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This was an obviously bad idea from the start. One of the tenants of a reasonably modern mechanical engineering curriculum is at least passing coverage of 'pro

This was an obviously bad idea from the start. One of the tenants of a reasonably modern mechanical engineering curriculum is at least passing coverage of 'product lifecycle', which basically means thinking about disposal/recycling during design. What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain?

mhurron 11y ago
> What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain? They clearly thought it wasn't their problem.
- Zikes 11y ago
  As much debate as I've heard recently over what qualifies a person as an "engineer", one of the key features has always been a very strict adherence to a code of ethics. I'm starting to wonder if the title is even worth arguing over anymore.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    In a highly competitive job market, it's hard to have ethics that result in your unemployment. And any actual "whistleblowing" that costs businesses money can be career-destroying, life-ruining, or (in the case of Snowden) force you to flee the country. Look at how nobody's broken omerta on what actually happened in VW.
  - cpncrunch 11y ago
    Would the people designing these products even be engineers?
  - the8472 11y ago
    The low-level employees can act ethically and still design unethical solutions: - development cooks up 20 different solutions, some of them containing plastic microbeads - plastic microbeads work better than no additive - plastic microbeads have the same performance as <alternative> - report concludes: "we clearly should pick <alternative>, due to similar performance and lower pollution" - management massages report: "we clearly should pick plasic microbeads since it performs equal to <alternative> and is cheaper"
  - smsm42 11y ago
    Which code of ethics? You're saying it as if there is and always been an objective code which says what is good and what is bad, and the choice is only to adhere to it or to be evil. I think in fact it's more like there are a tons of claims around, some true, some not, some important, some pretentious bullshit, some outright fraudulent - and one would have to navigate all this mess which also earning a living and maybe also working on stuff that is interesting. If you're unlucky, post-factum it may turn out the stuff you've worked on has horrible consequences - but I wouldn't say it is unethical unless you had full knowledge of what is going to happen. Which most people just don't. E.g. read about Thomas Midgley, Jr., who worked on both CFCs and TEL. Both proved horrible in the hindsight.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Pharmaceuticals are another such issue. Maybe we ought to be designing for inactive metabolites. But getting drugs that work well and are safe enough is a huge challenge already, I admit. Externalities are a bitch.
  - hanniabu 11y ago
    A friend of mine works in a Pfizer lab and tells me how the technicians are constantly pouring drugs down the normal drains because a lot of rooms don't have the special drains for chemicals. You'd think it'd be mandatory for every lab to have those special sinks. It may even be, but she tells me everybody is afraid of speaking up about that and various other safety protocols because they don't want it to affect their employment. Even if they did say something, it'll probably get stopped at management and nothing will every come of it.
    - mirimir 11y ago
      I was thinking post-consumer. But your comment reminds me of horror stories from India. Regulation there is even less well enforced, based on what I've read.
    - xkcd-sucks 11y ago
      It's really not difficult to chuck waste drugs into some bleach... more likely, nobody cares.
      - hanniabu 11y ago
        What does the bleach do? And she's a biomedical engineer and works with a lot of dangerous viruses both from humans and animals. So it's not just drugs that are getting put into the water sadly.
        mirimir 11y ago
        Bleach is standard for infectious stuff. Some drugs, maybe even most, would be destroyed. But some for sure would not. Maybe chromic acid cleaning solution?
_delirium 11y ago
Unfortunately I don't think there are that many cases where engineers even have much independent clout, enough to force the company to "do it right" vs. just make a note of problems. This kind of thing is taught in engineering curricula, but the ability of engineers to stand up to the business and marketing sides of things is pretty limited, outside of regulated industries where there is some specific legal framework requiring the company to do a proper engineering review and follow its recommendations. Then it becomes easier to say that your legal duty requires you to make a particular recommendation, and harder for the company to bypass it (though still not impossible). But if it's legal and just a bad idea? Hard fight to win. It doesn't help that engineers tend to be fairly weakly organized, without a particularly strong professional organization or union or other entity willing to put more muscle into the idea of professional ethics when it comes to actually saying "no" to management.
biot 11y ago
Tenant is the opposite of landlord. The word you're looking for is "tenet".
- rrauenza 11y ago
  Unless it's a Time Lord - then it's 'Tennant.'
slavik81 11y ago
> What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain? I'm willing to put part of the blame on the cities for this one. In many cities, wastewater treatment has not been given the necessary investments to properly filter the water before piping it into the lake. Plastic's not the only problem, unfortunately. http://greatlakes.org/CSOs http://greatlakes.org/CSOs
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  No wastewater treatment process is going to filter out microbeads - they're between 0.01mm and 1mm in size. You'd have to change the filters every five minutes. Properly treated wastewater is just that - treated, to make it safe (i.e. fewer pathogens). It's still not something you'd want to drink out of a tap.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    > No wastewater treatment process is going to filter out microbeads - they're between 0.01mm and 1mm in size. You'd have to change the filters every five minutes. Rather than filter, why not settle them out?
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Most of the problem with untreated sewage in the Great Lakes is burst capacity - when you get a rainstorm, the sewers overflow and dump raw sewage into the lakes. Having to store an entire storm's worth of water long enough for 10 micrometer beads to filter out simply isn't feasible.
      - slavik81 11y ago
        If you build separate sanitary and storm sewers, then you don't have that problem. About a decade ago, developing a proposal for solving that problem in Kingston, ON was part of my first-year engineering coursework. Obviously, I was not an expert, but after some research, my conclusion was that building storage was the cheapest solution in the short term. Opportunistically separating the sewers made the most sense over the long term.

mhurron 11y ago

> What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain? They clearly thought it wasn't their problem.

Zikes 11y ago
As much debate as I've heard recently over what qualifies a person as an "engineer", one of the key features has always been a very strict adherence to a code of ethics. I'm starting to wonder if the title is even worth arguing over anymore.
- pjc50 11y ago
  In a highly competitive job market, it's hard to have ethics that result in your unemployment. And any actual "whistleblowing" that costs businesses money can be career-destroying, life-ruining, or (in the case of Snowden) force you to flee the country. Look at how nobody's broken omerta on what actually happened in VW.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Would the people designing these products even be engineers?
- the8472 11y ago
  The low-level employees can act ethically and still design unethical solutions: - development cooks up 20 different solutions, some of them containing plastic microbeads - plastic microbeads work better than no additive - plastic microbeads have the same performance as <alternative> - report concludes: "we clearly should pick <alternative>, due to similar performance and lower pollution" - management massages report: "we clearly should pick plasic microbeads since it performs equal to <alternative> and is cheaper"
- smsm42 11y ago
  Which code of ethics? You're saying it as if there is and always been an objective code which says what is good and what is bad, and the choice is only to adhere to it or to be evil. I think in fact it's more like there are a tons of claims around, some true, some not, some important, some pretentious bullshit, some outright fraudulent - and one would have to navigate all this mess which also earning a living and maybe also working on stuff that is interesting. If you're unlucky, post-factum it may turn out the stuff you've worked on has horrible consequences - but I wouldn't say it is unethical unless you had full knowledge of what is going to happen. Which most people just don't. E.g. read about Thomas Midgley, Jr., who worked on both CFCs and TEL. Both proved horrible in the hindsight.
mirimir 11y ago
Pharmaceuticals are another such issue. Maybe we ought to be designing for inactive metabolites. But getting drugs that work well and are safe enough is a huge challenge already, I admit. Externalities are a bitch.
- hanniabu 11y ago
  A friend of mine works in a Pfizer lab and tells me how the technicians are constantly pouring drugs down the normal drains because a lot of rooms don't have the special drains for chemicals. You'd think it'd be mandatory for every lab to have those special sinks. It may even be, but she tells me everybody is afraid of speaking up about that and various other safety protocols because they don't want it to affect their employment. Even if they did say something, it'll probably get stopped at management and nothing will every come of it.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    I was thinking post-consumer. But your comment reminds me of horror stories from India. Regulation there is even less well enforced, based on what I've read.
  - xkcd-sucks 11y ago
    It's really not difficult to chuck waste drugs into some bleach... more likely, nobody cares.
    - hanniabu 11y ago
      What does the bleach do? And she's a biomedical engineer and works with a lot of dangerous viruses both from humans and animals. So it's not just drugs that are getting put into the water sadly.
      - mirimir 11y ago
        Bleach is standard for infectious stuff. Some drugs, maybe even most, would be destroyed. But some for sure would not. Maybe chromic acid cleaning solution?

_delirium 11y ago

Unfortunately I don't think there are that many cases where engineers even have much independent clout, enough to force the company to "do it right" vs. just make a note of problems. This kind of thing is taught in engineering curricula, but the ability of engineers to stand up to the business and marketing sides of things is pretty limited, outside of regulated industries where there is some specific legal framework requiring the company to do a proper engineering review and follow its recommendations. Then it becomes easier to say that your legal duty requires you to make a particular recommendation, and harder for the company to bypass it (though still not impossible). But if it's legal and just a bad idea? Hard fight to win. It doesn't help that engineers tend to be fairly weakly organized, without a particularly strong professional organization or union or other entity willing to put more muscle into the idea of professional ethics when it comes to actually saying "no" to management.

biot 11y ago

Tenant is the opposite of landlord. The word you're looking for is "tenet".

rrauenza 11y ago
Unless it's a Time Lord - then it's 'Tennant.'

slavik81 11y ago

> What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain? I'm willing to put part of the blame on the cities for this one. In many cities, wastewater treatment has not been given the necessary investments to properly filter the water before piping it into the lake. Plastic's not the only problem, unfortunately. http://greatlakes.org/CSOs http://greatlakes.org/CSOs

ceejayoz 11y ago
No wastewater treatment process is going to filter out microbeads - they're between 0.01mm and 1mm in size. You'd have to change the filters every five minutes. Properly treated wastewater is just that - treated, to make it safe (i.e. fewer pathogens). It's still not something you'd want to drink out of a tap.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > No wastewater treatment process is going to filter out microbeads - they're between 0.01mm and 1mm in size. You'd have to change the filters every five minutes. Rather than filter, why not settle them out?
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Most of the problem with untreated sewage in the Great Lakes is burst capacity - when you get a rainstorm, the sewers overflow and dump raw sewage into the lakes. Having to store an entire storm's worth of water long enough for 10 micrometer beads to filter out simply isn't feasible.
    - slavik81 11y ago
      If you build separate sanitary and storm sewers, then you don't have that problem. About a decade ago, developing a proposal for solving that problem in Kingston, ON was part of my first-year engineering coursework. Obviously, I was not an expert, but after some research, my conclusion was that building storage was the cheapest solution in the short term. Opportunistically separating the sewers made the most sense over the long term.