A polymer made from waste cooking oil and sulphur can clean up crude oil spills | Hacker News Reader

A polymer made from waste cooking oil and sulphur can clean up crude oil spills

news.flinders.edu.au

140 pointsxVedun18 comments

For those who were annoyed by the inconsistent units in the story:

"International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation reporting about 7000 tonnes of crude oil spilling from tankers into oceans in 2017 alone."

".. explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig on 20 April 2010 and subsequent release of approximately 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico."

According to this site (https://www.reference.com/science/much-barrel-oil-weigh-b29e...) "In order to get a metric tonne of oil, one would need about 7.33 barrels of oil."

7000 tonnes ~ 51,310 barrels

4.9 million barrels ~ 668,485 tonnes

Sometimes I wonder how numbers are regarded in journalism. From the outside it looks as if there was some cult around reproducing the exact string that the source uttered, but with no understanding.

Having been quoted in a newspaper article once, I can attest that journalists don't always care about precision when reproducing utterances.

Let's put journalists interview quotes on the blockchain! Then they can't be faked and everyone can ensure they are real!

False precision annoys me.

For example, an article might say someone travelled 1243 miles — very precise and authoritative journalism there. Of course, they were actually told they travelled 2000 km, clearly an approximation.

Length: Football fields

Capacity: Olympic-sized swimming pools

In France, I have noticed that journalists often say they were very weak in mathematics. Probably there is some kind of education effect that drives smart people weak in mathematics toward journalism. People opinion is very much influenced by journalists and I wonder if this selection bias is the cause of the bad image of mathematics (difficult, disconnected from the real world, ...).

Usually the exact string but with a conversion to Olympic swimming pools, London busses, Empire State buildings or other helpful units.

I see a surprising amount of awesome work coming out of the pokey town of Adelaide.

its a very pretty city. the university especially.

Even has a couple of Nobel Laureates!

And a fields medalist, in one sense. Terry Tao is a Flinders graduate.

The chap who helped make penicillin deliverable was from Adelaide as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Florey

Hopefully the Chinese gutter-oil industry[1] will start selling to this purpose, instead of as cooking oil!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutter_oil - while recycling oil from deep fryers might not sound awful, some gutter oil is literally taken from the gutter - sewage is being recycled and sold as cooking oil in parts of China!

Remember that manure has been used as fertiliser for basically as long as humans have existed, so waste being recycled is not a new nor unusual phenomenon.

From the article, at first it looks like the recyclers have done a pretty good job...

The illegal oil shows no difference in appearance and indicators after refining and purification because the law breakers are skillful at coping with the established standards

...but then...

Gutter oil has been shown to be quite toxic, and can cause diarrhea and abdominal pain.

...makes me think the standards and testing processes need to be changed.

Using manure as fertilizer is very different, in the sense that anything grown in fertilizer can be washed before eating. We don't generally wash things between cooking them in oil and consuming them.

> Remember that manure has been used as fertiliser for basically as long as humans have existed

But we don't use human manure for growing food for very good reasons--it tends to transmit diseases.

Spoiler Alert: The article takes too much space to say almost nothing.

sigh Science journalists.

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