Hybrid Nature: Sewage Treatment and the Contradictions of the Industrial Ecosystem

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. U.S. EPA, “Clean Watersheds Needs Survey, 2004. Report to Congress,” U.S. EPA, January 2008, , (accessed May 27, 2009); G. L. Van Houtven, S. B. Brunnermeier, and M. C. Buckley, “A Retrospective Assessment of the Costs of the Clean Water Act: 1972 to 1997,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water, 2000. 2. My treatment of the “industrial ecosystem” differs from the recently established field of “industrial ecology.” In this field, the idea of the ecosystem as a bounded area with inputs and outputs of energy and materials has been used to analyze the industrial firm and describe its connections to suppliers and customers. Industrial ecology tries to close the loop between inputs and waste, devising ways for the waste of one firm to form the supply of another, and create a more environmentally sustainable economy. The idea of the ecosystem, though, is used primarily as a metaphor. In fact, in the statement announcing the creation of the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Reid Lifset explicitly identified the term industrial ecology as a metaphor, titling his introduction “A Metaphor, A Field, A Journal.” Industrial ecology, he wrote, looks “to the natural world for models of highly efficient use of resources, energy, and wastes.” In contrast, as an ecologist and historian, I use the term literally. Reid Lifset, “A Metaphor, a Field, and a Journal,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 1 (1997): 1–3, on 1. See also Ralf Isenmann, “Industrial Ecology: Shedding More Light on Its Perspective of Understanding Nature as Model,” Sustainable Development 11 (2003): 143–158. For other metaphorical uses of the term, see Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), preface and chapter 6. 3. Edmund Russell, “The Garden in the Machine: Toward an Evolutionary History of Technology ,” in Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, ed. Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2. 4. Keith Vernon, “Pus, Sewage, Beer and Milk: Microbiology in Britain, 1870–1940,” History of Science 28 (1990): 289–325; Keith Vernon, “Microbes at Work. Micro-organisms, the D.S.I.R. and Industry in Britain, 1900–1936,” Annals of Science 51 (1994): 593–613. 5. A. Chaston Chapman, “The Employment of Micro-organisms in the Service of Industrial Chemistry. A Plea for a National Institute of Industrial Micro-biology,” JSCI 38 (1919): 282–286, on 283. 232 Notes 6. Kristoff Glamann, “The Scientific Brewer: Founders and Successors during the Rise of the Modern Brewing Industry,” in Enterprise and History: Essays in Honor of Charles Wilson, ed. D. C. Coleman and Peter Mathias (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 186–198. 7. Testimony of Ralph McKee, Record, Vol. II, Union Solvents vs. Guaranty Trust, Equity no. 802, District Court, Delaware, RG 21, Box 272, NARA Mid-Atlantic, 945; Lloyd C. Cooley, “Acetone,” Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 29 (1937): 1399–1407. 8. Tetsuo Oka, “Amino Acids, Production Processes,” in Encyclopedia of Bioprocess Technology : Fermentation, Biocatalysis, and Bioseparation, ed. Michael C. Flickinger and Stephen W. Drew (New York: Wiley, 1999), 89–100; L. Eggeling, W. Pfefferle, and H. Sahm, “Amino Acids,” in Basic Biotechnology, 3rd ed., ed. Colin Ratledge and Bjørn Kristiansen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 335–357. Executives of the agribusiness giant ADM and other firms were convicted of price fixing in the marketing of L-lysine, which is the subject of the recent Hollywood film The Informant! (2009). 9. On biomining, see D. E. Rawlings and B. D. Johnson, eds., Biomining (Berlin: Springer, 2007), and G. J. Olson, J. A. Brierley, and C. L. Brierley, “Bioleaching Review Part B: Progress in Bioleaching: Applications of Microbial Processes by the Minerals Industries,” Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology 63 (2003): 249–257. 10. Shu-Jen D. Chiang and Jonathan Basch, “Cephalosporins,” in Encyclopedia of Bioprocess Technology, ed. Flickinger and Drew, 560–570. These bacteria were first isolated from sewage-contaminated seawater. J. M. T. Hamilton-Miller, “Sir Edward Abraham’s Contribution to the Development of the Cephalosporins: A Reassessment,” International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents 15 (2000): 179–184. 11. José Manuel Otero, Gianni Panagiotou, and Lisbeth Olsson,“Fueling Industrial Biotechnology Growth with Bioethanol,” Advances in Biochemical Engineering/Biotechnology 108 (2007): 1–40. 12. The brief overview of the history of sewage and sewage treatment that follows is drawn chiefly from the following works: Christopher Hamlin, What Becomes of Pollution? Adversary Science and the Controversy on the Self-Purification of Rivers...