Soil pollutant
Contents
Organic
Both nearer term and more advances atomically precise manufacturing can introduce new kinds of potentially dangerous persistent organic pollutants (POPs).
Near term POPs
- In medicine there is a desire for drugs that won't be degraded to fast in the (human) body. While Drugs never will be produced in high volumes (construction industry scale) their hormone like effect on other life that dwells down the waste-water drain can be significantly detrimental.
- Artificial foldamers like peptoids tend to be less degradable than natural foldamers like peptides (~=proteins) since the natural degradation tool-chain may not be capable to deal with the new stuff.
(TODO: link video) See: "Foldamer R&D".
Far term POPs
A wide range of potentially useful small environmentally persistent molecules will emerge for which there are currently no synthesis pathways known that make high volume production economically feasible. Spill of those new molecules must be minimized and dependent of the ratio of unavoidable spill rate to natural degradation rate it might be necessary to attempt active collection which introduces a host of new dangers. See: "Mobility prevention guideline".
Elemental
Avoidable
Future products will be able to avoid the use many poisonous metals almost completely since advanced metamaterials made entirely from non-poisonous elements can emulate many material properties that today can only be archived by heavy usage of those potentially poisonous metals.
Metals that are today used for:
- oxidation protection
- electrochemical batteries
- catalysts
- mechanical strength improvement
All can be be avoided.
A view properties like very high density of mass remain only creatable by special elements. For high density of mass there can be e.g. used:
- abundant and thus cheap but poisonous lead
- less abundant and thus more expensive but less toxic bismuth
Usage of potentially poisonous elements can be made pretty safe by enclosing them in very durable (non-poisonous) micro-capsules (e.g. made of diamond or moissanite). Such micro-capsules need to be tightly anchored to the parent macroscopic product with strategies to prevent fine grained break-off. See "mobility prevention guideline" for details.
Another case where heavy poisonous elements can't be avoided is nuclear fission. With increasing ease for using regenerative energy sources it might be possible to ban this technology (as means for energy production - not for research) from earth to places where it makes more sense like the main asteroid belt with lots of heavy metal rich planetary core material plus Jupiter's planet sized moons where natural radioactivity is already on a deadly level since they cross Jupiter's intense radiation belts.
Remediation of existing elemental pollution
- lead
- bauxite mud
- aluminium salts
- highly concentrated lowly radioactive elements
- lowly concentrated highly radioactive elements
Related
- Poison
- Recovery of scarce elements from waste heaps.
External links
Wikipedia links
- Bioaccumulation (general; any source; air, water, food)
- Bioconcentration (chemical stems from water)
- Biomagnification (concentration through food chain)
- Biotransformation (change by metabolization)
