Comment by Symbiote
9 hours ago
Since this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?
From the linked Eater article:
>Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the provincial government ordered the factory’s drains to be blocked to prevent any more sauce from seeping into the ocean.
https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop...
I think dumping it slowly would be better than a hazardous waste landfill, but government bureaucracy is not capable of handling this situation.
In 2016, they dumped forty bats into the ocean but Environment Canada did some testing on the sludge and found that it would kill fish within five minutes. The environmental cost would have been obscene - it’s acidic, extremely salty and has little to no oxygen. This would have been a disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss before they bury it - they don’t want it to touch the water table.
I don’t really see what the problem is with letting scientists work.
Orders of magnitude more fish die offshore of this village every day. I'm skeptical of scientists who think there's no middle ground between dumping it all at once, and treating it like plutonium.
More likely there is some intersection between bureaucratic dysfunction and folks with a financial interest in a $700k cleanup project.
Put it on a boat, navigate to an area with a current away from any land and then slowly release it
Take it outside the environment.
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Sewers go places, and it is nearly a million liters of extremely concentrated stinky. If you do this, you take a single location source of stinky and smear it over a much larger set of locations that will then ALL be extremely stinky, in a way that isn’t easily cleaned with water as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
Instead the stinky will be spread through time.
The solution to pollution is dilution, and the ocean would metabolize it away fairly quickly.
The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.
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> as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
Just use a lot of Dawn dish detergent
I'd say dump it in the ocean, but I don't guess any boat will take it. Still, sounds like they're going to make the area around the landfill stink forever.
So, but… where do most fish go when they die?
Usually not salt baths and fermentation. Well... with modern levels of fishing most fish might end up in human stomachs, but im not really sure on the numbers.
Into other creatures that eat them?
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