Mango leaves: Indian scientists' solution to a $2.5T global shipping problem | Hacker News Reader

Mango leaves: Indian scientists' solution to a $2.5T global shipping problem

qz.com

148 pointsrubayeet19 comments

This article is like a game of telephone. The cited study finds that all corrosion of all types worldwide is a 2.5T problem. Shipping is a small fraction of that. Hard to trust the article after such a trivially false statement in the title.

Notably, the economic impact of the entire shipping industry is under 500B [1], which ought to cast doubt over the whole article.

[1] http://www.worldshipping.org/benefits-of-liner-shipping/glob...

Also @dang the article should link to the original at https://www.scidev.net/asia-pacific/r-d/news/mango-leaf-extr...

Those numbers you found are only for liner shipping, not all shipping.

The total world GDP is around 80 trillion. A 2.5 trillion dollar problem is about 3% of total GDP. That is an astronomical amount of rust!

In the context of a thread about the precision of quantitative language, I feel obligated to raise an eyebrow (and type a comment about the raising of said eyebrow) at your use of "astronomical".

The number of stars in the Milky Way is supposedly about 250 billion, so anything in the trillions is well qualified to be considered an astronomical number.

Technically, it could be 2.5T because they never say annually. So may be they are talking about 100 years :|. That said, the QZ title is really misleading and click-baity. They have a simulated environment test and yet to tested for real world conditions.

or the real real article: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.9b00632

> Hard to trust the article after such a trivially false statement in the title.

Usually, the article and the title are written by different people, so the accuracy of the latter shouldn't be viewed as an indication of that of the former.

I'm not convinced corrosion under water is any problem at all. Typically problem is fouling from marine growth. That's what toxic anti-fouling paint is for.

Corrosion under water can't really happen as not enough oxygen is there. Over the waterline (and across the ship) - it's different story.

Also we use sacrificial anodes that are designed to rust away and be easily replaced.

It is lab-tested and nothing beyond this

"""“What has been developed is a dip-coated method—we do not know the strength of this coating and its ability to resist wear and tear in real conditions outside the laboratory, or the commercial viability of the product,” Gosvami says."""

I have another solution: stop shipping so much junk around the world.

Watch the Story of Stuff https://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff, the True Cost http://thoughtmaybe.com/the-true-cost, and films like them and it's hard not to conclude that reducing the amount of shipping by 75% or so would improve everyone's lives and Earth's capacity to support life and human society. Some industries would have to adjust -- mainly ones filling landfills and producing greenhouse gases.

The Story of Stuff site has the details, but something like 99% of stuff American's buy ends up in landfills within a year. Go to Craig's List free stuff and you'll see tons of stuff people can't give away every day. Just the tip of the iceberg.

You can't "reduce the amount of shipping" by fiat. The best you can do is price the externalities into products we buy—which is a good idea and we should be doing a lot more of that—but that won't change the fact that (a) it'll always be cheaper to make some stuff elsewhere and (b) it's often impossible to make some stuff closer to you.

Good luck making (not just assembling) smartphones in Belgium or Iowa.

What you're really asking for is to make consumer goods so dramatically more expensive that repairs become economically competitive and casual disposal becomes economically untenable. Even then if you want to "fix" the problem, you would also fix the cost of housing, education and healthcare so that disposable consumer goods command greater portion of people's income.

  “so far it has been tested only in simulated laboratory 
  conditions rather than in actual use”

As with the weekly ‘battery breakthrough’: wake me when it turns out to work in practice and production can be scaled.

These articles... lemme try one.

Riding to Alpha Centauri on a Pineapple: Scientists' find key inside beloved fruit; eternal life?

question: are there enough mango leaves in India to extract the rust inhibiting compounds?

y'all haters are killjoys too

Fixing iron oxidation is great, my old VW would appreciate it, but I don't see how it helps much... and I'm sure marine coatings have a long history and a lot of technology invested. Wouldn't a systematically-better approach be to do as much local-to-customer, JIT manufacturing and stop shipping finished goods all over the world? If not just for climate-change but for reduced time-to-customer? (Caveat: Still must ship materials and specialized/complex goods that aren't available locally.)

Local manufacturing works great for some industries, such as band T-shirts. I know from chatting to Anberlin after their show in Sydney that they get T-shirts printed in each country they tour in.

It simply wouldn't work for electronics. A company could lose its brand recognition just because of bad PR from an incompetent assembly plant in one region. Customers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between regional variants, and outrage on the Internet would spread worldwide. It's just a whole lot safer to keep it centralised with proper quality controls.

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