Could What We Waste Be Harming Our Lakes?

Article link: http://www.freep.com/article/20130927/NEWS06/309260196/           

Picture link: http://www.terragalleria.com/america/mid-west/illinois/picture.usil6675.html

The article “Drugs, caffeine, chemicals found in Lake Michigan worry researchers” written by Keith Matheny on September 27, 2013 from the Detroit Free Press, talks about how the discovery of chemicals from medicines and personal care products in Lake Michigan two miles offshore is a rising concern for scientists.

Pharmaceuticals and personal care products, or PPCP’s, which had previously gone unstudied, have started to get some attention from researchers because they have been found offshore in Lake Michigan. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences conducted a study looking for 54 different types of PPCP’s in Lake Michigan of which 32 were found in the water and 30 were found in the sediment.

Lots of caffeine and antibiotics were found in concentrations of “’medium’ or ‘high’ ecological risk”. Scientists are worried that these levels of PPCP’s in the lake could affect the health of organisms living in it.

These PPCP’s are coming from wastewater plants around Lake Michigan. Businesses use these to get rid of any waste material and chemicals from their products. The original argument for using wastewater plants in Lake Michigan was that the lake is so big that it would dilute the PPCP’s into “undetectability”. However, the recent study proves that to be false which causes concern for not only Lake Michigan, but also for the other Great Lakes with wastewater plants.

Another problem is that there is not just one chemical in the lake; there is a wide variety. A study was performed on fathead minnows that involved exposing one group of male minnows to two kinds of PPCP’s found in Lake Michigan, and one group of males to only one kind of PPCP for 28 days. The minnows that were exposed to both PPCP’s had reduced testosterone, but nothing happened to the group that was exposed to only one.

Scientists are still unsure of the effects that these low-level PPCP’s have on different types of organisms and even humans. Until this is known, not much will be done to try to help this problem. The Muskegon Wastewater Management System said, “’We don’t do anything specific for them — we have our treatment that’s in place’ for sewage ‘and that’s all they get.’” They are not planning on making any significant changes because of the discovery of these PPCP’s.

But there is a new treatment technology to take care of the low-level PPCP’s in the wastewater plants that scientists are urging the wastewater plants to use. However, the new technology is very expensive, and some plants find it an impractical use of money and can’t afford it.

I can connect this article to our Biology class because we are studying biomagnification. Biomagnification is the process by which contaminants are found at progressively higher concentrations as they pass from one trophic level to the next in an ecosystem. This means that the contaminants in the water are eaten by a small organism or producer, and then a bigger animal eats multiple of those organisms so it has more contaminants in its body, and this continues up the food chain and the level of contaminants gets higher in each level. This is what researchers are worried could happen in Lake Michigan that would affect the health of many organisms.

I see both sides of this argument. I think that the School of Freshwater Sciences is right in their thinking that there should be new treatments put in place to try to control the levels of PPCP’s so that they don’t get out of control and start to biomagnify. However, I also think that the Wastewater Management System also has a point that it is expensive and a lot of work to put these new treatments in place. I hope that some of these new treatment technologies will gradually be able to be put in place in many plants around Lake Michigan, and that the PPCP levels will gradually decrease.