Free Republic

'God help us if it gets hot and this material is still out here' (Newser) – Springtime in one small Alabama town smells more like manure than magnolias this year—and it's going to get a lot worse as the weather gets warmer. Dozens of freight cars carrying some 10 million pounds of human waste, enough to form a malodorous train more than a mile long, have been stranded in a Parrish rail yard for two months awaiting transfer to a landfill site, and residents say they can't take the stench for much longer, NJ.com reports. They say the freight cars...

The Associated Press is reporting that the Salinas-based company Fresh Express is recalling some of its bagged lettuce because of a positive test for E. Coli. What the AP and others continue to ignore is any possible connection between the use of treated sewage sludge and municipal waste water on farms in the Salinas Valley. Certainly consumers would want to know if the food they are buying is being poisoned by cities looking for a cheap way to dispose of their sewage sludge.

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) – The U.S. city of San Antonio unveiled a deal on Tuesday that will make it the first U.S. city to harvest methane gas from human waste on a commercial scale and turn it into clean-burning fuel. San Antonio residents produce about 140,000 tons a year of a substance gently referred to as "biosolids," which can be reprocessed into natural gas, said Steve Clouse, chief operating officer of the city's water system. "You may call it something else," Clouse said, but for area utilities, the main byproduct of human waste - methane gas - will soon be...

When they’re out of public view dealing with controversial items in camera, the high hand displayed by some Toronto City councillors is disturbing. Humiliated by revelations from the expensive ongoing public inquiry probing the MFP computer scandal and its recent testimony about an "intimate" relationship between former Toronto City Treasurer Wanda Liczyk, and a lover, who shared with a colleague some $3.8 million in untendered contracts, city council is going a long way to keep its $95-million biosolids scandal under wraps. "Biosolids" is the more palatable name given by bureaucrats to human excrement, which is used to fertilize farmers’ fields....