[Pharmwaste] Univ. of Washington researchers say holiday cookies have impact on Puget Sound

[Tenace, Laurie]

http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcquality/7univofxx1.html


Univ. of Washington researchers say holiday cookies have impact on Puget
Sound January 2007

U.S. Water News Online

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 consumed 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."

Laurie J. Tenace
Environmental Specialist
Florida Department of Environmental Protection
2600 Blair Stone Road, MS 4555
Tallahassee, Florida 32399-2400
PH: (850) 245-8759
FAX: (850) 245-8811
Laurie.Tenace at dep.state.fl.us 

view our mercury web pages at:
http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/categories/mercury/default.htm

Please Note:  Florida has a very broad public records law.  Most written
communications to or from state officials regarding state business are public
records available to the public and media upon request.  Your e-mail is
communications and may therefore be subject to public disclosure.