Can You Throw Biological Weapons In The Garbage?

When you envision an attack with biological weapons, you probably don’t think about what happens to the trash. But seriously, when the attack is over, and the buildings have been scrubbed down, the drywall ripped out, etc. – can they just chuck all that refuse into a landfill? Wonder no more! Somebody’s already looked into this.

Biological weapons, such as anthrax or the plague, can be both hardy and mobile. They can lie dormant for a long time, and can (in some cases) travel through the air. This is scary. If you put contaminated waste from a bioweapon attack into a landfill, could it escape into the air? Dissolve into the groundwater? Can it still reach the public and, therefore, hurt us?

According to a paper published in Environmental Science & Technology, the answer is: probably not.

Researchers from NC State and the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology did an EPA-funded study using surrogates for two key biological agents – Bacillus atrophaeus stood in for anthrax, while Serratia marcescens stood in for plague. The researchers introduced these surrogates into simulated landfill environments filled with fake building debris, and then used DNA-targeted techniques (namely, quantitative polymerase chain reaction) to see how and whether the surrogates were transported.

“Most of it sticks to the solids,” says study co-author Francis de los Reyes, limiting the public’s exposure to the biological agents – unless the public goes digging in the wrong landfill. But note that not all of it sticks to the solids.

Some of the surrogate biological agents leached into the landfill liquid, or leachate. This would be particularly true for landfills that are exposed to a lot of rainfall, or which contain a high, recirculating liquid content – a slushy landfill, if you like. And even those low levels of biological material would be knocked out by the wastewater treatment facilities that handle landfill leachate.

All in all, good news for those of us who only like anthrax on our iPods. And let’s hope the knowledge is never needed anyway.