View Source | July 23, 2013
If you want to eat and drink clean water, then you should care about an element called phosphorus. We use it to fertilize our food, but sometimes too much of it ends up in our water supplies, causing pollution and fish kills. Researchers, including Distinguished Sustainability Scientist James Elser, are more concerned than ever because our global phosphorus supplies are non-renewable, and we are gobbling them up.
"There are big challenges, such as how to keep the phosphorus where it belongs and how to make sure we have enough phosphorus for the long term," says Elser.
Elser co-edited the book "Phosphorus, Food, and Our Future" to provide a comprehensive examination of the entire phosphorus issue for scientists, government officials, and stakeholders like farmers, miners, and wastewater engineers.