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So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then? How about when it enters the food chain and starts to accumulate? Will the elements say that "we're under legal limi
by bayindirh 5mo ago
So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then?
How about when it enters the food chain and starts to accumulate? Will the elements say that "we're under legal limits, and accumulate slowly, so we will act nice and don't poison the organism we're in?"
Love that way of thinking.
- cyberax 5mo agoArsenic and lead occur naturally through the food chain. If the levels of discharge are not significantly above the normal levels (and they aren't) then it's harmless.
- gegtik 5mo agoits all-natural
- bluGill 5mo agoThey are still not harmless. They are normal. However if they are at all above natural (that is your input levels) you should treat and remove them. It is not unusual for the output of a sewage treatment plant to be cleaner water than what goes into your drinking water system.
- cyberax 5mo agoFrom a quick lookaround, it looks like a lot of water sources in the area have similar natural levels of arsenic. I could not find chromium content information, and it's plausible that it can be leached from stainless steel. These are pretty much the only two concerning contaminants. Everything else in the report is just fear-mongering, like the BS about manganese.
- dvt 5mo ago> So, it's fine as long as it's legal, then? > Love that way of thinking. I mean.. yeah, kinda'? We live in a society made up of laws, that's kind of the premise. So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do). It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?
- fuzzy2 5mo agoDunno, maybe strive to release no pollutants at all? Then we wouldn't need all the pesky big government overreach.
- forshaper 5mo agoHow would you do that, assuming you wanted to keep up the material standard of living that the people you care about are used to?
- baggy_trough 5mo agoTo exist is to pollute.
- bayindirh 5mo agoBut you can pollute sustainably. e.g.: Composting, biodegradable materials, etc. or unsustainably: e.g.: PFAS. For bonus points you can do internal research and hide the reports detailing the effects accurately.
- xg15 5mo agoThis seems to be the credo of too much of the tech industry lately.
- jakelsaunders94 5mo agoTaking this as a good faith engineering argument. What does that mean? What do you constitute a pollutant and how much is zero? I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution? The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.
- goosejuice 5mo agoUm, I'm pretty sure we can all get behind corps striving for the ideal. Fines align incentives. Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?
- tekne 5mo agoI mean... if it's got a similar amount of toxin X to drinking water... then it's probably not making things much worse. There is lead in dirt!
- Etheryte 5mo agoThe upper limit does not mean that water actually has that amount in it regularly.
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- xiaoyu2006 5mo ago> we're under legal limits That's the definition of law. As long as it is legal it won't be charged.
- bayindirh 5mo agoWhat if the law is formulated to be convenient for corporations and not to protect the public and/or the environment?
- unglaublich 5mo agoThen we should protest the law.
- lmm 5mo agoIn some vague abstract sense? Wouldn't protesting specific instances where bad laws are letting companies get away with environmentally damaging practices be more effective? As and when there's a pattern of events that is best addressed by adjusting the law, politicians and voters can figure that out for themselves.
- gdudeman 5mo agoThen we should work together as a society to fix the law and make sure it's applied evenly. Hard to do, but necessary. Is there an alternative?
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoEmissions regulations are a balancing act. Industrial processes are inherently filthy. If you want copper, gold, lithium, or anything else that makes up the modern world, somewhere on earth was dirtied for that to be possible, and some of the pollution will get into the surroundings because zero emissions simply isn't possible. So we set certain levels of "acceptable emissions" as a balancing act. I also agree that emissions should be tighter, but the location question is more interesting, because we can also choose where emissions happen. For example, we might choose them to happen near cities/factories so the products are close to where they're used. We've mostly stopped doing that since the industrial revolution for pretty good reasons though. We could place them in the pristine landscapes not otherwise used by humans, like national parks. That's unpopular for hopefully obvious reasons. We could place them in sparsely inhabited deserts abroad, as Europeans did [0], before we collectively decided colonialism was a bad thing. And lastly, we could place them in figurative deserts away from conservation land and people like monoculture farmland, but then we get to your question. So, what's left? What are you suggesting as a better alternative? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bou_Craa
- whimsicalism 5mo agoWhat a ridiculous comment for something that is obviously extremely +EV for the environment.
- stinkbeetle 5mo agoWonderful to see so many people here embracing skepticism when it comes to government institutions, bureaucrats, and their "experts".