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Comment by lvxferre | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering: vinasse is the crap left after you distil the fermented mass, to retrieve the alcohol. It should not be an issue, because as mentioned by the text it's a good fertiliser; however law enforcement in most of the Americas does not fucking work, and Brazil is a prime example of that - if it's cheaper to dump it into the river than to store and resell it then producers will do it, laws be damned.

Another issue (not mentioned by the text) is that long-term sugarcane farming desertifies the environment where it's grown. Yeah - it is not sustainable in the long run.

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Here's another example that I ran into in Brazil, and ended up making and selling a business out of.

Whey, the by-product of dairy manufacturing, is most cheaply disposed of by feeding to pigs. The excess the pigs can't eat is supposed to be safely disposed of, but this is often deemed too costly, and it ends up in the river. A bribe to the right official will be cheaper anyway.

So I started to buy the stuff, for pennies per decalitre. Dairies didn't have to bribe officials anymore, and the river is spared. My refrigerated truck then brought this enormous amount of whey to my nanofiltration pump (setup with the help of a local chemical engineer), where we split it into Whey Protein Isolate, which is the powder bodybuilders drink. I then became a local supplier for the (at the time) only South American company that produced and marketed protein powders in Brazil, sold my share of the business, and came home a slightly wealthier man.

Every stage of this was a nightmare. The uses of whey have been well documented in the literature since the 1920's, and the equipment is cheap. In engineering terms, it's a completely solved problem. But the bureaucracy....

in austria whey is flavored with fruit and sold as a soft drink

Is it any good? The taste?

yes, it's one of my favourite drinks. it's slightly acidic and very refreshing.

I remember two dairy brands in Brazil doing the same, a decade or so ago. However the whey+juice mix was more expensive than plain fruit juice, and both advertised it as a "fitness alternative", so you barely see it any more.

Can you share a story about the bureaucracy and how you’d improve it?

No details. It is illegal for Canadian citizens to bribe workers of foreign governments. So, of course, I was able to do everything without ever exchanging money with a foreign official. But, if one were in a position to do so, I imagine things would have proceeded in a much more efficient way.

You just need to imagine that for every step of the way (say manufacturing, packaging and transport) there's a bribe (not necessarily to avoid a justified fine) for whatever official was supposed to take care of it. Corruption in South America is pretty much a way of life

I'm always kinda stunned by how destructive people can be when money is involved.

I'm not surprised, I completely expect it and do what I can to mitigate it. But it's still shocking. What kind of sociopath builds something and decides "I'll throw this leftover crap where others drink" for decades? And why do they have so much power, so frequently?

Money is always just a proxy. People have been evading responsibility for murder by tossing dead bodies in wells and rivers for millennia.

Whey is an example of ease of rationalization "you're just feeding the fish".

Are bodies toxic to the environment?

> And why do they have so much power, so frequently?

A business managed by a sociopath has a larger margin of profit, due to arseholery like: misleading customers, dumping stuff on rivers, bribing authorities, etc. That makes the business able to expand faster, more resilient to eventualities, and more attractive to vulture capital injecting money in it. Those sociopaths will also see no issue whatsoever on amassing power elsewhere, for the sake of their business.

As such, businesses playing by the rules are outcompeted by the ones managed by sociopaths. Darwin style.

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