F.A.,
The staggering amount of pollution this industry is crapping directly into our waterways is a closely kept secret by both the perpetrators (Norway's fish-farmers) and our collusive government. I've recently posted this information but I'll happily do it again for your benefit. If more people knew exactly how much poison this industry dumps into some of our most pristine and magnificent marine ecosystems 24/7... they'd have been 'punted' long ago. (As you read, bare in mind that you or I can be fined for taking a dump on our boat, and then flushing it out while in a marina).
Pollution volumes from this industry are not readily published nor, it seems, rigorously examined. In the nearly a decade I have been studying this filthy business this is what I've been able to dig up about fish-farm pollution:
- each of BC's more than 100 active farms dumps the daily equivalent raw sewage (untreated) directly into our waterways as does a city of half a million (500,000) people. This toxic cocktail of effluent includes: fish-feces, antibiotics, fungicides (poison), insecticides (poison), tin, zinc, lead and others. (An associate at Pure Salmon also provided data that stated: 3-market ready Atlantics' contribute an equivalent amount of daily feces as 1-adult human).
Let's set aside the other major issues with this industry for now (disease/parasite transfer to wild Pacific salmon, escaping alien fish colonizing our salmon habitat) and focus in on and try to put this pollution thing in perspective.
Let's use a comparison of equivalent (human) pollution from a significantly smaller source than a half-million people; let's use our fair city of Victoria (350,000) as an example, and a well suited one at that as Victoria also sends it's (screened) untreated-sewage directly into our ocean.
Data from a CRD publication pegged sewage volumes at the McCauly & Clover Point outfalls in 1999 at - 120,000/cu. meters/per day.
Other data from other sources on Victoria's sewage:
-Epochtimes: (May-06')120,000,000/LTRS.-DAY
-Victoria Sewage Alliance: 130,000,000/LTRS.-DAY
Extrapolation of the CRD data (x 100/active farms) paints a chilling and sickening picture.
12-million cubic meters of raw-sewage human-equivalent per DAY!
Further: 500,000 cubic meters per HOUR.
8,333 cubic meters per MINUTE.
138.8 cubic meters per SECOND!
... tick... tock... tick... tock... tick...