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Comment by anon84873628 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

Or dump it in a volcano.

Shoot it into space.

What's out there?

    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.

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.

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