From Denver Westword (Michael Roberts):
“Where we have very large domestic populations, we’re either excreting or dumping a lot of chemicals down the drain, and a number of them are estrogenic in nature. They get into wastewater treatment plants, which aren’t constructed in a way to deal with chemicals in the very low concentrations of these chemicals, [said CU-Boulder professor David Norris]”[…]
…in Boulder, Norris says, the situation improved dramatically “after the wastewater treatment plant went from a trickling filter process to a more efficient system, called activated sludge. This was something mandated by the EPA, because they weren’t meeting standards for some of the other chemical requirements for effluents. So it wasn’t related to what we were studying. But it had a side benefit.”
The team is still analyzing some of the data from tests conducted after the new plant was up and running. But this time around, Norris points out, “we had no demasculinizatoin of fish over a 28 day period, and we only saw a slight feminization — and we didn’t see that until somewhere between day fourteen and day 28. So a modest upgrade of the plant reduced a lot of these chemicals.”
More water pollution coverage here.