Dig a hole… but not next to the escarole!
I live in small northern town. Years ago, we had several mechanics that used to collect all the old engine oil around town, collect it all in tanks and then use it as fuel to power specialized furnaces to heat their garages. Those furnaces were environmentally unfriendly because it burned dirty oil, in a dirty furnace in an inefficient way so it was deemed environmentally unfriendly and phased out.
Then the town developed a program of allowing residents to take any used oil they had at home from their own oil change jobs they did to be collected at the local dump. There was a big tank there and we could just dump our oil there and then it would be taken to be processed somewhere else.
I do all my own oil changes on my vehicles and motorcycles, so in a year, I end up with several liters of oil in my garage that I have to get ride of. I know several other guys around town who do the same and they end up with several liters of oil in their garages. So for a while, we all took our oil to the dump for safe handling.
The town then cut that program to save money and then directed everyone to a few local garages where used oil could be collected. A few years go by and now those garages don’t want to accept any used oil because it costs them money after a while when their collections get too much because they are collecting oil themselves as a business when they do oil changes. They just don’t want the hassle of collecting oil from a bunch of guys in town who sometimes end up with several gallons of the stuff because we don’t have anywhere to take our used oil.
So now, myself and several guys in town have resorted to secretly sending our used oil in the regular trash. Every week, we just fill a one liter bottle of used motor oil and throw it out with the trash. Little by little over a year, we get rid of all our oil, in the regular garbage … into the dump, unprocessed and it all seeps into the ground water.
All because our local municipality, regional government and environmental protection agencies don’t want to make it easy for us regular people to have a safe way to dispose of our used motor oil.
As dirty as it was with the garages that burned used motor oil years ago … the annual pollution they generated paled in comparison to the mining smelters in our area or the pulp and paper mills that are also in our region, who all pump thousands of tons of pollution into the air every year. Instead our only easy option is to throw it all into the trash.
One of our local councils tried to ban home oil changes.
If you weren’t in an industrial zone, you weren’t allowed to perform any work on your car whatsoever, we had one tech who received a fine because he helped a friend change a tyre in his own driveway.
There were protests at the next council meeting, the councillors demanded a police escort from the building and the new bylaws were reverted.
All because our local municipality, regional government and environmental protection agencies don’t want to make it easy for us regular people to have a safe way to dispose of our used motor oil
There is no “safe” way… It’s all a matter of you being ok with the environmental destruction of what you are doing and the horror that is “the solution to pollution is dilution”.
Most people are ok with it, so you (and me) x a few billion and its why the planets biosphere is in a complete fucking mess. Sixth mass extinction, plastic ubiquity, pfas every where, climate change, shitty air quality etal
“If we carry on with the way we are going now, I can’t see this civilisation lasting to the end of this century… no chance in my view, on the current trajectory” - Professor Tim Lenton Chair of Climate Change and Earth System Science, University of Exeter.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/07/un-expert-human-rights-climate-crisis-economy
Outgoing special rapporteur David Boyd says ‘there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand how grave this is’
In that respect
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/06/14/opinion/science-civilization-collapse-environment-limits
Rees bluntly states, “the human enterprise is effectively subsuming the ecosphere” and “wide-spread societal collapse cannot be averted — collapse is not a problem to be solved, but rather the final stage of a cycle to be endured.”
Wrong, corporations are the issue. Any company that produces oil, plastics, other base products, etc should be required to accept the return of base product and be required to recycle it properly. Shouldnt be on the end consumer as we arent the problem.
I’ve seen 5 quart jugs abandoned at the doorstep of the quickie lube like a baby at the orphanage
Unless your municipality is not following proper dump design, none of that oil you send in the trash is ever going into the groundwater. Dumps are designed to never let anything decay or escape into the ground, with layers of plastic barriers laid every x feet, along with reduction of microbes, and more. They’re designed to completely prevent exactly what you’re talking about.
I’m very confident that this very environmentally conscious municipality took all necessary precautions to safely deposit their trash.
So you have no proof, you’re just assuming.
What do you think I assumed?
That the landfill is allowing trash to leech into the groundwater. If you are “very confident” that they are allowing that then go ahead and report them to the EPA. They’d be in violation of a number of federal laws.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-40/chapter-I/subchapter-I/part-258
You think companies care about epa? My city been paying epa fines for decades for dumping raw sewage in the river everytime they experience overflow…which happen everytime it rained.
source or gtfo.
I expressed doubts that they would apply the necessary diligence which is reasonable with the given information. But this is of course all speculation because nobody knows which place this is about our OP might have just made it all up.
I expressed doubts
…
I’m very confident
which is reasonable with the given information
no it’s not.
Just because a city stops providing a service has absolutely no bearing on whether or not they follow federal laws. In fact reducing those other service was maybe done so that they could continue to follow federal regulations. That’s more likely than “city cuts one service so they must be breaking federal laws”. Your logic would have made more sense if you literally went the opposite direction with it. “City cuts services so it can focus on federal requirements, since other services were costing the city money and taxpayer revenue isn’t high enough to cover supplemental services”
But this is of course all speculation because nobody knows which place this is about our OP might have just made it all up.
and we can at least speculate with logic. If a city is cutting services, it’s probably because they need to fund other (required) things. If a city is in the USA (which it sounds like from OPs comment) then they have to follow federal regulations. If the city was doing what OP said they would be breaking SO MANY federal regulations that OP should report them. What is entirely more likely is that the city is following federal regulations, none of the oil OP put into the trash made it into groundwater, and that if it did, OP should be reporting the city to the EPA (which fines hundreds of millions for violations like this).
We had a bit of stockpile of used motor oil. We used it to treat redgum sleepers to make a deck at the back of my brothers place.
The parts of the deck treated with motor oil are still pristine and intact. The parts treated with linseed oil discoloured. The untreated parts of the deck splintered and rotted.
Several years ago, a friend sent out a mass email asking for help with a property he recently bought. When we arrived, there were 50-gallon metal drums filled with wooden-fencing bathing in motor oil.
To this day, my dad’s friends still paint their posts and fences with motor oil. When I was a kid I asked my dad if paint was expensive, he laughed and said that it doesn’t work in Alaska.
Our most recent house is in a very exclusive neighbourhood so we decided to wash the fence with (grey) coloured fence wash, rather than our go-to motor oil. This is the first boundary fence in our family that is rotting out.
You lost me at the part where your 1-liter bottles of oil at the landfill are somehow “seeping into the ground water.”
First of all it’s in a plastic bottle which will probably take 5 generations to begin deteriorating;
and second, If all landfill trash juice is seeping into the ground water, seems like a disgusting problem the municipalities probably already found treatment for. And what is ground water to us unless it’s being pumped to the surface & purified for use? Do you honestly suppose municipalities would source ground water from UNDERNEATH LANDFILLS?
Lord help me if this is rage bait, because I’m 'baited.
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The water from underneath landfills gets sent to the wastewater treatment plant (maybe) which isn’t designed to treat hydrocarbons and then in ends up in your surface water, which I presume you value more than ground water.
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Maybe the wastewater treatment plant is on site and it probably gets less complete treatment than at a municipal plant.
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It’s also possible the dump doesn’t have a leachate collection system and it’s def ending up in the groundwater.
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Ground water doesn’t like…sit still?
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Also people have wells. The wells might predate the dump. Or they don’t know the groundwater is fucked and someone goes to dig a well and finds out the water is fucked.
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It’s not uncommon to build over landfills or build near them once they are ‘closed’. In 5 generations that might be a park.
I worked on the remediation of petroleum site and they are still sucking hydrocarbons out of the ground 70 years later. Didn’t stop them from building on top of it in the meantime, though.
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That 1-liter bottle of oil isn’t going to stay a solid well contained, sealed bottle after it gets crushed by a trash compactor in the garbage truck.
I’m not going to dox myself so I’ll admit that I probably send about 10 gallons of used oil to the dump every year now. I maintain several old vehicles and I also do a couple of oil changes for friends. And in my town, I know about five guys that do about the same.
The municipal dump is often designed to mitigate bacterial contaminants. The site is probably lined with some sort of plastic or rubber barriers to contain and control waste water and either treat it or evaporate it all and turn everything to solid waste.
The thing with used oil is that it reacts with rubber and plastics … it will break down those barriers over time if enough oil and similar chemicals get into the waste and percolate down to the rubber/plastic layer. Once those barriers are compromised, all the waste water chemical or bacterial and everything is now free to travel down to the ground water system which can affect water for miles around, depending on the geology and location. It can even tap into a local river, stream or lake and make the problem worse.
You’re really making me think about sending those bottles of oil to the dump … I’ll probably stop that and think of getting rid of the oil some other way now. I was just doing it to be lazy … now that you’ve made me think about it more, I should figure out a different solution.
cries in soil remediation
Put it back right where ya got it.
Returning it to mother earth 🙏
this is actually higher quality than current day popular science articles lol
I remember dear ol’ dad just casually waltzing over to the storm drain and dumping it right in.
