POLLUTION FIGHTING BEER

POLLUTION FIGHTING BEER
By Charles Osgood

One of the nation's most polluted places might get some clean up help from tiny bacteria that feed on good, old sudsy beer.

Hundreds of old mines pepper the earth in northeastern Oklahoma. Rain and groundwater flood the shafts and force toxic wastes to the surface.

"If you look up to the north, you can see the acid mine water coming up out of the ground. See how it's gushing out," Sparkman says.

Millions of gallons of toxic water stream across the scarred landscape and pour into Tar Creek.

" It wiped out all the life in the creek," says EPA's Rayfael Casanova who oversees the Tar Creek Superfund site.

"We've actually made a decision that at this point, we won't be addressing Tar Creek. It would just be too expensive to clean it up," he says.

A University of Tulsa biologist may have the answer. Pollution-eating bacteria that can render heavy metals harmless. It's called bioremediation. But in order to work, the bacteria need a source of nutrients. Biologist William Rosche found a cheap and plentiful source. Beer.

Rosche says, "Sure enough, the bacteria seemed to be quite happy drinking a little beer now and then."

Rosche says a colleague hit upon the idea after meeting a local beer distributor at a dinner party.

"She said that they had some expired beer that they would throw down the drain anyway and did he think that that could be used for the bacteria for our bioremediation."

Since that fateful night, Rosche has successfully cleaned toxic Tar Creek soil in the lab. Now he just needs funding to take his beer eating bacteria on site. There are more than half a million abandoned mines in the US which the EPA calls one of the most dire threats to our nation's water supply.

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