Editorial: Water and Environment Journal: Volume 38, Issue 3

You can almost literally see it from space: a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, fanning around the Mississippi River Delta like a grim halo.

Decades of toxic algal blooms in these waters have generated annual anoxic zones, killing off countless species, disrupting food chains, and impoverishing coastal communities that fish in these waters. Though all ecological phenomena are complex and multifactorial, the principal cause here is no mystery: agricultural runoff from the endless corn and soybean fields hundreds of kilometres upstream in the American Midwest, dumping huge quantities of excess nitrogen fertilizer into the watersheds and eventually, the Gulf.

With a little help from the cameras in orbit that feed Google Maps’ databases, you can see a different sort of phenomenon from space when you zoom in to the Danish city of Kalundborg. At first glance, it looks like any other small city with some industrial facilities: you can see the port, a couple of water treatment facilities, and the many tanks, towers, and steel roofs of the various companies that have a presence there. But if you look carefully, you might notice something else: orderly arrays of large green pipes running in and out of these facilities in bundles over the ground and along the roads, connecting them like a sort of macroscale circulatory system.

These pipes are the most visible infrastructure of Kalundborg Symbiosis, a now 50-year running cooperative program among the utilities and companies of Kalundborg to develop, demonstrate, and practice circular production. The pipes convey water, heat, and materials among the various partner facilities, enabling efficient reuse. The hemicellulose byproduct of biofuel production at one plant becomes the raw material for a prebiotic product at the plant next door, and the surplus (no need to call it “waste”) water of one process becomes the process water of another.

This isn’t a new concept; the German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig once wrote, in noting that the decline of agricultural productivity and rise of pollution in cities in the 19th century were linked and could (hypothetically) be simultaneously solved: “If it were practicable to collect, with the least loss, all the solid and fluid excrements of the inhabitants of the town, and return to each farmer the portion arising from produce originally supplied by him to the town, the productiveness of the land might be maintained almost unimpaired for ages to come, and the existing store of mineral elements in every fertile field would be amply sufficient for the wants of increasing populations.”1

Liebig’s work had an enormous influence on Karl Marx, who characterized this disconnection as a rift in the interactions between humans and nature (and between the town and the country), a concept further developed by sociologist John Bellamy Foster as “metabolic rift” which, stated concisely, posits that industrialization tends to extract more resources than it returns to the places from which they are extracted (Foster, 1999). Recently, metabolic rift theory has been applied to characterize the effects of human activity on the water cycle (Hargrove, 2021) and to understanding water stress as a source of international conflict (Ul-Durar, 2023). In these pages last year, my editorial colleague Leopoldo Mendoza-Espinosa (2023) highlighted another example of a potential metabolic rift in water resources in the proposed desalination of water from the Sea of Cortez (in Mexico) to supply the freshwater needs of agriculture and population growth in Arizona (in the United States), with Mexico left to deal with the brines and energy requirements of industrial-scale reverse osmosis. (He also noted that this pattern pre-dates Marx and Liebig’s time by quite a bit, going back to at least the first interactions between Europeans and the Aztecs).

Kalundborg Symbiosis may show us a way forward, a possible path to maintaining the standards of living enabled by industrialization while healing the rifts it has caused along the way. However, the needs (and surpluses) of industries and the geographies they occupy vary widely. A concerted effort will be required to identify the unique symbiotic opportunities of each region.

Water researchers and practitioners have a significant role to play in such an ambitious transformation, as water (literally) runs through it all. Ideally, we will identify opportunities for water surpluses to be utilized with a minimum of treatment, but specialized treatment technologies and reuse applications can expand the opportunity space and give symbiotic initiatives room to grow in new directions. The biomanufacturing sector—which has a considerable presence in Kalundborg and is expected to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming decades—uses enormous quantities of water, but also presents tremendous opportunities for creative use of organic surpluses as feedstocks. With the right treatment, one plant’s high COD effluent could become an economical carbon and water source for its neighbor. The concentrated reject stream from reverse osmosis—typically thought of as a brine to be disposed of—could become a sustainable source of mineral nutrients for farms in the region.

Which brings us back to the Mississippi Delta. Industrialization translated into agriculture made it possible for the planet to feed billions of people. We shouldn’t lose sight of that fact, even as we look to mitigate and ultimately reverse the impacts industrialized agriculture has had on the climate. For over a century we’ve been pulling nitrogen out of the air (via the Haber-Bosch process) and phosphorus out of the ground (via mining). What are the opportunities to capture and reuse those nutrients before they run downstream, polluting other waters and necessitating another round of carbon-intensive extraction? For that matter, how can we improve fertilization practices to the point that nothing needs to run downstream in the first place?

As we get better at running our factories more efficiently—through collaboration and symbiosis, and also through the “smart” innovations of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—we need to make sure the best new practices translate into the fields as well.

References

Foster, J.B. (1999) Marx's Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 366-405.

Hargrove, A. (2021) The global water crises: a cross-national analysis of metabolic rift theory. Journal of Political Ecology, 28(1), 376-394.

Mendoza-Espinosa, L. (2023) Editorial. Water and Environment Journal, 37(4), 631-632.

Ul-Durar, S., Shah, M., De Sisto, M., & Arshed, N. (2023) Metabolic rift theory and the complexities of water conflict between India and Pakistan: A pathway to effective environmental management. Journal of Environmental Management, 347, 119164.

Brian T. Hawkins
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC, USA
Contact: bthawkin@ncsu.edu

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