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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

What's out there?

More environment

The only winning move is to pay for an academic lab to crank out enough papers that the government can agree with your lobbyists and declare your preferred dumping ground "not the environment" while retaining plausible deniability.

    Nothing's out there!

Well there must be something out there.

    There is nothing out there - all there is is sea and birds and fish.

And?

    And 20,000 tons of crude oil.

And what else?

    And fire.

And anything else?

    And the part of the ship that the front fell off.

And 900k litres of fish sauce.

Or dump it in a volcano.

Shoot it into space.

The environment can handle dead fish. We just don't want it doing that near the humans because it's smelly. Dumping fermented fish wouldn't be like dumping crude oil.

The "environment" can handle basically anything given the right conditions and timescale. It's very much 'the dose makes the poison' here, too (eg. how stormwater ponds help protect watersheds from road salt runoff, but often themselves become far too saline to sustain the same ecosystem as the watershed). So while you're not wrong, none of what you commented really means anything. It's a broad assertion without any foundation of context.

The solution to pollution is dilution.

Certain types of pollution. If it biodegrades and less than a million tonnes are being dumped in total, dilution probably works. This is the case here. However you still don't want it anywhere near human settlements because it stinks

If somehow someone hasn’t seen this, they are in for a treat.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM&pp=0gcJCWgCo7VqN5t...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Is fish sauce a toxin?

It's the dosage that makes the poison. If you dumped it all in the ocean in a single spot then yes, it would probably kill the local ecosystem.

Yeah sure I’m deep ocean it would kills the local ecosystem

Which is something humans do regularly e.g. every time a house is built

This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.

The risk of dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."

> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”

The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.

There's not enough salt to sterilize the land where dumped. The salt in fish sauce preparation may be as high as 20% initially but by the time it's done, after having been drained and refilled multiple times, it's 2-4%. To sterilize land requires 5-10kg/m^2 of salt applied repeatedly.

I’m not talking about sterilizing land. Just that salt is not a desirable ingredient in fertilizer. Most plants will not thrive in salty soil, even if it doesn’t kill them.

The ocean seems to contain a great deal of salt though.

Absolutely. So the ideal solution would be to return it to whence it came, but presumably that’s easier said than done if they’re going to all this trouble to bury it in a plastic sarcophagus instead.

Or someone gets paid a lot more for the plastic sarcophagus.

The scientists who have been testing it since 2016 have looked at the evidence and they disagree with you. CBC had to do an access to information request for the results - it took four years. Here is their coverage:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/nl-st-m...

> "All fish placed in the effluent died within 15 minutes,"

The suggestion was to dilute it while slowly releasing it into the ocean. The quote from the report tells us nothing useful.

That article doesn't have any extra information that wasn't in the original poster on this thread.

As fas as everybody here knows, it's rotten fish, salt and vinegar.

They could mix it with woodchips and compost it and it would be an excellent soil amendment full of trace marine minerals.

Mix it with auto shredder fluff and burn it. I bet it won't smell any worse than that stuff usually does.

oh, a stinkier compost? sign me up!

> Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it.

And the fact that there is 900k litres of it.

That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.

This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.

>it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster

And this can't be solved by dilution?

Do you really think the super basic idea of diluting it wasn't considered by anyone involved? Why are you so hung up on this?

Someone bounced from "let's dump 40 vats at once" to "we can't allow even a slow leak". No, I don't think we're seeing rigorous scientific competence.

It's not like we humans have any aversion to killing individual wildlife, as long as the ecosystem is okay.

> as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.

Just use a lot of Dawn dish detergent

So, but… where do most fish go when they die?

Into other creatures that eat them?

So give those creatures a bit more Umami!

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.

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