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Comment by wang_li | Hacker News Reader

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."

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> ”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.

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