Lake Erie's algae explosion blamed on farmers

This is what happens when phosphorous runoff from fertilizers etc end up in a closed system.

Ask anyone who owns an aquarium about algae...it isn't rocket science, but it can be a real bitch to get rid of.

Toledo has had a do not drink order for water for a few days now.

Killing bees with pesticides and killing lakes with fertilizer, all so we can feed exploding Third World populations.

Where did you hear that this is to feed the Third World?? We throw out 40% of the food we produce, don't you know.

Just saw a documentary earlier this evening from 2009 about the Great Lakes. Ladies and gentlemen, we who depend on them are truly screwed. There was one aspect that freaked the hell out of me. The zebra mussels are creating a toxic environment on the lake and river floors. I missed how the mechanism worked but they are the cause of botulism from the bottom of the Great Lakes food chain all the way to the top. Large stretches of lakes and rivers within the system are essentially dead.

On top of that, under Niagara Falls are some 18 locations where hundreds, if not thousands of barrels of highly toxic waste were stored decades ago, and still are.

One thing truly surpsied though, Dasani and one other major bottle water producer whose name currently escapes me, draw their water for the North American market from the Detroit River.
Then again, Coke has the money and willingness to spend far more on water treatment and filtration systems than any govt in the Great Lakes region, but of ALL the sizable fresh water sources Coke could draw from, why the hell would they pick the Detroit River?

Where did you hear that this is to feed the Third World?? We throw out 40% of the food we produce, don't you know.
It's the standard line of crap that companies like Monsanto and the pro-GMO crowd like to throw around to justify screwing with our food supply.

One of the other justifications is the need for corn. That's a problem however that can be blamed firmly on the fast food industry, not on "alleviating third world hunger".

No competition.

No competition.
Cute but the Dasani plant has been in Detroit since at least 2008.

I had an idea of how to deal withy the algae bloom while taking the ferry over to Pelee Island a couple of years ago through a sea of weed. The algae could be harvested (fairly easily I think) from Lake Erie and fermented into ethanol. There is an ethanol plant somewhere along there. Perhaps, it could be a new, replacement industry for the besieged Leamington area. That way, they would remove a lot of the chemical energy running into the lake from area farmland and would turn it into a more usable form of that chemical energy. If you've ever seen the stuff, you'd realize how easily it could be raked up and dredged from the lake but collecting the liquid run-off from hundreds of farms is a much more difficult (if not impossible) problem

It's not an impossible problem. Don't over fertilize, let fields go fallow like they used to do, and fertilizer wouldn't be needed. Stop throwing the limited element potassium into the water system where it can't be recovered. Keep it on the land where it can do some good by recycling sewage as fertilizer, like has been done for thousands of years.

The Great Lakes are not a closed system.