This guy says that the Hydrogen Cyanide needed to make cyanocobalamin in energy drinks is harvested from waste treatment. He say they don't even pay for it.
Of all the gasses you'd expect at a sewage treatment plant, hydrogen cyanide isn't the major one. I'd expect tons of H2S maybe since that's a common byproduct of decaying matter, but HCN? It isn't easy getting Nitrogen to bond to stuff. Industrially, you tend to need a platinum catalyst as well as fairly high concentrations of methane and ammonia.
The way you get vitamin B12 is certain bacteria generate it as a byproduct of its existence, so artificial B12 is generated in a bioreactor that would feed those bacteria whatever sugars and nutrients it wants, and then it would get the B12 out of solution. Now you might go "Oh, they could use human sewage to get those nutrients!" but for food grade chemicals you'd need to extract the thing you want, so dealing with human feces really isn't conducive to that, I'd expect it's a big stainless steel container with electric heaters on it and some pipes that feed chemicals the manufacturer probably buys in bulk at high purity, then some sort of process extracts the B12 in solution while leaving the bacteria alone. The idea of extracting a gas that isn't really produced in abundance in raw sewage to follow some cockamamey method of producing B12 just fails at mutiple levels.
One more thing about cyanide is that it's a naturally occurring chemical. If you eat nuts, you're eating chemicals that become cyanide. Bitter almonds are something most people never will see, but in water their precursor chemicals will start to produce hydrogen cyanide in quantities that can hurt you if you're eating tons of the things, but your body can deal with cyanide in small amounts, and you know when you're getting too much because you're close to dying. People work for decades in plants with small amounts of HCN in the air with no ill effects, and they're trained to know what symptoms to look for, but they're acute symptoms.
Finally, B12 is a very trace vitamin as it is. As I recall from taking vitamin B complex pills, even if 100% of the amount of B12 in such a pill were pure sodium cyanide, it would not be a lethal amount. We're talking a factor of 1000. If you were to take enough B12 to contain enough cyanide to be potentially harmful (even if it were free which it isn't), you would be facing major physiological danger from taking a dose of B12 that would be several million times the normal dose -- several grams of a chemical you normally need about a microgram of.
It's a conspiracy theory that's got so many layers of wrong it's actually impressive.
The way you get vitamin B12 is certain bacteria generate it as a byproduct of its existence, so artificial B12 is generated in a bioreactor that would feed those bacteria whatever sugars and nutrients it wants, and then it would get the B12 out of solution. Now you might go "Oh, they could use human sewage to get those nutrients!" but for food grade chemicals you'd need to extract the thing you want, so dealing with human feces really isn't conducive to that, I'd expect it's a big stainless steel container with electric heaters on it and some pipes that feed chemicals the manufacturer probably buys in bulk at high purity, then some sort of process extracts the B12 in solution while leaving the bacteria alone. The idea of extracting a gas that isn't really produced in abundance in raw sewage to follow some cockamamey method of producing B12 just fails at mutiple levels.
One more thing about cyanide is that it's a naturally occurring chemical. If you eat nuts, you're eating chemicals that become cyanide. Bitter almonds are something most people never will see, but in water their precursor chemicals will start to produce hydrogen cyanide in quantities that can hurt you if you're eating tons of the things, but your body can deal with cyanide in small amounts, and you know when you're getting too much because you're close to dying. People work for decades in plants with small amounts of HCN in the air with no ill effects, and they're trained to know what symptoms to look for, but they're acute symptoms.
Finally, B12 is a very trace vitamin as it is. As I recall from taking vitamin B complex pills, even if 100% of the amount of B12 in such a pill were pure sodium cyanide, it would not be a lethal amount. We're talking a factor of 1000. If you were to take enough B12 to contain enough cyanide to be potentially harmful (even if it were free which it isn't), you would be facing major physiological danger from taking a dose of B12 that would be several million times the normal dose -- several grams of a chemical you normally need about a microgram of.
It's a conspiracy theory that's got so many layers of wrong it's actually impressive.
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