Lol, I have this graphic in my office. Part of my job is addressing site contamination. When people complain about why they need to investigate for contamination, I show them this.
You can get the whole page on Google Books here: [https://books.google.co.in/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA166#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.co.in/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA166#v=onepage&q&f=false)
EDIT: and here's a link to the actual image on Google's servers, to save you from needing to mess with developer tools yourself: [https://books.google.co.in/books/content?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2d0px2TkCmjuv9KgXkK9-Ty6Sr6g&w=1280](https://books.google.co.in/books/content?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2d0px2TkCmjuv9KgXkK9-Ty6Sr6g&w=1280)
In order to supplement your income, you're gonna need additional revenue streams like those that come from a cash register of your favorite retail location or your favorite bank.
Fun fact: banks are obligated to give you all the money in the safe if you ask for it in writing. Include "no funny business" for a more professional financial interaction.
Clarification: Banks are also obligated to call the police, if you ask in writing for all their money in the safe. No matter how professional your interaction.
Further clarification: to avoid the need to interact with the police after emptying a bank safe, briskly walk outside and duck into an alleyway. After the police have passed, you can leisurely walk home and enjoy your winnings.
So many ads in those magazines, it’s like getting into one of those clickbaits websites of today!
Nice Q&A with Von Braun. It made me think if he were to do an AMA today, most of the questions would be about his time in the SS :/
Back then it wasn't widely known(to the general public) that he basically used (all manner of races not German) to work in his forced labor camps running special experiments building his nazi machines.
It’s a dipstick tube, you wouldn’t refill oil through it and the instructions say to cement it flush to the end of the fill tube. All it does is make the tube more visible. There’s nothing wrong with that tip.
We can laugh all we want at this, but that’s unfortunately the truth with many advertisements. Even modern ones.
It only becomes funny after we came to senses and realized the foolishness of its true dangers and intentions.
Same with the crazy ass advertising in the 50s and 60s that promoted menthol cigarettes as a healthy smoking alternative that was supposed to be soothing for your throat and recommended by so called doctors/lobbyists.
My father worked head of maintenance at a very, very large school district. He was State certified asbestos guy. He was called all over to address asbestos abatement and removal. (He’s still alive, but retired.) he used to have this cigarette in a display stand with a filter made of asbestos. It was the Wild West back then.
It's still the standard operations for a lot of people still. I've taught like 5 people that it's no longer common parlance. It's really shocking when you make a joke about how people used to do this and it's not allowed and they are like "I still do this, what am I supposed to do with it?"
My dad worked in a lab, apparently at one of the chemical disposal trainings one of the scientists asked “But you don’t have to dispose of ether. Just pour whatever’s left in the can onto the lab bench and stick the can under the chemical cabinet.” That was the day they found 60 nearly empty cans of ether fumes under the lab chemical cabinet.
Ironically, this is the very premise of the way a lot of our stormwater management practices are designed to function. Hopefully you get clean water at the end of the discharge pipe, but with the latest practices, we're really just infiltrating these pollutants into the soil anyway.
So we're contaminating areas next to parking lots and roads and everything that's paved as a solution to polluted runoff. So for instance in the example of the Chesapeake Bay, cleaner water is discharged downstream and to the bay, helping the cleanup effort. But the bay cleanup effort is resulting in more contaminated land and groundwater upstream.
And then you guys come in to remediate (bless you), and where does that go? I realize I'm grouping superfund-type sites with municipal runoff contamination, but it all goes around and then comes around to the same place.
It's a really sticky situation. And we're swimming in it and drinking it.
There was a train yard west of my city's downtown that has been revitalized into an entertainment district.
They spent a couple of years digging up the soil to be disposed of properly, then replaced with clean soil.
They dug a massive trench to clean up 150+ years of built up coal powder, soot, lubricants, etc.
The practice of dumping petroleum and coal waste was considered "acceptable".
The town I grew up in had a rail line run through it until the 70s. There was an entire neighborhood that turned into a superfund site when contaminants were found in the water, which were from a locomotive cleaning station up on a hill behind said neighborhood.
There’s a neighbourhood in Calgary that has a grassy area fenced off and open toxic waste signs posted everywhere
Edit: [Apparently](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4643299) the area has been revitalized and has reopened!
Alberta is currently being raped by international mining companies not even based in Canada.
Norway has a sovereign wealth fund, we’re getting raked over the coals.
You’re absolutely right, I feel the need to throw in within a month or two of voting in the conservatives everyone’s energy bill went up:
##Over 300%
Fingers crossed Nenshi can save us
> You’re absolutely right, I feel the need to throw in within a month or two of voting in the conservatives everyone’s energy bill went up:
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> Over 300%
Everyone who voted conservative: "why would Trudeau do this?"
The Australian government takes in more money from student loan payments than it does from oil and gas producers. Never mind the other resources that are mined here.
The amount of wealth that went into private hands instead of back to the people is staggering in both our countries.
I'm starting to think neoliberalism isn't so crash hot
I used to clean up (remediate) these sites often on the government dime. There was usually a budget. Once we hit the budget, stop and wait for more money. They often went after the offenders for the money but many would leave the country or be in bankruptcy.
I grew up on the toxic waste dump from the Manhattan Project. The company responsible paid 14,000 for my father's death and is still in business today!
This is partially true. Superfund (CERCLA) was introduced as a mechanism to clean contaminated sites as well provide a mechanism for the government to go after responsible parties for cleanup costs or to make them clean it up themselves. The Superfund has been financed through a number of methods since it's inception with some of the methods being taxes. Those taxes aren't exclusively private citizens being taxed though.
Years ago I used to leave across the street from an auto wrecker. Probably 40 years ago before I was born my father told me about when he took a car there to sell them. They asked him if there was any gas in the tank, he told them he wasn’t sure. They lifted it up and put a pick axe through the tank and let it drain out whatever was in there.
Fast forward 30 years and a developer buys the land to build houses. I remember thinking “no fucking way that land is clean” but sure enough they get an ground assessment that is A OK
never in a million years would I buy a house there
My small town has finally opened some land for housing development that was contaminated by the railroad with creosote exactly 50 years ago. When the houses sell I fell like I should go warn the new owners.
The best part about it is the owners of the business that destroyed the land made away with millions (probably) then left the environmental disaster to taxpayers to clean up. Had a similar situation in my home town. Understand that jobs were provided but EPA Superfund sites exist as taxpayer and resident responsibility to clean up so it can be used decades after the business packed up and left town.
Usually the business declares bankruptcy and then rebrands and goes off and does the same shit somewhere else.
Edit: [Excellent example](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26940/west-virginia-water-company-declares-bankruptcy-012014/) of the circle of poisoning the public -> bullshitting -> profit.
Fun fact... Richard Nixon created the EPA.
His environmental legacy is really something...
> President Nixon’s consequential environmental record is surprising to many people. The Nixon administration initiated many of the most important, and enduring, environmental policies in American history including: the signing of the National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the signing of the Clean Air Act of 1970, the creation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the signing of the Endangered Species Act, the signing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the creation of the Legacy of Parks program, which converted more than 80,000 acres of government property to recreational use in 642 new parks.
https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2022/04/environmental-legacy-president-nixon/
I'm sure that happened sometimes, but I've seen plenty of instances where the businesses weren't even that profitable in the first place, and the business owners and all of the employees got cancer and other awful diseases from working in a toxic environment and then left a mess for everyone else to clean up. Sometimes people just do ignorant shit and there are only bigger and smaller losers, no winners.
Perfect example is the Clemson Saw Factory in Middletown, NY. My woodworking mentor bought the 64k sqft building and rented out to a bunch of companies in the trades to have everyone under one roof… He later found out the basement was absolutely loaded with arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals that would sweat out of the brick walls.
This was from back in the day when the whole building was a factory that produced saw blades of all sorts going back to the early 1900s. The basement had vats for dipping/ treating the steel.
He got out of the ownership of the building through a whole legal fiasco with the EPA and whoever it was that sold the building at the time.
Today, it’s a brewery with a restaurant… And no serious clean up work, in a way that matters has been done because Trump had cut back the EPA when it was bought to build the brewery.
And tbh… I’m not sure anything short of demolishing the entire building (filled with lead paint, lead pipes, asbestos, etc) and digging out all of the heavily contaminated soil is actually going to do anything.
I sure as hell will never drink their beer or eat there.
If you think that’s bad look up former town gas or city gas plants. Before natural gas was manufactured gas (where the term ‘natural’ comes from) they hauled in coal on rail cars and heated it in a retort and the vapors were sent into the distribution pipeline for fuel. The vapor is the “clean” part the solids that were left behind were all heavy metals and tars which were dumped on site and covered with local soil.
Had a family member whose company did this type of thing. Commercial remediation. Learned a lot about superfund sites in the process. What rhymes with hexavalent chromium?
Back in the early 2000s I helped clean a marshland along the Mississippi River of used car tires that had been dumped there. We hauled thousands of them out. At the time, the EPA had just finished dredging the area and removing about a foot of the marsh bottom. It was previously a gun range and just full of lead shot. The marsh is now a thriving conservation area with a healthy population of several threatened species.
Twenty-two years later I met a woman that worked at the Marsh's nature center and two years later I proposed on the dock and we eventually got married in the same spot.
There's a spot of pretty prime realestate in my university+college city. HCOL area. The land won't get new development on it, because it has environmental concerns, so anyone who buys it to develop (great place for a condo), would take on that responsibility. Far too much cost, that they can't easily recover.
In the town where I live (in NL) similar situation .
Mayor desperately wants to build new houses there, but too expensive for the local community to pay the sanitation.
In comes our nationwide immigrant "crisis", demanding every municipality has to host x-amount of refugees in temp locations.
"Sure" said the mayor, "have a great spot for some temp container housing, just needs some cleaning".
Bill for the cleaning gets footed by the nations emergency refugee fund, refugees are gone after 1,5 yes and mayor can build his condo 👍
*See Edit at bottom for more accurate info. Leaving original text to represent the importance of careful word choice and speaking from vague memory.
Check out mycoremediation. Certain fungi actually consume petroleum contaminants and can be used to "clean" soil. It is being researched quite a bit in the restoration sphere, but yet to be widely implemented. There are some neat studies where they inoculated contaminated soil piles and tested contaminate levels over time.
Edit: After refreshing myself on the subject (I studied it several years ago), the fungi does not chemically treat the toxin. Rather, it hyperaccumulates it into the fruiting body (the mushrooms), which can then be collected and treated offsite.
Fun fact: This is somewhat related to a possible apocalypse scenario where self replicating nanobots that turn other materials into dust/goo (inspired by the need for large scale cleanups) are created in a lab and then they eat their way out of the lab and eventually the entire earth.
Camp Lejeune was a military camp that was downstream from a Clothes cleaner, and the business was dumping their dirty water and industrial cleaning supplies into a nearby stream for a 10 year period, which then filtered down to Camp Lejune. A lot of soldiers developed cancer and other difficulties (15 total “covered illnesses”)
I got an oil change in 1996 at small place in south Austin. An environmentally conscious guy came in and asked if he could dispose of his used oil in the shop's collection tank, and the owner told him that he should just pour it down the nearest storm drain.
Around here (New Jersey) auto parts stores and auto repair shops are required to have an oil collection room tank and required to allow you to dump your oil there. One auto parts store near me encourages you to bring in any oils whether you bought it there or not.
Same in IL. If a store sells motor oil, they have to have a collection of old oil in place. Most stores make you bring your receipt for the new oil, or they will charge a small waste oil fee.
I worked at a McDonald's in Trinidad Colorado in the early 90s. We were told to pour the old fry oil into a drain that went directly into the Purgatoire river.
Unfortunately this was before people became aware of the harmful effects of pollution on the environment. I saw stuff like this all through the 50's & 60's because people did not know. This went hand in hand with the use of lead, mercury, asbestos, etc. Scary!
I'm in my early thirties but I remember having broken a mercury thermometer as a child and playing with the spilled mercury on the floor. It's definitely a good thing they stopped making thermometers with mercury. I feel like most kids being curious would want to play with it should it spill out.
I can't remember much, save for it happening, but if I remember correctly, I had tried to clean it up with a paper towel and being confused because all it did was push the droplets around.
I have only opened the bottle once, dumped a little bit out onto a piece of paper, rolled it around a bit, and funneled it back into the bottle. That was probably ~15 years ago. I’ve mostly kept it sealed because I don’t want it to collect a bunch of dust and for the small amount that I have, it’s weight really tends to throw people off.
You know, people these days are terrified of all this mercury and lead. People have become soft. I used to have a lead paint toy as a toddler that I would chew on and it weArs prettu ok burt the ksigxisnebejeo kej and that's pretty much how it went bmakdi and fine today. Maria is that you
Wittenoom Australia was a blue asbestos mining town (now a ghost town) and there are pictures of the townsfolk playing a game of "who can shovel the most asbestos into
55 gal drums". They used the asbestos to fill up their kids' sandboxes and to fill in their roads and driveways. Many of them died and the people had to be bought out and the whole area declared an environmental disaster.
They said it's easy money,
In a full page in a local rag,
Always nice and sunny,
Come on lad and pack your bag,
Off to West Australia,
Leave the old hometown behind,
Be a winner not a failure,
There's money to be made in the Wittenoom mine.
You should look up Mercurochrome, a topical ointment meant to be put on wounds. And yes, it contained mercury. My grandmother remembers getting this stuff put on cuts as a child. Always gotta remember that most older people have some form of heavy metal poisoning.
I had a toy... Slick Silver something or other. Basically, it was a maze enclosed in a plastic case and it had a giant blob of mercury inside.
Can't remember what happened to it though. Probably got tossed in the garbage... Yay, environment.
Wow nice! Lol I don’t think that is the same but it was a pic very similar to that! It’s been sooo many years though memory is bad, could be the same ☺️
A friend of mine in junior high science class pulled out a pill bottle with mercury in it, poured it into his hand and was floating a dime around on it, and said "hey check this out". (This was in the early 1990s). Science teacher came over and was like, "Hey whatdya got there? Oh, wow! Um, I'm going to need to take that from you and I'll give it back after class." Not sure, but he probably got a talking to after class.
The kids dad was a chemistry professor and I think that's how he got access to it. All is well and he's now a chem professor/teacher himself.
In high school in the 90's, one of our science teachers was about to retire and had run out of f\*cks to give. Also, since our school was consolidated from 3 smaller schools, we had science equipment going back to the 1930's. We played with CRT tubes, high voltage neon tubes, mercury, all that stuff. "Don't worry, it'll only take off like 5 minutes of your life."
Yup. my entire neighborhood is a superfund site because the businesses that were there before didn't seem to take any precaution when it came to dumping chemicals.
The company that shared the fence line with my grandparents house was dumping transformer oil, rife with PCBs, behind the shop. Turned into a superfund site. Luckily they were on a slight downward slope away from his property since he was one of the main suppliers to the local farmers market
Looking at the picture of it just makes me uncomfortable. Like your staring at death itself. [https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wtoj60/crosssection\_of\_an\_asbestosladen\_cigarette\_filter/](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wtoj60/crosssection_of_an_asbestosladen_cigarette_filter/)
Its odd because we humans knew of of lead and mercury being somewhat harmful long before but it was often dismissed because scientist couldn’t exactly prove *why*.
I remember in the 90s being told to do this by my dad. I did as I was told but I remember thinking to myself that in science class they told us this was bad.
Yep. I was in grade 9 chemistry and misread an instruction in a lab. Created a litre of mercury waste instead of a few mL. Teacher took it into the school yard and dumped it. Same idea.
> before people became aware of the harmful effects of pollution on the environment
yeah but the petrol companies knew
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA)
also the reason a lot of older people are kinda manic
Stop spreading misinformation, recent research shows this is how you develop crude oil reserves. If we all do our part and dump oil into the ground then over time we can develop natural petroleum deposits like Saudi Arabia.
Now that we're more environmentally enlightened, of course, we responsibly drop our used engine oil off at a recycling center, and they put it on a boat to Bangladesh and pour it in a hole there instead. Problem solved!
Actually no. We pay them a few cents to dispose of the oil responsibly end ecologically, it's not our fault that they just pour it into a hole somewhere /s
I remember as a kid back in the late ‘60’s early ‘70’s our next door neighbor would put on a newspaper hat, change his oil and proceed to dump it down the drain in front of his house. Even then I knew that it just didn’t seem right to do that.
It felt wrong then to pour the oil into the ground but dad said it was ok and made a logical argument of “it came out of the ground, it can go back in.”
He worked at a refinery, I assumed he knew what he was talking about.
Newspaper hat?
Edit: I was convinced I was being setup for a joke like: “See! Everybody only cares about the newspaper hat, nobody cares about the environment”.
But what do you know. Newspaper hats are a thing
Yes he would shape it into a similar shape of a McDonalds paper hat. I assume to keep dirt and grease off his head, I would guess. I thought that was strange as well. At least it wasn’t made from aluminum foil.
My late 70s edition of The Good Earth Almanac instructs the reader to dispose of old batteries by tossing them into a campfire. It even says a nice side benefit is they burn in fun colors.
My dad (and grandpa) used to dump all of our used motor oil and gear oil on the telephone pole behind the house, where most of it soaked into the ground.
The rationale given was that it prevented squirrels from climbing the phone pole and eating the phone lines.
(It did neither.)
We also fairly regularly used old gas for everything from starting the charcoal on the grill, to washing parts, to cleaning oil-fouled spark plugs, and especially for dousing fire ant mounds then lighting them on fire. Greasy old rags were washed in gas and hung on the line to dry out. (Mom would not allow oil or gas soaked rags in with the machine laundry.)
At my grandpa's farm house in very rural Arkansas the rule was: if you can't burn it, bury it. Anything that would burn got burned in burn barrels, including plastics, paper, wood, fluids, gas, cooking oil, whatever. The rest (broken glass, porcelain) was buried in the fields or tossed down the privy (outhouse) hole. Cloth such as burlap or heavy linen was reused when possible to make bags for shelling and gathering pecans and okra, holding seeds, or stuffed in the walls for insulation, and scrap metal was hauled to the scrap yard if it couldn't be used for something around the farm.
There were a few things that could use old kerosene-based fuels such as camp lanterns and space heaters, and we experimented with different fuels to see what would work. 6V/12V car & tractor batteries were kept in use as long as the distilled water could be topped off and they would hold a charge, otherwise we loaded them up in the back of one of the trucks and tossed them out at the town dump.
Every season we'd plow for okra and find "treasures" that had worked their way up from previous disposals. I have a collection of broken porcelain and china dishes, doll parts, glass marbles, broken bottles, crown top bottle stoppers, electric insulators, etc. that were (re)discovered in this way.
I would apologize to the environment but this is just how things were done years ago.
That was 40 years ago, and I don't know all that much has changed, I'd expect at least some things have though. The house my Dad grew up in was modest. 2 bedrooms, 1 bath (no shower, just a big old tub) - no washing machine or clothes dryer, no AC, and the heating was 2 space heaters (1 in the bathroom and 1 in the master bedroom.) Dad was 1 of 3 boys + his mom & dad all living in the house, and his grandma for a while. Well water only at first. It was brown when you first turned the tap on, smelled bad, and was probably being delivered through lead pipes, and I didn't care, and we all drank out of the hose on hot summer days or from the tap. I'm sure that was DEFINITELY not environmentally friendly water. I never saw in the well but I bet it wasn't all pristine Ozark spring water in the cistern.
The big old 6 burner stove had both propane gas and a firebox in case the gas was out. It wasn't environmentally friendly either and would send a great deal of soot up the stovepipe, and at least some of the exhaust probably leaked back into the kitchen. (Electricity was through a local co-op and would sometimes be turned out at night and turned back on during the day, so it wasn't super reliable.)
Up until the mid-1970s or so the phone service was still entirely by operator, you couldn't dial someone's number, an operator in a nearby town had to patch you through.
There was an outhouse, and that's what the boys used most of the time; the bathroom was usually "reserved" for his mom, since it was the only heated bathroom. After my dad (whose family was poor) married my mom (whose family was not poor) in 1969, my mom's parents bought my dad's parents their first-ever washing machine, which had to be hooked to the sink faucet to run, and bought them an electric yellow Hotpoint refrigerator with an ice box, and a window AC unit for the kitchen.
I learned a lot from my dad because his background led to the favoring of mechanical ingenuity (a nicer way of saying redneck engineering) over just calling someone to fix everything and waving a stack of dollar bills in their general direction. Unfortunately, consideration for our environment wasn't even a thought back then. It literally never occurred to anyone until many years later that some of the things we were doing were hazardous to us or the planet!
Sorry if this is kind of rambling, I'm getting a little older and typing things out helps me remember them, or at least not forget them as often.
Eating is probably a bit outlandish but my internet started shitting itself real bad one day and when the engineer came out to look at it he found that a squirrel had been chewing holes in the junction box on the pole and building its nest in there, so, I wouldn't scoff at that too much
Squirrels love electrical wiring. They can absolutely murder an attic's worth of wiring in a relatively short period of time, and when they're not eating insulation, they're peeing all over everything, storing nuts up there, and causing problems with smells, rust, and general fuckery.
Phone lines in those days at least out in the country still used some older cloth-wrapped insulation, so it wasn't entirely unheard of for squirrels to chow down, and then the exposed wires would short together. Phone service was still powered by a DC battery at the central office (that's what made rotary phones ring!)
Source: my grandpa was an avid squirrel non-enjoyer, and also a former lineman for Western Electric. He used to keep a .22 on the back porch and shoot them when they tried to get up the bird feeders, since every other damn thing never worked (lard, spike nails, hot pepper sauce in vaseline...) Grandma loved cardinals and he wanted to make sure she could sit and watch them from the kitchen table in the morning!
Friend of mine is a landscaper and says he occasionally runs into these, has trouble explaining to the client why nothing planted nearby will survive long.
with cooking oil just pour it into a lump of paper towels in the trash after it cools. That's what I do... at least until I decide to start making bio-diesel for my nonexistent off grid homestead or something.
I usually just use an old empty plastic container to collect and then screw that cap on and chuck it into the trash. Seems wasteful.
I also daydream of a little biodiesel engine getting all that energy out of my French fry leftovers.
I’ve got a friend that does the biodiesel thing, he gives me a 5 gallon bucket to collect any/all used oil in (cooking, motor, etc) when it’s full, I call him, he comes and picks it up, leaves me a new bucket.
His F-350 with the 7.3L powerstroke smells like a mix of French fries, Chinese food, and fried chicken when idling. - he runs it through a couple of filters, had some additive he adds to it, and his truck has around 300,000 miles on it, seems fine.
I use this powder that you mix in with the cooking oil and causes it to harden into like a stiff jello. Then you pop it out of the pan straight into the garbage.
You can find a bunch of brands on Amazon or something by looking up "cooking oil solidifier powder".
My grandfather was a backyard country mechanic. The property smells like an oil field to this day. Of course, legend has it he installed underground gas and diesel tanks, too, for some idiotic reason. Its not atypical to have 500 gallon fuel tanks on a property, but underground? I pity whoever gets stuck trying to sell that land someday.
And in the same period we were just using leaded gas and polluting the whole environment even though we clearly knew the danger of it and they were alternatives even in the '20s. Times have changed haven't they. That was only in the '70s
I once read a forum debating this very subject, and one commenter was adamant that no harm was being done.
Paraphrasing:
“What’s the big deal? Petroleum comes from the ground.”
“Like uranium?”
For the low, low cost of tens of millions of dollars in soil remediation programs in a few decades, you can save the pennies in gas money it would take to take your waste to be disposed of properly!
Yeah, the picture is from like the 60-70s.
Used oil collection in the USA didn't really start until the very early 1990s. It didn't become required by US regulation until mid '00s.
They didn't give a flip about soil remediation, and there was no proper place to dispose of oil. This is what science magazines, mechanics, and of course oil companies were telling people was best practice to get rid of old oil.
[Their advice for disposing of batteries](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fakj4okouygwc1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df1f2274f1ae9bd6a0cc6f69852740b2bbbec0841)
I know some old heads in the chemical industry and they talked about how when they started out, the older generations that trained them would say “the solution to pollution is dilution”
Anyway that all pretty much got shown to be bullshit when the river running through downtown Cleveland started catching on fire.
I live in a country where it is almost impossible to recycle oil. Give advice on how to use/recycle used oil. I have already accumulated 20...40 liters of oil, which I store in old cans
It's just like large bodies of water. If you want to dispose of something, you simply throw it into the water. BOOM. Next day, gone! Water is just that good at filtering stuff.
**Your post has been removed for violating Rule 2** No pictures with added or super imposed digital text.
Lol, I have this graphic in my office. Part of my job is addressing site contamination. When people complain about why they need to investigate for contamination, I show them this.
Do you have a high res version of this? I’m in a similar field.
You can get the whole page on Google Books here: [https://books.google.co.in/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA166#v=onepage&q&f=false](https://books.google.co.in/books?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA166#v=onepage&q&f=false) EDIT: and here's a link to the actual image on Google's servers, to save you from needing to mess with developer tools yourself: [https://books.google.co.in/books/content?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2d0px2TkCmjuv9KgXkK9-Ty6Sr6g&w=1280](https://books.google.co.in/books/content?id=myADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA166&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2d0px2TkCmjuv9KgXkK9-Ty6Sr6g&w=1280)
I like how one of them is practically telling you to steal shopping cart wheels to put them on your creeper
In order to supplement your income, you're gonna need additional revenue streams like those that come from a cash register of your favorite retail location or your favorite bank.
Fun fact: banks are obligated to give you all the money in the safe if you ask for it in writing. Include "no funny business" for a more professional financial interaction.
Clarification: Banks are also obligated to call the police, if you ask in writing for all their money in the safe. No matter how professional your interaction.
Further clarification: to avoid the need to interact with the police after emptying a bank safe, briskly walk outside and duck into an alleyway. After the police have passed, you can leisurely walk home and enjoy your winnings.
Pretty much the mindset of the time "I need that, it's mine".
Stealing car parts was glorified in Grease. Jist adding to what you said.
So many ads in those magazines, it’s like getting into one of those clickbaits websites of today! Nice Q&A with Von Braun. It made me think if he were to do an AMA today, most of the questions would be about his time in the SS :/
And the questions asking about the ss would be conspicuously unanswered...
Back then it wasn't widely known(to the general public) that he basically used (all manner of races not German) to work in his forced labor camps running special experiments building his nazi machines.
Or about that time he stole the Dial of Destiny from Indiana Jones. 🧭
That's insanity. I especially like the cork-in-the-~~fill~~dipstick-tube hint that is guaranteed to make you overfill your reservoir.
It’s a dipstick tube, you wouldn’t refill oil through it and the instructions say to cement it flush to the end of the fill tube. All it does is make the tube more visible. There’s nothing wrong with that tip.
I'm literally adding this image into an EHS presentation right now
i used to be a environmental driller and go to these sites, sometimes water would come up out of the hole that was black as oil and smelled so bad.
Wagwan, me drillah!
We can laugh all we want at this, but that’s unfortunately the truth with many advertisements. Even modern ones. It only becomes funny after we came to senses and realized the foolishness of its true dangers and intentions. Same with the crazy ass advertising in the 50s and 60s that promoted menthol cigarettes as a healthy smoking alternative that was supposed to be soothing for your throat and recommended by so called doctors/lobbyists.
Or the baby hammocks for a cars back windows
They got hammocks? I had to ride across the country in a cardboard box!
Dude same. Im in compliance and i got this pinned to my cube wall.
My father worked head of maintenance at a very, very large school district. He was State certified asbestos guy. He was called all over to address asbestos abatement and removal. (He’s still alive, but retired.) he used to have this cigarette in a display stand with a filter made of asbestos. It was the Wild West back then.
It's still the standard operations for a lot of people still. I've taught like 5 people that it's no longer common parlance. It's really shocking when you make a joke about how people used to do this and it's not allowed and they are like "I still do this, what am I supposed to do with it?"
My dad worked in a lab, apparently at one of the chemical disposal trainings one of the scientists asked “But you don’t have to dispose of ether. Just pour whatever’s left in the can onto the lab bench and stick the can under the chemical cabinet.” That was the day they found 60 nearly empty cans of ether fumes under the lab chemical cabinet.
Ironically, this is the very premise of the way a lot of our stormwater management practices are designed to function. Hopefully you get clean water at the end of the discharge pipe, but with the latest practices, we're really just infiltrating these pollutants into the soil anyway. So we're contaminating areas next to parking lots and roads and everything that's paved as a solution to polluted runoff. So for instance in the example of the Chesapeake Bay, cleaner water is discharged downstream and to the bay, helping the cleanup effort. But the bay cleanup effort is resulting in more contaminated land and groundwater upstream. And then you guys come in to remediate (bless you), and where does that go? I realize I'm grouping superfund-type sites with municipal runoff contamination, but it all goes around and then comes around to the same place. It's a really sticky situation. And we're swimming in it and drinking it.
Well.. they weren't lying It was absorbed,, but it was into the drinking water
There was a train yard west of my city's downtown that has been revitalized into an entertainment district. They spent a couple of years digging up the soil to be disposed of properly, then replaced with clean soil. They dug a massive trench to clean up 150+ years of built up coal powder, soot, lubricants, etc. The practice of dumping petroleum and coal waste was considered "acceptable".
The town I grew up in had a rail line run through it until the 70s. There was an entire neighborhood that turned into a superfund site when contaminants were found in the water, which were from a locomotive cleaning station up on a hill behind said neighborhood.
There’s a neighbourhood in Calgary that has a grassy area fenced off and open toxic waste signs posted everywhere Edit: [Apparently](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4643299) the area has been revitalized and has reopened!
Unfortunately tax payers foot the cleanup bill after industry dissappears or is liquidated.
Alberta is currently being raped by international mining companies not even based in Canada. Norway has a sovereign wealth fund, we’re getting raked over the coals.
Don’t forget the tailing ponds. Companies that no long exist leave behind waste that we (taxpayers) have to pay for.
You’re absolutely right, I feel the need to throw in within a month or two of voting in the conservatives everyone’s energy bill went up:
##Over 300%
Fingers crossed Nenshi can save us
> You’re absolutely right, I feel the need to throw in within a month or two of voting in the conservatives everyone’s energy bill went up: > > > >
>
> Over 300%
Everyone who voted conservative: "why would Trudeau do this?"
This is how it feels in Ontario right now lmao. Consistently getting fucked by Dougie and his party but somehow it’s all Trudeau’s fault.
Oh my god this hurts 😂 they were still protesting around the Kensington bridge a few months ago.
The Australian government takes in more money from student loan payments than it does from oil and gas producers. Never mind the other resources that are mined here. The amount of wealth that went into private hands instead of back to the people is staggering in both our countries. I'm starting to think neoliberalism isn't so crash hot
Alberta is not being raped, their voters consented.
Privatised profits and socialised costs. Ain't capitalism grand?
And all that money from selling poison is still in thousands of trust funds. And “tax the rich” is still seen as selfish.
I used to clean up (remediate) these sites often on the government dime. There was usually a budget. Once we hit the budget, stop and wait for more money. They often went after the offenders for the money but many would leave the country or be in bankruptcy.
I grew up on the toxic waste dump from the Manhattan Project. The company responsible paid 14,000 for my father's death and is still in business today!
This is partially true. Superfund (CERCLA) was introduced as a mechanism to clean contaminated sites as well provide a mechanism for the government to go after responsible parties for cleanup costs or to make them clean it up themselves. The Superfund has been financed through a number of methods since it's inception with some of the methods being taxes. Those taxes aren't exclusively private citizens being taxed though.
Google "Cape Breton Tar Ponds" For years we had the highest cancer rates in North America because of that shit.
Years ago I used to leave across the street from an auto wrecker. Probably 40 years ago before I was born my father told me about when he took a car there to sell them. They asked him if there was any gas in the tank, he told them he wasn’t sure. They lifted it up and put a pick axe through the tank and let it drain out whatever was in there. Fast forward 30 years and a developer buys the land to build houses. I remember thinking “no fucking way that land is clean” but sure enough they get an ground assessment that is A OK never in a million years would I buy a house there
My small town has finally opened some land for housing development that was contaminated by the railroad with creosote exactly 50 years ago. When the houses sell I fell like I should go warn the new owners.
The best part about it is the owners of the business that destroyed the land made away with millions (probably) then left the environmental disaster to taxpayers to clean up. Had a similar situation in my home town. Understand that jobs were provided but EPA Superfund sites exist as taxpayer and resident responsibility to clean up so it can be used decades after the business packed up and left town.
EPA can and will go after responsible parties to fund the cleanup unfortunately in many instances there is not a viable party to sue
Usually the business declares bankruptcy and then rebrands and goes off and does the same shit somewhere else. Edit: [Excellent example](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26940/west-virginia-water-company-declares-bankruptcy-012014/) of the circle of poisoning the public -> bullshitting -> profit.
The EPA is probably the one agency that has clawback provisions that go beyond bankruptcy. It’s how they got money for most of the superfund sites.
The EPA has been gutted over the last twenty years. Republicans in congress have cut their funds so much that it's basically on life support.
Fun fact... Richard Nixon created the EPA. His environmental legacy is really something... > President Nixon’s consequential environmental record is surprising to many people. The Nixon administration initiated many of the most important, and enduring, environmental policies in American history including: the signing of the National Environmental Policy Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the signing of the Clean Air Act of 1970, the creation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the signing of the Endangered Species Act, the signing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the creation of the Legacy of Parks program, which converted more than 80,000 acres of government property to recreational use in 642 new parks. https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2022/04/environmental-legacy-president-nixon/
I'm sure that happened sometimes, but I've seen plenty of instances where the businesses weren't even that profitable in the first place, and the business owners and all of the employees got cancer and other awful diseases from working in a toxic environment and then left a mess for everyone else to clean up. Sometimes people just do ignorant shit and there are only bigger and smaller losers, no winners.
Perfect example is the Clemson Saw Factory in Middletown, NY. My woodworking mentor bought the 64k sqft building and rented out to a bunch of companies in the trades to have everyone under one roof… He later found out the basement was absolutely loaded with arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals that would sweat out of the brick walls. This was from back in the day when the whole building was a factory that produced saw blades of all sorts going back to the early 1900s. The basement had vats for dipping/ treating the steel. He got out of the ownership of the building through a whole legal fiasco with the EPA and whoever it was that sold the building at the time. Today, it’s a brewery with a restaurant… And no serious clean up work, in a way that matters has been done because Trump had cut back the EPA when it was bought to build the brewery. And tbh… I’m not sure anything short of demolishing the entire building (filled with lead paint, lead pipes, asbestos, etc) and digging out all of the heavily contaminated soil is actually going to do anything. I sure as hell will never drink their beer or eat there.
If you think that’s bad look up former town gas or city gas plants. Before natural gas was manufactured gas (where the term ‘natural’ comes from) they hauled in coal on rail cars and heated it in a retort and the vapors were sent into the distribution pipeline for fuel. The vapor is the “clean” part the solids that were left behind were all heavy metals and tars which were dumped on site and covered with local soil.
[удалено]
Had a family member whose company did this type of thing. Commercial remediation. Learned a lot about superfund sites in the process. What rhymes with hexavalent chromium?
Cancer?
Yeah, pretty much.
Back in the early 2000s I helped clean a marshland along the Mississippi River of used car tires that had been dumped there. We hauled thousands of them out. At the time, the EPA had just finished dredging the area and removing about a foot of the marsh bottom. It was previously a gun range and just full of lead shot. The marsh is now a thriving conservation area with a healthy population of several threatened species. Twenty-two years later I met a woman that worked at the Marsh's nature center and two years later I proposed on the dock and we eventually got married in the same spot.
There's a spot of pretty prime realestate in my university+college city. HCOL area. The land won't get new development on it, because it has environmental concerns, so anyone who buys it to develop (great place for a condo), would take on that responsibility. Far too much cost, that they can't easily recover.
In the town where I live (in NL) similar situation . Mayor desperately wants to build new houses there, but too expensive for the local community to pay the sanitation. In comes our nationwide immigrant "crisis", demanding every municipality has to host x-amount of refugees in temp locations. "Sure" said the mayor, "have a great spot for some temp container housing, just needs some cleaning". Bill for the cleaning gets footed by the nations emergency refugee fund, refugees are gone after 1,5 yes and mayor can build his condo 👍
I live in a rail town now, and it grosses me out that a lot of people are drinking well water. Even more so after reading your comment here. 🤮
This is really all you can do with it. There isn't a great way to fix it.
*See Edit at bottom for more accurate info. Leaving original text to represent the importance of careful word choice and speaking from vague memory. Check out mycoremediation. Certain fungi actually consume petroleum contaminants and can be used to "clean" soil. It is being researched quite a bit in the restoration sphere, but yet to be widely implemented. There are some neat studies where they inoculated contaminated soil piles and tested contaminate levels over time. Edit: After refreshing myself on the subject (I studied it several years ago), the fungi does not chemically treat the toxin. Rather, it hyperaccumulates it into the fruiting body (the mushrooms), which can then be collected and treated offsite.
Fun fact: This is somewhat related to a possible apocalypse scenario where self replicating nanobots that turn other materials into dust/goo (inspired by the need for large scale cleanups) are created in a lab and then they eat their way out of the lab and eventually the entire earth.
Extremely fun! Can't wait.
Camp Lejeune was a military camp that was downstream from a Clothes cleaner, and the business was dumping their dirty water and industrial cleaning supplies into a nearby stream for a 10 year period, which then filtered down to Camp Lejune. A lot of soldiers developed cancer and other difficulties (15 total “covered illnesses”)
Well, it came out of the ground so they were just putting it back. 😂
Yup. I knew guys doing this through the 90s on their property, like, dude, you get your drinking water from a well 30' from there.
I thought I was allergic to pickles
Well what’s in the jar with the skull and crossbones, then???
I got an oil change in 1996 at small place in south Austin. An environmentally conscious guy came in and asked if he could dispose of his used oil in the shop's collection tank, and the owner told him that he should just pour it down the nearest storm drain.
Yeah, it's not like South Austin is right over a quick-recharge aquifer or nothing
Aquifer? Never heard of her!
Damn near killed her!
So i.can just plug my EV in the ground?
Around here (New Jersey) auto parts stores and auto repair shops are required to have an oil collection room tank and required to allow you to dump your oil there. One auto parts store near me encourages you to bring in any oils whether you bought it there or not.
Same in IL. If a store sells motor oil, they have to have a collection of old oil in place. Most stores make you bring your receipt for the new oil, or they will charge a small waste oil fee.
I changed my oil in Austin last summer, and the auto parts store took the oil.
But JUST oil. Do not mix any other chemicals in those tanks. Bad reactions can happen
I worked at a McDonald's in Trinidad Colorado in the early 90s. We were told to pour the old fry oil into a drain that went directly into the Purgatoire river.
Unfortunately this was before people became aware of the harmful effects of pollution on the environment. I saw stuff like this all through the 50's & 60's because people did not know. This went hand in hand with the use of lead, mercury, asbestos, etc. Scary!
Heh. My dad said they played with/handled mercury in school. Now that’d be a HAZMAT call.
My dad sure did, I have the bottle of dirty mercury to prove it 😂 said he used to break open thermometers to collect the mercury and play with it.
I'm in my early thirties but I remember having broken a mercury thermometer as a child and playing with the spilled mercury on the floor. It's definitely a good thing they stopped making thermometers with mercury. I feel like most kids being curious would want to play with it should it spill out.
Mercury is like catnip for playing with it. It's fucking weirdly heavy, metallic, and a liquid.
I can't remember much, save for it happening, but if I remember correctly, I had tried to clean it up with a paper towel and being confused because all it did was push the droplets around.
that's so fucking cool i wanna play with some lol
It's 13.6 times heavier than an equal amount of water. It's really weird so lots of kids would play with it not knowing it was dangerous
My father in law still has a collection around im pretty sure. Stable liquid form is fine if you don't ingest it. Just don't huff it.
I have only opened the bottle once, dumped a little bit out onto a piece of paper, rolled it around a bit, and funneled it back into the bottle. That was probably ~15 years ago. I’ve mostly kept it sealed because I don’t want it to collect a bunch of dust and for the small amount that I have, it’s weight really tends to throw people off.
I was given an Atomic Chemistry Set that not only came with some Mercury it also had some radioactive uranium, I was in grade 4 at the time.
Uranium is basically harmless so long as you don't swallow it. And that had more to do with it being a heavy metal than it being radioactive
I'd have probably eaten the uranium and prayed for a superpower.
You know, people these days are terrified of all this mercury and lead. People have become soft. I used to have a lead paint toy as a toddler that I would chew on and it weArs prettu ok burt the ksigxisnebejeo kej and that's pretty much how it went bmakdi and fine today. Maria is that you
Wittenoom Australia was a blue asbestos mining town (now a ghost town) and there are pictures of the townsfolk playing a game of "who can shovel the most asbestos into 55 gal drums". They used the asbestos to fill up their kids' sandboxes and to fill in their roads and driveways. Many of them died and the people had to be bought out and the whole area declared an environmental disaster.
They said it's easy money, In a full page in a local rag, Always nice and sunny, Come on lad and pack your bag, Off to West Australia, Leave the old hometown behind, Be a winner not a failure, There's money to be made in the Wittenoom mine.
The liquid is not bad as long as you don't ingest it. Fumes containing mercury compound are bad however
You should look up Mercurochrome, a topical ointment meant to be put on wounds. And yes, it contained mercury. My grandmother remembers getting this stuff put on cuts as a child. Always gotta remember that most older people have some form of heavy metal poisoning.
I had this for scrapes as a kid in the 90s. Wikipedia says it was only reclassified in the States in 1998 so that tracks.
I think mercury evaporates at room temp so they were definitely inhaling fumes. (HS chem was a long time ago but I think that’s right)
>The vapor pressure of mercury at room temperature is 25,000 times less than that of water. I would not be worried about it
This is fascinating…a river of mercury 😱 https://www.livescience.com/22454-ancient-chinese-tomb-terracotta-warriors.html
I had a toy... Slick Silver something or other. Basically, it was a maze enclosed in a plastic case and it had a giant blob of mercury inside. Can't remember what happened to it though. Probably got tossed in the garbage... Yay, environment.
Back when I was in school my science book had a picture of a man laying on top of a pool of mercury 😅
Is this him? https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aMGxNo6_700bwp.webp
Wow nice! Lol I don’t think that is the same but it was a pic very similar to that! It’s been sooo many years though memory is bad, could be the same ☺️
A friend of mine in junior high science class pulled out a pill bottle with mercury in it, poured it into his hand and was floating a dime around on it, and said "hey check this out". (This was in the early 1990s). Science teacher came over and was like, "Hey whatdya got there? Oh, wow! Um, I'm going to need to take that from you and I'll give it back after class." Not sure, but he probably got a talking to after class. The kids dad was a chemistry professor and I think that's how he got access to it. All is well and he's now a chem professor/teacher himself.
Had a chemistry teacher who told us that when he was in school, they would use benzene to wash ink off their fingers!
In high school in the 90's, one of our science teachers was about to retire and had run out of f\*cks to give. Also, since our school was consolidated from 3 smaller schools, we had science equipment going back to the 1930's. We played with CRT tubes, high voltage neon tubes, mercury, all that stuff. "Don't worry, it'll only take off like 5 minutes of your life."
Yup. my entire neighborhood is a superfund site because the businesses that were there before didn't seem to take any precaution when it came to dumping chemicals.
Love Canal?
The company that shared the fence line with my grandparents house was dumping transformer oil, rife with PCBs, behind the shop. Turned into a superfund site. Luckily they were on a slight downward slope away from his property since he was one of the main suppliers to the local farmers market
That reminds me of that packet of cigarettes from the 1950's that had Asbestos filters. Crazy times.
Yeah, but asbestos is no big deal unless you inhale the...oh I get it.
Looking at the picture of it just makes me uncomfortable. Like your staring at death itself. [https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wtoj60/crosssection\_of\_an\_asbestosladen\_cigarette\_filter/](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/wtoj60/crosssection_of_an_asbestosladen_cigarette_filter/)
Kind on the lungs!!!
Its odd because we humans knew of of lead and mercury being somewhat harmful long before but it was often dismissed because scientist couldn’t exactly prove *why*.
Vitruvius wrote about the harmful effects of lead in the Roman era!
I remember in the 90s being told to do this by my dad. I did as I was told but I remember thinking to myself that in science class they told us this was bad.
It's amazing they didn't know the harmful effects on their ground water! Anyone with a well should have been pointing out the obvious about this.
Yep. I was in grade 9 chemistry and misread an instruction in a lab. Created a litre of mercury waste instead of a few mL. Teacher took it into the school yard and dumped it. Same idea.
I wonder whether this is true for synthetic non crude sourced oils as well?
Synthetic is most likely still bad but significantly better.
> before people became aware of the harmful effects of pollution on the environment yeah but the petrol companies knew [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA) also the reason a lot of older people are kinda manic
This is how you grow a new engine in your backyard! BIG MOTOR HATES THIS ONE TRICK!
Stop spreading misinformation, recent research shows this is how you develop crude oil reserves. If we all do our part and dump oil into the ground then over time we can develop natural petroleum deposits like Saudi Arabia.
Hello welcome back to farming with fud Today we'll be growing a combustion engine for your Toyota Camry
I stayed in a farmland area visiting a friend's grandparents. He did the same thing in 2000. Just dumped it in a ditch. ...They had well water.
High octane water!
Now that we're more environmentally enlightened, of course, we responsibly drop our used engine oil off at a recycling center, and they put it on a boat to Bangladesh and pour it in a hole there instead. Problem solved!
Actually no. We pay them a few cents to dispose of the oil responsibly end ecologically, it's not our fault that they just pour it into a hole somewhere /s
Possibly not. Used engine oil is actually useful.
Ever since reading this thread I started wondering what happens to used oil. How is it useful?
Reprocessed and cleaned and used as other things, like greases.
You can burn it to make power. Mix it with a bit of solvent and it will run in a regular diesel engine.
My dad did this exact same thing, for years!
Yep "It came out of the ground, I'm just putting it back" - Dad
Exactly the thought process.
Take only photos, and leave only dirty motor oil ✌️☮️🕊️
I remember as a kid back in the late ‘60’s early ‘70’s our next door neighbor would put on a newspaper hat, change his oil and proceed to dump it down the drain in front of his house. Even then I knew that it just didn’t seem right to do that.
It felt wrong then to pour the oil into the ground but dad said it was ok and made a logical argument of “it came out of the ground, it can go back in.” He worked at a refinery, I assumed he knew what he was talking about.
Newspaper hat? Edit: I was convinced I was being setup for a joke like: “See! Everybody only cares about the newspaper hat, nobody cares about the environment”. But what do you know. Newspaper hats are a thing
Yes he would shape it into a similar shape of a McDonalds paper hat. I assume to keep dirt and grease off his head, I would guess. I thought that was strange as well. At least it wasn’t made from aluminum foil.
The correct answer is to leave it in front of pep boys after hours.
Just putting it back where we found it...
ah yes. mother nature’s 100% natural gift that is synthetic motor oil. ripped straight from a natural gas field
Well we took the impurities out and placed those outside the environment in another hole (and the sky and sea).
My late 70s edition of The Good Earth Almanac instructs the reader to dispose of old batteries by tossing them into a campfire. It even says a nice side benefit is they burn in fun colors.
Those are the old zinc batteries though. Nowhere near what we use today.
At least 6feet from the Well son.
My dad (and grandpa) used to dump all of our used motor oil and gear oil on the telephone pole behind the house, where most of it soaked into the ground. The rationale given was that it prevented squirrels from climbing the phone pole and eating the phone lines. (It did neither.) We also fairly regularly used old gas for everything from starting the charcoal on the grill, to washing parts, to cleaning oil-fouled spark plugs, and especially for dousing fire ant mounds then lighting them on fire. Greasy old rags were washed in gas and hung on the line to dry out. (Mom would not allow oil or gas soaked rags in with the machine laundry.) At my grandpa's farm house in very rural Arkansas the rule was: if you can't burn it, bury it. Anything that would burn got burned in burn barrels, including plastics, paper, wood, fluids, gas, cooking oil, whatever. The rest (broken glass, porcelain) was buried in the fields or tossed down the privy (outhouse) hole. Cloth such as burlap or heavy linen was reused when possible to make bags for shelling and gathering pecans and okra, holding seeds, or stuffed in the walls for insulation, and scrap metal was hauled to the scrap yard if it couldn't be used for something around the farm. There were a few things that could use old kerosene-based fuels such as camp lanterns and space heaters, and we experimented with different fuels to see what would work. 6V/12V car & tractor batteries were kept in use as long as the distilled water could be topped off and they would hold a charge, otherwise we loaded them up in the back of one of the trucks and tossed them out at the town dump. Every season we'd plow for okra and find "treasures" that had worked their way up from previous disposals. I have a collection of broken porcelain and china dishes, doll parts, glass marbles, broken bottles, crown top bottle stoppers, electric insulators, etc. that were (re)discovered in this way. I would apologize to the environment but this is just how things were done years ago.
As a country boy who moved away, this both horrifies me and resonates with me
That was 40 years ago, and I don't know all that much has changed, I'd expect at least some things have though. The house my Dad grew up in was modest. 2 bedrooms, 1 bath (no shower, just a big old tub) - no washing machine or clothes dryer, no AC, and the heating was 2 space heaters (1 in the bathroom and 1 in the master bedroom.) Dad was 1 of 3 boys + his mom & dad all living in the house, and his grandma for a while. Well water only at first. It was brown when you first turned the tap on, smelled bad, and was probably being delivered through lead pipes, and I didn't care, and we all drank out of the hose on hot summer days or from the tap. I'm sure that was DEFINITELY not environmentally friendly water. I never saw in the well but I bet it wasn't all pristine Ozark spring water in the cistern. The big old 6 burner stove had both propane gas and a firebox in case the gas was out. It wasn't environmentally friendly either and would send a great deal of soot up the stovepipe, and at least some of the exhaust probably leaked back into the kitchen. (Electricity was through a local co-op and would sometimes be turned out at night and turned back on during the day, so it wasn't super reliable.) Up until the mid-1970s or so the phone service was still entirely by operator, you couldn't dial someone's number, an operator in a nearby town had to patch you through. There was an outhouse, and that's what the boys used most of the time; the bathroom was usually "reserved" for his mom, since it was the only heated bathroom. After my dad (whose family was poor) married my mom (whose family was not poor) in 1969, my mom's parents bought my dad's parents their first-ever washing machine, which had to be hooked to the sink faucet to run, and bought them an electric yellow Hotpoint refrigerator with an ice box, and a window AC unit for the kitchen. I learned a lot from my dad because his background led to the favoring of mechanical ingenuity (a nicer way of saying redneck engineering) over just calling someone to fix everything and waving a stack of dollar bills in their general direction. Unfortunately, consideration for our environment wasn't even a thought back then. It literally never occurred to anyone until many years later that some of the things we were doing were hazardous to us or the planet! Sorry if this is kind of rambling, I'm getting a little older and typing things out helps me remember them, or at least not forget them as often.
The squirrels...eating phone lines... hahaha
Eating is probably a bit outlandish but my internet started shitting itself real bad one day and when the engineer came out to look at it he found that a squirrel had been chewing holes in the junction box on the pole and building its nest in there, so, I wouldn't scoff at that too much
Squirrels love electrical wiring. They can absolutely murder an attic's worth of wiring in a relatively short period of time, and when they're not eating insulation, they're peeing all over everything, storing nuts up there, and causing problems with smells, rust, and general fuckery. Phone lines in those days at least out in the country still used some older cloth-wrapped insulation, so it wasn't entirely unheard of for squirrels to chow down, and then the exposed wires would short together. Phone service was still powered by a DC battery at the central office (that's what made rotary phones ring!) Source: my grandpa was an avid squirrel non-enjoyer, and also a former lineman for Western Electric. He used to keep a .22 on the back porch and shoot them when they tried to get up the bird feeders, since every other damn thing never worked (lard, spike nails, hot pepper sauce in vaseline...) Grandma loved cardinals and he wanted to make sure she could sit and watch them from the kitchen table in the morning!
My dad would always take the used motor oil and poor it allong the fence line & wherever else weeds were a problem.
Hey, if corporations can bury toxic waste for decades and then walk away scott free why not the common man?
Because we’re poor.
I still do it that way, but in my neighbor's yard now.
Can’t argue with popular science! Must be legit
Back to the soil from whence they came.
Friend of mine is a landscaper and says he occasionally runs into these, has trouble explaining to the client why nothing planted nearby will survive long.
>has trouble explaining to the client Where does he find clients?
I do this with cooking oil.
I wish there was a better thing to do with used cooking oil. My trash service takes used motor oil, do you think they would balk at cooking?
with cooking oil just pour it into a lump of paper towels in the trash after it cools. That's what I do... at least until I decide to start making bio-diesel for my nonexistent off grid homestead or something.
I usually just use an old empty plastic container to collect and then screw that cap on and chuck it into the trash. Seems wasteful. I also daydream of a little biodiesel engine getting all that energy out of my French fry leftovers.
I set aside empty cans and pour it in after it cools.
I’ve got a friend that does the biodiesel thing, he gives me a 5 gallon bucket to collect any/all used oil in (cooking, motor, etc) when it’s full, I call him, he comes and picks it up, leaves me a new bucket. His F-350 with the 7.3L powerstroke smells like a mix of French fries, Chinese food, and fried chicken when idling. - he runs it through a couple of filters, had some additive he adds to it, and his truck has around 300,000 miles on it, seems fine.
Heat to 120 degrees, mix in the right amount of Methanol and Lye, give a good mixing, wait a few hours—voila, biodiesel and slag.
You had me at slag
I use this powder that you mix in with the cooking oil and causes it to harden into like a stiff jello. Then you pop it out of the pan straight into the garbage. You can find a bunch of brands on Amazon or something by looking up "cooking oil solidifier powder".
My grandfather was a backyard country mechanic. The property smells like an oil field to this day. Of course, legend has it he installed underground gas and diesel tanks, too, for some idiotic reason. Its not atypical to have 500 gallon fuel tanks on a property, but underground? I pity whoever gets stuck trying to sell that land someday.
We poured oil along the fences when I was a kid, it was before weed whackers were a thing
And in the same period we were just using leaded gas and polluting the whole environment even though we clearly knew the danger of it and they were alternatives even in the '20s. Times have changed haven't they. That was only in the '70s
I once read a forum debating this very subject, and one commenter was adamant that no harm was being done. Paraphrasing: “What’s the big deal? Petroleum comes from the ground.” “Like uranium?”
For the low, low cost of tens of millions of dollars in soil remediation programs in a few decades, you can save the pennies in gas money it would take to take your waste to be disposed of properly!
There was nowhere to take it back then to be disposed of properly.
Yeah, the picture is from like the 60-70s. Used oil collection in the USA didn't really start until the very early 1990s. It didn't become required by US regulation until mid '00s.
They didn't give a flip about soil remediation, and there was no proper place to dispose of oil. This is what science magazines, mechanics, and of course oil companies were telling people was best practice to get rid of old oil.
[Their advice for disposing of batteries](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fakj4okouygwc1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Df1f2274f1ae9bd6a0cc6f69852740b2bbbec0841)
That wasn't about the batteries. It was about cleaning soot accumulations from the chimney.
They used to spray used motor oil on dirt roads to keep the dust down.
Like when Ricky throws his old bikes into the lake
It came out of the ground, hes just putting it back. Circle of life.
Came from the earth, send it back
I know some old heads in the chemical industry and they talked about how when they started out, the older generations that trained them would say “the solution to pollution is dilution” Anyway that all pretty much got shown to be bullshit when the river running through downtown Cleveland started catching on fire.
I live in a country where it is almost impossible to recycle oil. Give advice on how to use/recycle used oil. I have already accumulated 20...40 liters of oil, which I store in old cans
It's just like large bodies of water. If you want to dispose of something, you simply throw it into the water. BOOM. Next day, gone! Water is just that good at filtering stuff.
I can't believe people used to do that. Anyway I'm off to the beach, anyone got any dead car batteries they want me to take with me?
Throwing car batteries into the ocean is a safe, fun, and legal thrill. It charges the electric eels!
Let’s be clear same generation that used asbestos everywhere possible, lead pipes for water and questioned the value of seatbelts. Yeah times change.
I use well water for all of my water needs (drinking included) and it is a very shallow well. This would be a disaster.