How can phosphorus kill you

Potassium being a finite resource, some experts say mineral reserves of phosphorus could last for just around thirty years more, others insist it could be hundreds. When it comes to the three essential plant nutrients, nitrogen is obtained from the air and potassium from mineral reserves of which we have enough to last several centuries.

Continued population growth would cause a rising demand for food and consequently phosphate fertilisers as well. Meaning we have to be prepared for the current readily available supplies of phosphate minerals running out someday. Human activities are responsible for phosphorus polluting freshwater basins and causing serious environmental problems. Today, excessive use of phosphate fertilisers and manure is leading to a higher concentration of phosphorus in the run-off from agricultural land.

This excess phosphorus and that from livestock waste tends to collect in freshwater bodies causing the growth of toxic algae on their surface. Such toxic blooms make the water unfit for human use and activities like swimming and also suffocate marine life. There is also a lot of wastage of phosphorus at the sites where it is mined. Innovative measures are therefore urgently needed to curb the irresponsible waste of phosphorus. We need more efficient extraction of phosphates at source and agricultural reforms for reducing the demand for phosphate fertilisers.

Farmers need to be encouraged to use such fertilisers more judiciously and also to switch to using organic fertilisers and composting methods. At the same time, we also need newer and better ways of recovering and reusing phosphorus from organic waste and wastewater streams.

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Toyobo develops hollow fibre FO membrane system. Thank you for Signing Up. The cooled vapor solidifies into white phosphorus.

The reaction is:. Radioactive phosphorus helps locate the presence of tumors in the brain, eyes, breasts, and skin. This reaction is not very important because pure phosphorus has few uses.

The most important compounds of phosphorus are all made from phosphate rock or calcium phosphate. Therefore, the most important step in producing "phosphorus" is Two phosphorus compounds are used to make the coating found on the tips of safety matches. This can be done fairly easily. In , 91 percent of all the phosphate rock mined in the United States was used to make fertilizer. Modern farmers use enormous amounts of synthetic artificial fertilizer on their crops. This synthetic fertilizer contains nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three elements critical to growing plants.

These elements normally occur in the soil, but may not be present in large enough amounts. Adding them by means of synthetic fertilizer helps plants grow better.

Most farmers add some form of synthetic fertilizer to their fields every year. This demand for synthetic fertilizers accounts for the major use of phosphorus compounds. Phosphorus and its compounds have other uses. These uses account for about 10 percent of all the phosphorus produced. For example, the compounds known as phosphorus pentasulfide P 2 S 5 and phosphorus sesquisulfide P 4 S 3 are used to make ordinary wood and paper safety matches.

These compounds coat the tip of the match. When the match is scratched on a surface, the phosphorus pentasulfide or phosphorus sesquisulfide bursts into flame. It ignites other chemicals on the head of the match. Another compound of phosphorus with a number of uses is phosphorus oxychloride POCl 3. This compound is used in the manufacture of gasoline additives, in the production of certain kinds of plastics, as a fire retardant agent, and in the manufacture of transistors for electronic devices.

Phosphorus is essential to the health of plants and animals. Many essential chemicals in living cells contain phosphorus. One of the most important of these chemicals is adenosine triphosphate ATP. ATP provides the energy to cells they need to stay alive and carry out all the tasks they have to perform. Phosphorus is critical to the development of bones and teeth. Nucleic acids also contain phosphorus.

Nucleic acids are chemicals that perform many functions in living organisms. For example, they carry the genetic information in a cell. They tell the cell what chemicals it must make. It also acts as the "director" in the formation of those chemicals. The daily recommended amount of phosphorus for humans is one gram. It is fairly easy to get that much phosphorus every day through meat, milk, beans, and grains. On the other hand, elemental phosphorus is extremely dangerous. Elemental phosphorus is phosphorus as an element, not combined with other elements.

Swallowing even a speck of white phosphorus produces severe diarrhea with loss of blood; damage to the liver, stomach, intestines, and circulatory system blood flow system ; and coma. Swallowing a piece of white phosphorus no larger than 50 to milligrams 0. T he second most important use of phosphate compounds is in making detergents.

STPP adds a number of benefits to a detergent. For example, it can kill some bacteria and prevent washers from becoming corroded rusted and clogged. The most important function in detergents, however, is as a water-softening agent.

Natural water often contains chemicals that keep soaps and detergents from sudsing. They reduce the ability of soaps and detergents to clean clothes. STPP has the ability to capture these chemicals. It greatly improves the ability of soaps and detergents to make suds and clean clothes.

The introduction of Tide brought about a revolution in clothes cleaning. But STPP can create problems for the environment. After detergents have been used, they often end up in rivers and streams and, eventually, in lakes from waste water. And that's just fine for the algae that live in those lakes. Algae are tiny green plants that use phosphorus as they grow. As more detergents get into lakes, the amount of STPP increases. That means there is more phosphorus in a lake and that, in turn, means that algae begin to grow much faster.

In some cases, there is so much STPP and phosphorus in a lake that algae grow out of control, clogging the lake with algae and other green plants. The lake slowly turns into a swamp, and finally into a meadow. The lake disappears! Many people became concerned about this problem in the s. They demanded that less STPP be used in detergents.

A number of cities and states banned the sale of STPP detergents. STPP production had grown rapidly from 1. But then production began to drop off. By the mids, production had dropped well below a billion pounds a year. Interestingly, red phosphorus does not have the same effects. It is considered to be relatively safe. It is dangerous only if it contains white phosphorus mixed with it. Toggle navigation. Photo by: www. Discovery and naming Phosphorus and its compounds may have been known before Brand's discovery.

Physical properties Phosphorus exists in at least three allotropic forms. Chemical properties White phosphorus is the form that occurs most commonly at room temperatures.

Occurrence in nature The abundance of phosphorus in the Earth's crust is estimated to be 0. Isotopes Only one naturally occurring isotope of phosphorus exists, phosphorus Extraction It is possible to make pure phosphorus from phosphate rock. The reaction is: Radioactive phosphorus helps locate the presence of tumors in the brain, eyes, breasts, and skin.

Two phosphorus compounds are used to make the coating found on the tips of safety matches. Uses and compounds In , 91 percent of all the phosphate rock mined in the United States was used to make fertilizer.

Health effects Phosphorus is essential to the health of plants and animals. I n a field of sugar beets outside Cambridge, England, Simon Kelly stands above a narrow trench gouged into the rusty earth, roughly 15 feet deep and 30 feet long. The rock layers exposed in the trench date back more than million years, to when England lay submerged beneath a warm, shallow sea.

At the time, manure and bones were common sources of phosphorus, and when the country exhausted its domestic reserves, it looked elsewhere for more. Coprolites and other geologic deposits of phosphorus also raised the tantalizing possibility that humans had at last broken free of an age-old biological constraint. For billions of years, life on Earth had struggled against a stubborn lack of phosphorus. Finally, that was about to change. L ife as we know it is carbon based.

But every organism requires other elements, too, including nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen is the basis of all proteins, from enzymes to muscles, and the nucleic acids that encode our genes. Too little of either nutrient will limit the productivity of organisms, and, by extension, entire ecosystems.

On short timescales, nitrogen often runs out first. But that scarcity never lasts long, geologically speaking: The atmosphere—which is about 80 percent nitrogen—represents an almost infinite reservoir.

And early in the course of evolution, certain microbes developed ways to convert atmospheric nitrogen into biologically available compounds. This process of weathering can take thousands, even millions, of years. And once phosphorus finally enters the ocean or the soil, where organisms might make use of it, a large fraction reacts into inaccessible chemical forms. Read: A giant dust storm is heading across the Atlantic.

One of the lingering mysteries about the origin of life, in fact, is how the earliest organisms got hold of enough phosphorus to assemble their primitive cellular machinery. Some scientists think they must have evolved in environments with abnormally high concentrations of phosphorus, like closed-basin lakes. Others have suggested that bioavailable phosphorus came to Earth in comets or meteorites—a celestial gift that helped kick-start life.

Phytoplankton first began belching out the gas about 2. But they might not have had enough phosphorus to ramp up production, according to research by Planavsky and others, because the element kept getting bound up in iron minerals in the ocean, helping trap the world in a low-oxygen state for more than a billion years longer.

That we breathe oxygen today—and exist at all—might be thanks to a series of climatic cataclysms that temporarily freed the planet from phosphorus limitation. About million years ago, the oceans repeatedly froze over and glaciers swallowed the continents, chewing up the rock beneath them.

When the ice finally thawed, vast quantities of glacial sediment washed into the seas, delivering unprecedented amounts of phosphorus to the simple marine life forms that then populated the planet.

Planavsky and his colleagues propose that this influx of nutrients gave evolution an opening. Over the next million years or so, the first multicellular animals appeared and oxygen concentrations finally began to climb toward modern levels. Scientists still debate exactly what happened, but phosphorus likely played a part. Another group of scientists, led by Jim Elser of Arizona State University, speculate that such a pulse of phosphorus could have had other evolutionary consequences: Since too much phosphorus can be harmful, animals might have started building bones as a way of tying up excess nutrients.

Geologic weathering kept doling out meager rations of the nutrient, and ecosystems developed ways to conserve and recycle it. In lakes, for instance, a phosphorus atom might get used thousands of times before reaching the sediment, Elser says. Together, these geologic and biologic phosphorus cycles set the pace and productivity of life.

Until modern humans came along. Long before phosphorus was discovered, however, humans had invented clever ways of managing their local supplies, says Dana Cordell, who leads the food-systems research group at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia. There and in the Americas, for example, Indigenous people managed hunting and foraging grounds with fire, which effectively fertilized the landscape with the biologically available phosphorus in ash, among other benefits.

In agrarian societies, farmers learned to use compost and manure to maintain the fertility of their fields. Even domestic pigeons played an important role in biblical times; their poop—containing nutrients foraged far and wide—helped sustain the orchards and gardens of desert cities.

But human waste was perhaps the most prized fertilizer of all. Though we too need phosphorus it accounts for about 1 percent of our body mass , most of the phosphorus we eat passes through us untouched.

Depending on diet, about two-thirds of it winds up in urine and the rest in feces. For millennia, people collected these precious substances—often in the wee hours, giving rise to the term night soil —and used them to grow food. The sewage of the Aztec empire fed its famous floating gardens. Excreta became so valuable that authorities in 17th-century Edo, Japan, outlawed toilets that emptied into waterways. King, a forefather of the organic-farming movement who briefly worked at the U.

Department of Agriculture, admired this careful reuse of waste and lamented that he saw nothing like it at home. The so-called Sanitation Revolution followed close on the heels of the Industrial Revolution.

In the s and s, Europeans and Americans moved to cities in unprecedented numbers, robbing the land of their waste and the phosphorus therein.

This waste soon became an urban scourge, unleashing tides of infectious disease that compelled leaders in places like London to devise ways to shunt away the copious excretions of their residents.