jon.cohrs

Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt

October 01, 2010

http://All-Salt.com
By Morgan Levy + Jon Cohrs

Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt is a site-specific project created as part of the 01SJ Biennial.
Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt is a unique low-dosage cocktail of our most commonly used drugs, all brought together in one simple salty remedy.

Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt was a collaboration with Morgan Levy a water researcher from UC Berkeley. Most of the U.S. water supply contains various pharmaceuticals from both humans and livestock. We harvest and bottle them to create a perfect aggregate of what America is taking to heal itself.

All-Salt is hand-harvested from the salt waters of Artesian Slough, outside the small town of Alviso, California where the pharmaceutical-rich waters of the Silicon Valley’s local wastewater treatment plant meet the San Francisco Bay and the old Cargill Company salt evaporation ponds.

Sewage piped from urban Bay Area communities to water treatment plants along the Bay’s edges drain treated wastewater into Bay waters. Wastewater treatment plants filter out most toxic contaminants, but not the pharmaceuticals that many of us flush down our toilets – anything from antibiotics to antidepressants that are not completely absorbed by our bodies. Valuable drug compounds make it through treatment intact and collect in the Bay, where they are available to be re-harvested and re-used. We then turn around and sell it in cure-all salty solution that is for sale at festivals, online, and at organic street fairs.

There have a been several nice articles written on our recent project, Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt:
> PFSK
> TreeHugger
> BoingBoing
> Grist
> Good Magazine
> Make
> Miskeptics
and featured on Instructables with a lively debate;.)