Technologies for Hog Waste Treatment: A Call for Environmental Justice (2008)
Undergraduates: Joy Rasmussen, Jessica Marx, Natalie Solano, Jessie Nichols, Kandyss Whitehead none none
North Carolina produces over 9 million hogs and 4.4 billion gallons in associated waste every year, serving a tributary to a myriad of social and environmental complications. For example, the current waste disposal method stores waste in an open lagoon, which is shown to cause odor, air pollution, and health problems for the neighboring communities. Moreover, poor and minority communities bear the disproportionate burden of these environmental and health problems. Addressing these concerns, the NC attorney general met with Smithfield Foods to develop the 2000 Smithfield Agreement, which aimed to create Environmentally Superior Technologies (EST) for use on NC hog farms. As a part of APPLES service-learning class, ANTH 539: Environmental Justice, we collaborated with Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT), a social justice organization, to research and evaluate five proposed EST. The five EST include Gasification, two Super Soil Systems, High Solid Anaerobic Digestion, and Biomass Energy Sustainable Technology. We found that the Super Soil Systems was the most technologically effective EST, but it is not economically viable given the stipulations of the Smithfield Agreement. Moreover, in the development and assessment of the EST, environmental justice considerations, such as odor levels, were not sufficiently taken into account. It is our hope that CCT can use this information to convey the implications of the new technologies to similarly affected communities._x000D_