Comments geobeck has made

More harm than good

This is NOT a carbon tax, but it gives the impression that it is one.  People are going to fill up their tanks thinking that the new tax is offsetting their emissions, when it's actually going straight back to them in tax credits (minus administrative costs, of course).

This is a well-intended but poorly-implemented pigovian tax, and its only result will be to increase the cost of products on store shelves everywhere--because commercial truckers, who will be hardest hit, will pass the cost on to their customers.
On British Columbia unveils carbon tax posted 1 year, 9 months ago 4 Responses

Types of B-D plastic, types of landfills

A couple of comments on the comments:  

There are several ways to make biodegradable plastic.  One is to use biologically-based polymers that may or may not break down in a composting facility or a landfill.  Another common technique is to use mostly petro-plastic, but insert bio-plastic monomers into the plastic as it is made.  Plastics made with these hybrid polymer chains will break down into smaller pieces quickly, but will still leave tiny particles that will not degrade.  I call this "out of sight, out of mind" plastic.

There are also different kinds of landfills.  The "dry tomb" design tries to isolate waste, and make sure nothing gets in or out.  Another type uses soil between lifts.  Depending on the content of air and organic matter in the soil, aerobic degradation may occur.  Anaerobic degradation (which is much slower) occurs in many landfills.  The end-product, methane gas, is often captured and used to produce energy.  

But there is no guarantee that degradation won't occur in a dry tomb, or that it will occur in the other types.  Bill Rathje once studied landfills across the USA, and found no consistent pattern of degradation.  He found 60-year-old newspapers with the headlines still readable in some landfills, and paper turned to mush in others.  Local climate had less of an effect than he anticipated.

The best solution is to do what matrogers did: At an event where you typically use disposable items, do your best to use reusable ones.  The first 'R', 'reuse', is always the most effective, because the use of the second (reduce) or third (recycle) always results in the fifth: residual.On Umbra on biodegradable products posted 2 years, 4 months ago 5 Responses

Worse than nurseries...

...would be letting forestry companies suggest which trees to plant where.  Vast stretches of Canadian forest have been destroyed, despite the fact that they are fully reforested, because of the monoculture that has replaced the diverse natural forest.  

What kind of wildlife can survive in a forest that consists of one type of tree?  How long will it be before one strain of disease or bug wipes out an entire forest?  

It's even worse than a single-species problem.  Where seedlings are produced from cuttings from a small number of trees, there is essentially a very limited number of individual organisms in the forest, making them even more susceptible to disease.On They Could Teach PBS a Thing or Two posted 2 years, 6 months ago 4 Responses

How old is this story?

"...the world's first diesel-electric hybrid locomotive..."

So this story is what, 60 years old?  Last time I checked, all locomotives were essentially serial hybrids.  On Goals Gone Wild posted 2 years, 6 months ago 1 Response

Water Treatment != sterilization

Jan Steinman: I don't know what EcoReality is, but you should probably take a couple of courses before spewing such, well, sewage about wastewater treatment.  

If you released untreated domestic sewage into a waterway in sufficient concentration, that would kill just about any life in that waterway because the carbonaceous and nitrogenous components would create a huge oxygen demand, de-oxygenating and acidifying the waterway.

A well-designed treatment plant, even if it only has secondary treatment, will remove most of the biological oxygen demand using a bioreactor.  In other words, you create conditions where bacteria can eat the carbonaceous food, reducing (but not eliminating) the BOD (biochemical oxygen demand) in the wastewater.  

With tertiary (advanced) treatment (which is becoming the law in more and more jurisdictions), you also remove nitrogenous BOD (ammonia and nitrates), dissolved phosphorous, and various other dissolved solids.  You chlorinate the water to disinfect it, but most standards also require dechlorination before the waste is discharged.  I don't know where you get the idea that wastewater effluent is "unable to sustain life", but it's not from knowledge of wastewater treatment processes.

Hazardous wastes in domestic wastewater are still a problem, but that's where environmental engineers like me come in.  With increasing public awareness and producer stewardship programs (which require that producers take responsibility for their products at the end of their use), what people flush today is a lot less harsh than what they flushed ten years ago.  

Industrial wastewater still has a long way to go, but it's also much cleaner than it used to be.  The biggest problem facing waterways (at least in southwestern BC) is agricultural waste.  Factory farms release huge amounts of nitrogenous wastes that leach into groundwater, and from there into waterways, with no treatment except the filtering effect of passing through the aquifer--in the process, often making that aquifer unsuitable for use as a source of drinking water.  

So if you want to throw the guilt somewhere, don't attack municipal wastewater treatment plants, which are actually pretty green; attack factory farmers, and the few industries that illegally dump untreated waste into your drinking water supply.
On Umbra on peeing in the shower posted 2 years, 8 months ago 18 Responses