Heavy Metals in the Environment: Using Wetlands for Their Removal - Chapter 1 doc

PART I INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Chapter 1 Introduction ...3Chapter 2 Problems and Needs...21Chapter 3 Background of Published Studies on Lead and Wetlands ...29Chapter 4 Biogeochemica

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Heavy Metals

in the

Environment

Using Wetlands for Their Removal

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LEWIS PUBLISHER S

Howard T Odum Wlodzimierz Wójcik Lowell Pritchard, Jr.

Shanshin Ton Joseph J Delfino Malgorzata Wójcik Slawomir Leszczynski

Jay D Patel Steven J Doherty Jacek Stasik

Center for Environmental Policy and

Center for Wetlands Environmental Engineering Sciences

University of Florida Gainesville, Florida

Heavy Metals

in the

Environment

Using Wetlands for Their Removal

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This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources Reprinted material is quoted with permission, and sources are indicated A wide variety of references are listed Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or for the consequences of their use.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heavy metals in the environment : using wetlands for their removal / Howard T Odum

… [et al.].

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56670-401-4 (alk paper)

1 Heavy metals—Environmental aspects 2 Lead—Environmental aspects 3 Wetland ecology 4 Bioremediation 5 Ecological engineering I Odum, Howard T., 1924–

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This is a book to deepen our understanding of the way nature realigns and reorganizes to acceptthe burdens associated with metal as it streams through society Tadeusz and Berthe Sendzimir,industrial pioneers, first in Poland and later in the U.S., left a legacy to fit metals with environmentand society by supporting the work which led to this book

Much of the appearance and possibilities of modern life reside in sheet metal, the cowlingshield of most machines Tadeusz Sendzimir designed some of the first machines that made sheetmetal affordable, mills that rolled red hot slabs into miles of thin metal to house the refrigeratorsand washing machines of expanding suburbia Like so many of the creative eddies spun off a river

of fossil fuel in this century, Tadeusz Sendzimir made sheet metal something common, andappliances became the altars of modern-day convenience However, the load that convenience takesoff human muscle has to be taken up elsewhere, and some of this has been borne as a series ofburdens added to the Earth during the extraction and refinement of metal In a sense, the true cost

of convenience is emerging; and it is only fitting that the profits derived from metal’s convenienceshould in turn be fed back to understand some of the impacts underlying the exploitation of metal.This balancing of cause and effect is part of the noble legacy of pioneers

Many of us awakened to the true cost of convenience as the momentum of a century of alization finally surpassed the capacity of nature to assimilate it Society’s final buffer againstuncontrolled pollution is to filter the news from state and corporate news media When the officialsilence on environmental degradation was breached in Poland by the Solidarity Movement in the mid-1980s, Tadeusz and Berthe Sendzimir were shocked to learn of the effects of 50 years of short-sightedexploitation of natural systems The bleak aspect of Polish rivers, lakes, and forests had testified tothis for decades, and now the verdict of statistics left no doubt Forests were acidified by rain, riverswere made corrosive with salt and acid, waters were polluted by sewage, and air in many cities wasladen with the exhaust of cars, furnaces, and factories Many places in the U.S were also impacted.With difficult choices and years of hard work, new progress can grow from these ashes Tadeuszand Berthe decided that they could help by supporting small steps in understanding what mightculminate in useful tools when the political will and the economic means to mitigate the damage

industri-to the environment had matured This book describes the first project they launched It had thegoal of understanding how natural systems use wetlands to adapt to wastes Lead was chosenbecause a capable group of investigators had incisive questions to apply and situations were availablewhere human developments had inadvertently saturated wetland ecosystems with this heavy metal.The key people in question were ecologists, Howard T Odum and Lowell Pritchard, Jr.;chemists, Joseph Delfino and Shanshin Ton; and an engineer, Wlodzimierz Wójcik and associates.Breakthrough questions stem from ecological engineering, a discipline that probes how the design

of natural systems can be employed to engineer resource flows in ways more efficient than fossilfuel-driven machine systems Can systems powered by sunlight handle toxics more effectivelythan systems running on fossil fuel? At what scale and by what means does one usefully defineefficiency? The locations where these studies occurred were a North Florida cypress swamp loadedwith lead from a spill from a battery reprocessing plant and an herbaceous wetland in Silesia whichhas received the waste effluent from a lead mine for 400 years

The questions raised in these studies resonate ever more strongly with a number of globalchallenges that have become more prominent since this study has been completed Airbornedeposition of toxics is no longer a regional phenomenon that can be avoided by moving elsewhere

It appears to be as global and inescapable as climate change If the time comes when there is lessuse of fossil fuel-based technology, what means remain with which to clean up the aftermath oftoxic misadventures? Ecological engineering appears to be one of the most promising avenueswith which to explore answers to that question, and this book is an excellent step down that path

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This study was a joint project of the D.T Sendzimir Family Foundation (Jan Sendzimir, Head),the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences of the University of Florida in Gainesville(H.T Odum, Principal Investigator), and the University of Mining and Metallurgy, Krakow, Poland(Wlodzimierz Wójcik, Principal Investigator) Joan Breeze was editorial assistant

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PART I INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Chapter 1

Introduction 3Chapter 2

Problems and Needs 21Chapter 3

Background of Published Studies on Lead and Wetlands 29Chapter 4

Biogeochemical Cycle of Lead and the Energy Hierarchy 49

Lead Distribution in Steele City Swamps 81

Shanshin Ton and Joseph J Delfino

Chapter 7

Experiments with Lead and Acid in Wetland Microcosms 87

Shanshin Ton

Chapter 8

Simulation Model of a Lead-Containing Swamp Ecosystem 91

Shanshin Ton and Howard T Odum

PART III LEAD AND WETLANDS IN POLAND

Chapter 9

Lead and Zinc Retention in the Biala River Wetland of Poland 97

Wlodzimierz Wójcik and Malgorzata Wójcik

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PART IV VALUE AND POLICY

Chapter 12

Emergy Evaluation of Treatment Alternatives in Poland 145

Wlodzimierz Wójcik, Slawomir Leszczynski, and Howard T Odum

Methods Used for Chemical Analysis of Waters and Sediments 187

Chemical Data on the Cypress-Gum Swamps of Steele City Bay, Jackson County, Florida 193

Appendix A7

Details and Statistics on Microcosm Studies 201

Shanshin Ton

Appendix A8

Equations, Programs, and Calibration Table for Simulation Models 205

Shanshin Ton and Howard T Odum

Appendix A9

Data on the Biala River Wetland and the Results of the Field Experiments 211

Wlodzimierz Wójcik and Malgorzata Wójcik

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Emergy Evaluation of Poland 269

Wlodzimierz Wójcik, Jacek Stasik, and Howard T Odum

Appendix A13

References to Laws Cited in Chapter 13 281

Jay D Patel

References 283L1401-frame-FM Page 11 Tuesday, April 11, 2000 2:53 PM

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To Tadeusz and Berthe Sendzimir For their love of nature and the people of Poland which returns again and again

in the new understanding and practice toward which they set us.

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PART I Introduction and Background

After describing the contents of this book on lead and wetlands, the introductory chapter explainsthe gaia hypothesis for the role of wetlands in regulating toxic heavy metals Chapter 2 identiﬁescurrent questions and needs regarding lead and society Chapter 3 reviews published literature onlead, wetlands, and society Finally, Chapter 4 examines systems models of lead and the global cycle

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction

CONTENTS

Lead 5

Sapp Swamp in Florida 5

Biala River Marshes in Poland 6

Models and Simulation 8

Microcosms 9

Evaluation 12

With restless energies of the sun and heat of the earth, the biogeosphere circulates materials

on which human life depends In the global cycle of the earth, the slow rise of the land is balanced

by steady erosion as soils and sediments return to the sea carried by the cycle of water In Figure 1.1 the ocean on the left supplies the rain to the land on the right, and the water carrying sediments drains back to the ocean In the original landscape before economic development, much of the water runoff passed through wetlands which captured the fertile soils and toxic substances The filtered material in peaty sediments was eventually converted into coal by geologic processes What the evidence of many studies now shows is that the wetlands all over the world evolved mechanisms that were mutually reinforcing life in the biosphere Self-organization of life with the biogeochemistry of the earth has been called gaia, a word used in the popular press to mean “life operating the earth for itself.” As the examples in these studies show, wetlands are gaia operations The development of human civilization was based on this earth cycle Metals were mined from the earth, manufactured into swords and plowshares, used, and returned to the earth cycle as fragmented remains Figure 1.2 shows the economy on the right using waters and earth resources With accelerating growth of society and its demands, the flow of metals between the economy and the earth cycle increased, often distorted with waste accumulations and risks (waste tank on the right in Figure 1.2)

A sustainable civilization requires a harmonious fit between economic use of the earth materials and the environmental system It makes sense to process and reuse concentrated materials in wastes, whereas the dilute wastes need to go back into the earth cycle in a way that promotes productivity and is not toxic There are now many successful demonstrations that recycling the dilute wastes of cities and industries back through wetlands is a good way to connect the economy to nature Especially where the natural wetlands were drained, new wetlands are being created to let the ecological systems adapt, becoming a low-cost contributor to the wealth of the landscape

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4 HEAVY METALS IN THE ENVIRONMENT: USING WETLANDS FOR THEIR REMOVAL

This book is a story about scientific studies for achieving a better fit of the economy with theearth cycle We call the development of partnership designs with nature ecological engineering.Others call it industrial ecology, making manufacturing and ecosystem processing mutually bene-ficial This book is especially about the wetlands

Starting in the last century, brilliant advances in the science and technology of chemistrymade it possible to cover the earth with new chemical products in amazing variety as part ofthe new ways of farms and cities At first little attention was paid to the questions of what could

be sustained and how to return the leftovers and worn-out pieces of the new substances to theearth As accumulations and toxic conditions developed threatening the health of humans, anew insight developed: perhaps the global earth system after millions of years of ecosystemself-organization was operating so as to support and protect the special chemistry of life and

to filter out chemicals toxic to life

New studies like those reported here showed that the wetlands were one of the main placeswhere the toxic materials were filtered, immobilized, and returned to the geologic part of the earthcycle, mostly isolated from the living biosphere (Figure 1.2) The beds of peat in wetlands often

Figure 1.1 Concept of the cycle of atmosphere, earth, and water which moves the cycle of lead (thicker lines)

from ocean to land, with runoff waters passing through wetland filters before returning to the sea Swamp peats may eventually be turned into coal as shown (a) Cycles of matter; (b) same with addition of the main energy flows.

Wetland Filter

Land Ocean &

Sediments

Rain, Snow, &

Earth Uplift

Runoff Rivers

Peat &

Coal

(a)

Wetland Filter

Land Ocean &

Sediments

Sun's Energy

Rain, Snow, &

Earth Uplift

Runoff Rivers

Earth Energy

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INTRODUCTION 5

LEAD

One of the metals first used by developing civilization was lead, because of its low meltingtemperature and malleable properties, and which was easy for artisans to make into pipes, kitch-enware, and bullets or to combine with other metals in alloys Nriagu (1983) includes estimates ofglobal lead processing, starting in ancient history with evidences of its toxicity affecting sustain-ability of both Greek and Roman civilizations Patterson, in the 1980 National Academy Report,has a graph of lead production starting 5000 years ago His minority statement warns of toxicaccumulations Later massive quantities were part of paint, gasoline anti-knock additives, andespecially batteries still used by the billions Unfortunately, too much lead in people is toxic,especially to brains and the nervous system Soon there were enormous costs to society fortreatment, lost work, and public health measures to eliminate lead from waters, foods, and dangerouswaste disposal See details in Chapter 3

However, wetlands filter lead This book is about lead, wetlands, and the relation of the globallead cycle to the industrial economy In Figures 1.1 and 1.2 the cycle of lead as it accompaniesatmosphere, waters, sediments, and rocks is shown as thick, dark arrows

In small-scale science it is easy to set up experiments to study the effect of various factors

on a system Thus, there have been many laboratory-scale studies of the effect of lead onorganisms On this scale many replications could be made to ensure that the results are consistent.However, for the larger scale of whole ecosystems it is rarely possible to do such experimenting.Instead, one can look for situations where a test of a factor has been provided as a fortuitousexperiment In this study two situations were found where wetlands received and filtered largequantities of lead

SAPP SWAMP IN FLORIDA

Field studies were made on the two wetlands which had received lead The Sapp site in JacksonCounty, in Florida (Figure 1.3), is a 1-h drive west of Tallahassee From 1970 to 1979 thousands

Figure 1.2 Cycle of earth, waters, and lead from Figure 1.1 modified by the human civilization on the right.

The economy is shown using the waters and mined lead, generating by-product wastes (tank symbol) The most concentrated wastes are reused and dilute wastes are recycled to the environment by air and in waters that can be filtered by wetlands

Land Ocean &

Sediments

Rain, Snow, &

Earth Uplift

Runoff Rivers

Wastes

Reuse

Recycle to Environment

Economy Use

Wetlands

Heavy Metal Pollution

in the Atmosphere

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