the.com/sludge
the gunk at rock bottom that somehow runs entire cities and feeds farms.
means Thick, soft, semi-solid muck — the heavy mire that settles out of sewage, oil, or any slow-moving slurry.
from An English word of murky, fittingly muddy origins, recorded from around the 17th century. It's tangled up with a whole family of squelchy 'sl-' words — slush, slosh, slime, slop — that English seems to breed for anything wet and unpleasant underfoot. It's likely a variant of 'slutch,' an older dialect word for mud and mire, though the exact root is uncertain. The 'sl-' cluster itself is one of English's quiet sound-symbolic patterns, where the very mouthfeel suggests something slippery and low.
- sewage gold
- Treated sludge fertilizes millions of acres of US cropland
- power source
- Methane from sludge generates electricity at treatment plants
- music genre
- Sludge metal fuses doom slowness with punk filth
- toxic legacy
- Sludge can concentrate heavy metals and microplastics
- volcanic cousin
- Lahars are mudflows of volcanic ash and water
milwaukee harbor sludge — contains 75 years of accumulated industrial contamination and pcbs from surrounding factories
deepwater horizon sludge — gulf of mexico oil sludge from 2010 spill, covering thousands of square miles of seafloor
thames river sludge — london's historic sewage sludge, dredged and dumped in the north sea until 1998