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46 points

Ugh. I hate being that guy, and I realize it’s a meme, not science, but I can’t leave it alone.

Composting doesn’t get rid of metals, so you’d need a way to deal with them if you wanted to be safe.

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10 points

I’ll bring the magnet.

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11 points

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10 points

Especially if the compost is used for mushrooms. They have tendency to absorb heavy metals from the ground so you have to be careful where you pick them from and what kind of compost you use if growing at home.

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7 points

Most plants that we eat are excellent at taking up heavy metals too - potatoes and herbs especially.

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1 point

I didn’t know that! Thanks for sharing that info.

I was really into growing culinary mushrooms for awhile was cautioned about my compost choices and to avoid fish based ones because mushrooms absorb mercury(and others like cadmium) particularly well. I didn’t know potatoes and herbs did that too

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9 points

I got it. Force the rich to eat each other until the problem solves itself.

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6 points

No, it would increase concentrations. You need to get the rich to launch themselves into the sun

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5 points

So.

We force them to eat each other until their concentrations are high enough to extract the metals for industrial uses.

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4 points

That’s a feature.

We force them to gorge on themselves until there’s one, inbred, leaded rich guy left. Then we put it on display as a warning to everyone else

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3 points

We’re halfway there; many of the rich want desperately to strap themselves on top of a million tons of explosives in the shape of a penis. All we have to do now is convince them that there are poor people with money on the sun, and they’ll trip over each other to be the first to steal from the poor sun-people.

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6 points

also doesn’t remove prion diseases

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9 points

Not that I disagree with you, but it doesn’t make sense that they are stable in soil given that they are proteins, and those are relatively quickly decomposing in soil.

(Don’t) Ask me how I know.

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7 points
*

Prions are quite stable, and also they don’t need to stay in the soil for long, just enough to get reconsumed. Supposedly that’s how CWD (chronic wasting disease, not coarse woody debris), is spread among deer.

Edit: in context with composting, overall temps would be higher in such a pit but not by much. Its anywhere from room temp to 140F/60C. Prion destruction is a lot higher temp wise. As for bacteria in the pile, maybe? It might be more likely to become meaningfully degraded in a compost pile instead of normal soil.

As for cwd prion bio accumulation, it’s been hypothesized but not demonstrated (like grass picking it up from the soil itself). It’s spread in saliva and indirectly from the environment which is probably why you shouldn’t feed deer in areas with cwd and explains a lot of the spread. Also apparently the scrapie prion can endure for 16 years. Wtf.

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5 points

a quick look at wikipedia will show you are wrong

“In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment.”

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1 point

Okay but if we’re going to be that guy, “eat the rich” doesn’t mean consume their flesh.

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