Sludge Watch ==> Researchers find Christmas Baking impacts Puget Sound

[Maureen Reilly]

Researchers Find Baking Impacts Puget Sound

December 27, 2006 - By Associated Press

SEATTLE - Researchers at the University of Washington say all that
holiday baking and eating has an environmental impact -- Puget Sound is
being flavored by cinnamon and vanilla. "Even something as fun as baking
for the holiday season has an environmental effect," said Rick Keil, an
associate professor of chemical oceanography. "When we bake and change
the way we eat, it has an impact on what the environment sees. To me it
shows the connectedness."

Keil and UW researcher Jacquelyn Neibauer's weekly tests of treated
sewage sent into the sound from the West Point treatment plant in
Magnolia showed cinnamon, vanilla and artificial vanilla levels rose
between Nov. 14 and Dec. 9, with the biggest spike right after
Thanksgiving.

Natural vanilla showed the largest increase, "perhaps indicative of more
home baking using natural vanilla," Keil and Neibauer wrote.

"This conjecture is weakly supported by a verbal communication between
Rick Keil and an employee of the Wallingford QFC (supermarket) who felt
that natural vanilla peaked during the holiday seasons," the scientists'
preliminary report says. "This will be investigated more thoroughly."

So far, the research has turned up no evidence that snickerdoodles are
harming sea creatures, but their research does lead to some serious
environmental questions. Fish rely heavily on their sense of smell to
locate food, for example, and, in the case of salmon, to find their way
back to their home stream to spawn.

"All the spices have odors associated with them, so it's interesting to
ask whether they are there in sufficient concentration (for fish) to
smell them," Keil said.

Using benchmarks from a published scientific study, they were able to
estimate that people in Seattle and a few outlying areas served by the
sewage plant scarfed down the daily equivalent of about 160,000 butter-
or chocolate-chip-type cookies and about 80,000 cookies containing
cinnamon during the Thanksgiving weekend.

The county did not spend any money on the study, but officials at King
County's Wastewater Treatment Division said they were happy to cooperate
because they expected the results to reinforce their message: What goes
down the drain has to come out somewhere.

That goes both for pesticides and industrial chemicals as well as
vanilla and cinnamon.

"It's an ability to look at a whole population's behavior through one
pipe," said Randy Schuman, a county science and technical support
manager who helped arrange the wastewater testing.

Keil's findings present a light side of what scientists say is
potentially a serious situation. Scientists at the U.S. Geological
Survey and other agencies have documented that antibiotics,
contraceptives, perfumes, painkillers, antidepressants and other
substances pass through the sewage system into waterways.

King County researchers several years took caffeine measurements to try
to learn whether the city's coffee drinking habits had any effect on the
sound. Caffeine was found in more than 160 of 216 samples in water as
deep as 640 feet.

"It was everywhere," Schuman said. "There's an effect (from) humans on
the sound and it's almost ubiquitous. It's not just at the end of the
(discharge) pipe."

Source: Associated Press
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