I have a potential source of biomass that was inadvertently contaminated by the pesticide phosmet through a contaminated sprayer that was previously used on fruit crops.
The grower cleaned the used sprayer as best as they could but failed to do their due diligence to ensure all the phosmet was gone and proceeded to contaminate their entire outdoor crop with it.
This is all what I was told by the grower and I don’t have any reason to question the veracity of this story. How and why this happened is largely irrelevant to this conversation at this point, the damage is done.
Anyway, my question is, can this be remediated, and if so, how involved would it be to do so? and can it be done in line during extraction? The material is over a year old so it will likely need to be heavily CRC’d anyway.
Any help/advice/suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Seems like this is pretty soluble in water and many solvents. It also has a pretty short half-life when exposed to UV and when in acidic water conditions.
Usually you wash this off of vegetables/fruits/your hands. And then it goes down the drain.
I’m not generally “for” pesticide remediation - as there could always be byproducts and non-detectable stuff still around. But if you are going to do this anyway, I’d probably start with a LEL using a slightly acidic (pH 4-5) water wash. You could maybe get this organophosphate to come off using normal activated carbon filtration - that’s how you would remove it from drinking water for instance (not that I’m recommending drinking phosmet contaminated drinking water after passing it through your Brita… but it is used in environmental waste water treatment).
Here’s the most recent FAO for it via the WHO. Its got the tables for solubility and the half-life information I mentioned. Probably if the stuff is a year old AND it wasn’t completely DRY - then much of the contamination has already degraded. Especially if it was just a few incidental PPM which is what your grower said happened.
If its MORE THAN THAT - you’ll want to exercise caution when bagging/socking this material. phosmet can cause some weird neurological impacts… but if its a very small amount you’d probably be okay. just use standard ppe (gloves, sleeves, dust mask).