https://fluoridealert.org/articles/phosphate01/The Phosphate Fertilizer Industry: An Environmental Overview
1. Introduction
They call them “wet scrubbers†– the pollution control devices used by the phosphate industry to capture fluoride gases produced in the production of commercial fertilizer.
In the past, when the industry let these gases escape, vegetation became scorched, crops destroyed, and cattle crippled.
Today, with the development of sophisticated air-pollution control technology, less of the fluoride escapes into the atmosphere, and the type of pollution that threatened the survival of some communities in the 1950s and 60s, is but a thing of the past (at least in the US and other wealthy countries).
However, the impacts of the industry’s fluoride emissions are still being felt, although more subtly, by millions of people – people who, for the most part, do not live anywhere near a phosphate plant.
That’s because,
after being captured in the scrubbers, the fluoride acid (hydrofluorosilicic acid), a classified hazardous waste, is barreled up and sold, unrefined, to communities across the country. Communities add hydrofluorosilicic acid to their water supplies as the primary fluoride chemical for water fluoridation.Even if you don’t live in a community where fluoride is added to water, you’ll still be getting a dose of it through cereal, soda, juice, beer and any other processed food and drink manufactured with fluoridated water.
Meanwhile, if the phosphate industry has its way, it may soon be distributing another of its by-products to communities across the country. That waste product is radium, which may soon be added to a roadbed near you – if the EPA buckles and industry has its way.
https://fluoridealert.org/articles/phosphate01/"Today, the same gypsum stack which caused this particular spill, is considered by Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection to be “the most serious pollution threat in the state.†That’s because tropical rains over the past couple of years have brought the wastewater to the edge of the stack’s walls.
As noted by the Tampa Tribune, “The gypsum mound is near capacity, and a wet spring or a tropical storm could cause a catastrophic spill.â€
To prevent such a spill, which was all but inevitable, the EPA recently agreed to let Florida pursue “Option Z“: To load 500-600 million gallons of the wastewater onto barges and dump it directly into the Gulf of Mexico.
The dumping of the wastewater into the Gulf represents the latest in a series of high-profile embarrasments for Florida’s phosphate industry; one of the most dramatic of which happened on June 15, 1994.
On that day, a massive, 15-story sinkhole appeared in the middle of an 80 million ton gypsum stack. The hole was so big that, according to US News & World Report, it
“could be as big as 2 million cubic feet, enough to swallow 400 railroad boxcars. Local wags call it Disney World’s newest attraction — ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth.'â€
But, as US News noted,
“there’s nothing amusing about it. The cave-in dumped 4 million to 6 million cubic feet of toxic and radioactive gypsum and waste water into the Floridan aquifer, which provides 90 percent of the state’s drinking water.â€"
