The Big Wobble by Gary Walton 1/10/2021
Company AltEn selling "Clean Fuel" ethanol responsible for eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds in residents colonies of dead bees disoriented birds and butterflies and pet dogs ill, staggering about with dilated pupils: Bi-product known to cause tumours in mice
For the residents of Mead, Nebraska, the first sign of something amiss was the stench, the smell of something rotting. People reported eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds. Then colonies of bees started dying, birds and butterflies appeared disoriented and pet dogs grew ill, staggering about with dilated pupils. There is no mystery as to the cause of the concerns in Mead, a farming community so small that its 500 residents refer to it as a village and not a town. After multiple complaints to state and federal officials and an inquiry by a researcher from the University of Nebraska, all evidence points to what should be an unlikely culprit - an ethanol plant that, like many others around the United States, turns corn into biofuel.
The company, called AltEn, is supposed to be helpful to the environment, using high-starch grains such as corn to annually churn out about 25m gallons of ethanol, practice regulators generally hailed as an environmentally friendly source for auto fuel. Ethanol plants typically also produce a byproduct called distillers grains to sell as nutritious livestock feed. But unlike most of the other 203 US ethanol plants, AltEn has been using seed coated with fungicides and insecticides, including those known as neonicotinoids, or "neonics", in its production process. Company officials have advertised AltEn as a "recycling" location where agricultural companies can rid themselves of excess supplies of pesticide-treated seeds, a strategy that gave AltEn free supplies for its ethanol but also left it with a waste product too pesticide-laden to feed to animals.
Instead, AltEn has been accumulating thousands of pounds of a smelly, lime-green mash of fermented grains, distributing some to farm fields as a "soil conditioner" and accumulating the rest on the grounds of its plant. It is that waste that some researchers say is dangerously polluting water and soil and probably also posing a health threat to animals and people. They point to testing ordered by state officials that found neonics in AltEn waste at levels many times higher than what is considered safe. "Some of the levels recorded are just off the charts," said Dan Raichel, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has been working with academics and other environmental protection groups to monitor the situation in Mead.
"If I were living in that area with those levels of neonics going into the water and the environment I would be concerned for my own health." Importantly, Raichel and other observers say the situation in Mead is a warning sign - an example of the need for tighter regulations of the pesticide-coated seeds that are marketed by big companies such as Bayer AG and Syngenta. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers neonics in food and water safety at a range of up to 70 parts per billion (ppb) depending on the specific pesticide. The agency sets different benchmarks for "aquatic life" freshwater invertebrates. For the neonic known as clothianidin, the benchmark is 11ppb and it is 17.5ppb for a neonic called thiamethoxam. On the AltEn property, state environmental officials recorded levels of clothianidin at a staggering 427,000ppb in the testing of one of the large hills of AltEn waste. Thiamethoxam was detected at 85,100ppb, according to testing ordered by the Nebraska department of agriculture. In an AltEn wastewater lagoon, clothianidin was recorded at 31,000ppb and thiamethoxam at 24,000ppb.
More:
http://www.thebigwobble.org/2021/01/company-alten-selling-clean-fuel.html
