Fertilizer Manufacture: Processing Waste

Saint James, Louisiana, USA

The far-reaching, systemic effects of our personal activities and purchases is difficult to comprehend, even when one thinks about it. We need fertilizer as a plant nutrient to grow our food. Without it we starve. But it is a powerful chemical with tremendous impact on those fragile systems in our world that bring us clean air and water. The phosphates that are not absorbed by our crops (or our lawns) are washed down into streams, lakes, and the ocean. But in those biomes, they provide nutrients to algae, causing blooms, which then die and absorb all the oxygen in the water, leaving a dead zone. In the Baltic Sea, the dead zone is about 49,000 km2.

In 2014, this facility released 156 pounds of lead, 220,962 pounds of methanol, and 1,008,440 pounds of ammonia.