Foundation, the agency which certifies fluoridation chemicals, has admitted that fluosilicic acid increases the concentration of arsenic in our drinking water by about 0.4 ppb. The EPA has determined that there is no safe level of arsenic. That extra 0.4 ppb of arsenic, according to risk assessment figures reported by the National Academy of Sciences, is enough to kill an additional 68 people in Salt Lake County alone. Lead, mercury and radioactive decay products of uranium have also been detected in this product.

Government scientists have admitted that there have been absolutely no safety studies on this substance, which is already being used to fluoridate drinking water in Salt Lake and Davis Counties. This material is vastly different from the purified sodium fluoride we find in our toothpaste and that was used in the early fluoridation experiments back in the 1940's. A disturbing report released from Dartmouth in 2000 showed evidence that these fluorosilicates interact with the body in such a way that they increase the adsorption of lead into the bloodstream.

The harsh reality is that water fluoridation has very little to do with dental health. It is nothing more that a mechanism for cheap disposal of hazardous waste. If you’re happy with that, then make a toast to the ADA and bottoms up!