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Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed
- Symbiote 2mo agoSince this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?
- sneak 2mo agoSewers go places, and it is nearly a million liters of extremely concentrated stinky. If you do this, you take a single location source of stinky and smear it over a much larger set of locations that will then ALL be extremely stinky, in a way that isn’t easily cleaned with water as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
- chuckadams 2mo agoI'd say dump it in the ocean, but I don't guess any boat will take it. Still, sounds like they're going to make the area around the landfill stink forever.
- anon84873628 2mo agoInstead the stinky will be spread through time. The solution to pollution is dilution, and the ocean would metabolize it away fairly quickly.
- cwal37 2mo agoThe solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.
- buellerbueller 2mo agoIs fish sauce a toxin?
- falsemyrmidon 2mo agoIt's the dosage that makes the poison. If you dumped it all in the ocean in a single spot then yes, it would probably kill the local ecosystem.
- wang_li 2mo agoThis 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."
- Reason077 2mo ago> ”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.
- dylan604 2mo ago> as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble. Just use a lot of Dawn dish detergent
- alwa 2mo agoSo, but… where do most fish go when they die?
- edoceo 2mo agoInto other creatures that eat them?
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoSo give those creatures a bit more Umami!
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoUsually not salt baths and fermentation. Well... with modern levels of fishing most fish might end up in human stomachs, but im not really sure on the numbers.
- anon84873628 2mo agoFrom 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-newfoundland-smell-fermenting-atlantic-seafood-sauce 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.
- Tepix 2mo agoPut it on a boat, navigate to an area with a current away from any land and then slowly release it
- Waterluvian 2mo agoTake it outside the environment.
- rekoil 2mo agoWhat's out there?
- Lalabadie 2mo agoMore environment
- cucumber3732842 2mo agoThe 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.
- jt2190 2mo agohttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/st-marys-fish-sauce-removal-9.7288539 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/st-mary... tl;dr After 20 years of legal battles abandoned factory containing tanks of rotting fish in St Mary’s NL is getting cleaned up, paid for by provincial taxpayers.
- Grazester 2mo agoAfter 20 years this hasn't completely rotted and scentless? I need to read the article.
- gus_massa 2mo agoIf the goo is too salty, probably bacterias can grow enough to eat the cause of the bad smell, in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine From a random google search I got this report https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468.pdf https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468... (mostly in Spanish, with an English abstract). It looks serious and as far as I understand it makes sense. They recommend to add iodine to burn/oxidize the trimethylamine or use bacteria and bubbles or air/oxygen, or a mix or bacteria+algae+light that produces the oxygen inside the mix. It looks like without an active source of oxidizer, the mix will be stinky for years.
- gus_massa 2mo agoToooo late to edit: > probably bacterias can grow enough > probably bacterias can _not_ grow enough
- samus 2mo agoThis is not rot, but digestion. The digestive enzymes of the fish keep breaking down amino acids, producing the characteristic smell. The salt prevents most microorganisms from growing.
- Y-bar 2mo agoI wanted to crack a joke that Swede's do like their stinky fermented fish, why not sell to them… But I figured why not see if other cultures might also like it, and was floored with how many there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_fish
- dolmen 2mo agoAlso the article pointed directly to vietnamese culture.
- comrade1234 2mo agoThere's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell the rotten fish smell. I'm sure professional chefs must know about these. I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.
- rob74 2mo agoI mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).
- pluralmonad 2mo agoLike labelling bacon nitrate free while also including celery seed something-or-another that is... Just nitrates.
- d-e-r-e-k 2mo agoWhile your comment is true, it is reductive. While celery seed does in fact contain nitrates which are turned into nitrites, it’s the next step that’s important. Unlike synthetic sodium nitrite, celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines. The subtle differences in how our bodies process synthetic vs natural ingredients significantly impacts our bodies and health.
- gruez 2mo ago>celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines. This just sounds like post hoc justification. There's hardly any vitamin C in celery seeds[1][2]. Broccoli has 5x the vitamin C per 100g, despite much of it being water. Moreover, if the point is that vitamin C protects against nitrates, why not add vitamin C directly, rather than doing it in a roundabout way by adding celery seeds which also happen to contain vitamin C? [1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170920/nutrients https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170920/nutrients [2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170379/nutrients https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170379/nutrients
- bhouston 2mo agoIsn't the ocean filled with salt and already knows how to biologically degrade fish? I sort of think that you could deposit this at sea somehow, just need to spread it out sufficiently. I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.
- arethuza 2mo ago"just need to spread it out sufficiently" Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong? Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.
- wbl 2mo ago"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" - prior failure of intuitively appealing disposal option.
- rootusrootus 2mo agoEven in 1970 that could not have made sense to anybody with a brain. They certainly knew enough about explosives to know that the kind of blast required to reliably vaporize an entire whale carcass would be considerably larger than anything they were going to do on a public beach. That whole event was just a couple dudes who thought it would be hilarious and insufficient supervision by adults. Diluting salty rotting fish sauce in seawater is a lot more defensible. It's not like they'd have to just dump it all in one spot.
- wbl 2mo agoTransporting forty-five tons of this stinking liquid far enough offshore won't be cheap.
- bigfishrunning 2mo agowrapping it in plastic and burying it in a landfill will also not be cheap
- jonhohle 2mo ago> But this person who ended up becoming my wife, she's like, "I love fish sauce. I need more of it in my life." Possibly the least expected ending to that article, and very heartwarming.
- wxw 2mo ago> I would 100 percent taste the forbidden fish sauce. I would do it for science. My wife would kill me if I'm not already dead. Count me in.
- anon84873628 2mo agoSounds like the Canadian Food Inspection agency screwed the town out of spite. Like they had a target on Ngo's back. Anyone have more details? From the linked Eater article: >He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began. Ngo claims that he had been vocal about their interactions, and speculates “if they shut [us] down, nobody makes any complaints anymore.” >After the government-run lab found Ngo’s product to be safe, he went on to win a court case and an appeal against the government. Even after those victories, the CFIA moved to restrict the sales of his product to the province of Newfoundland. “If I sell there, who will use my product?” Ngo says, pointing out the small population of Newfoundland and its non-existent Vietnamese community. “I could sell maybe one or two cases a month[...] we can’t survive.” The CFIA declined to comment, citing the amount of time that has passed since filing its initial complaint. They could have stopped production in the moldy factory but allowed sale of the remaining product.
- rawgabbit 2mo agoI don’t think he was targeted but he met the reality of bureaucracy. One agency actually funded him and approved the building and allowed him to operate for 11 years. Another agency said you can’t operate or sell because of the growing mold. Another agency said dump the forbidden fish sauce in the sewer. Another agency said to bury it.
- busterarm 2mo agoCanadian bureaucracy around food is at times insane (and vaguely racist). Just look up '1985 Jamaican patty wars'.
- gruez 2mo agoFrom cbc: >In 1985, the Canadian government tried to stop Jamaican bakeries and restaurants from using the term "beef patty." >At the time, Canada's Meat Inspection Act classified a beef patty as what goes in a hamburger. It could contain only meat and seasoning and it couldn't be encased in dough or a crust. Therefore, a Jamaican patty — widely known as a flaky pastry with a spiced beef filling — didn't meet the criteria. That actually vaguely seems reasonable? Especially in contexts where there's only text to go by (eg. on a menu), people might actually be confused.
- cuechan 2mo agoSlightly Offtopic but the voice in the embedded youtube Video is so sounds so unnatural and creepy. I guess its AI generated and no one bothered to check the end result.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- meshweaver 2mo agoSounds like a normal news broadcaster voice to me. I suppose the inflection is a bit over-the-top. The speaker says her name at the end - Leila Beaudoi.
- Dunati 2mo agoIt sounded very odd to me too. I was wondering if that was normal for Newfoundland maybe. To be honest it didn't sound AI, more like it was played back slightly too slow, but not by a constant amount.
- DarkStar851 2mo agoNewfoundlander here checking in! Nope. She just sounds like that. Another comment mentioned it seems to be a CBC/traditional news thing. A bunch of them sound that way. The "accent" here is starting to fade out of the younger generations but it sounds Irish to a naive ear.
- theluketaylor 2mo agoThere are dozens of local CBC news broadcasts all over the country and they all feature someone with similarly strong enunciation and clipped pauses for emphasis. She certainly has one most aggressive forms I've heard, but that's absolutely the CBC news anchor 'voice' and has been for decades. No AI trickery here, just weird Canadian public broadacaster-isms.
- _whiteCaps_ 2mo agoIt sounds like typical CBC reporter to me. Maybe the AI was trained on these types of broadcasts.
- whycome 2mo agoIt’s organic solids. Just get it to the ocean. It’s not like it’s crude oil or volatile chemicals.
- kurthr 2mo agoThe solution to pollution is dilution. It might not always be true, but it is here.
- aaron695 2mo ago[dead]
- somat 2mo agocrude oil is also just organic solids. err... liquids.
- dtgriscom 2mo agoI live near Boston, and every winter the city needs to deal with tons and tons of snow removed from the streets. The easiest solution is to dump it in Boston Harbor, but the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection banned that in 1997 (as part of cleaning up the Harbor). The solution: pile the snow up in vacant lots and let it melt into the Harbor. What's the difference? Dunno...
- dboreham 2mo agoThere's a significant difference in that solids picked up with the snow (gravel, dirt, dog shit, human...) mostly won't end up in the harbor.
- blitzar 2mo agoThey should blow it up like they blew up that whale carcass. Nothing could possibly go wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
- masklinn 2mo agoA little treat for all the seagulls keytar solo
- moralestapia 2mo agoHmm, curious, could there be any use for this substance? Fertilizer or something?
- compass_copium 2mo agoWith all the salt, you'd turn your fields into the next Carthage.
- moralestapia 2mo agoAh, I thought it was some rotten fish. Thanks. >With all the salt, you could create another Hacker News. Lol.
- samus 2mo agoIt might actually be safe to use as a condiment, as originally intended.
- fred_is_fred 2mo agoI am surprised that after this long the smell isn't gone. If one were to open all these tanks and spread it around on the ground in a layer, wouldn't it dissipate after a few months when the bacteria finish up?
- Arainach 2mo agoSalt isn't conducive to bacteria.
- vitorfblima 2mo agoCan you actually taste the goo and not get killed instantly? This sounds so crazy to me. lol
- samus 2mo agoKilled from what? It's essentially sterile from all the salt.
- Maxion 2mo agoWhy on earth are they not composting it, but instead putting in a landfill and locking it up? What a dumb idea.
- namibj 2mo agoSalty.
- llbbdd 2mo agoI don't have much familiarity with composting or fish sauce production, but wouldn't the high salt content make it a bad fertilizer?
- FuriouslyAdrift 2mo agoSalt... it has lots and lots of salt in it. It's been sitting for 20+ years. It isn't going to "compost" any more than it already has.
- Maxion 2mo agoWell that makes a whole lot of sense.
- fsckboy 2mo agoit is sitting right next to the ocean, which is where all that salt came from, just put it back
- BenjiWiebe 2mo agoThe fish came from there too.
- jollyllama 2mo agoI bet you could grow some killer swiss chard with it.
- hluska 2mo agoEnvironment Canada’s testing found it ‘acutely lethal’. I’d consider composting an acutely lethal substance that is extremely high in salt to be the dumb idea. Canada actually has scientists. From reading through these comments, I know that’s a shock but we do, they test things and they follow the evidence before making recommendations. In fact, those test results from back in 2016 are even public. Just because this is news to you doesn’t mean it’s a new thing. Other cheaper solutions were looked into and they weren’t safe enough. It’s remarkably simple if you make yourself aware of everything involved. Salt in a compost though? How does that work?
- gadders 2mo agoCan you die from a umami overdose?
- chihuahua 2mo agoYou can even die from a water overdose, so you can certainly die from an umami overdose. For example, imagine a person who ingests 100 kg of umami - I'd bet every penny I have that they won't survive. The lethal dose is somewhere between 1g and 100kg.
- peri-cl 2mo agoI recall reading there were zoning laws in the classical era about where you could manufacture garum (the Roman fermented fish condiment). Here's one attributable example I could find, from the tail end of the Eastern empire. This is 2.4.22 in the Hexabiblos (1344–1345) ["–" sic] of the Byzantine jurist, Constantine Harmenopoulos of Thessalonica; it legislates a ~450–600-meter exclusion zone (three stadia). The archive.org page I linked is in Byzantine Greek with a Latin translation. I've quoted the Greek part here, and I used Deepseek V4 Flash for OCR-cleanup and machine translation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_Harmenopoulos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_Harmenopoulos https://archive.org/details/constharmenopul00heimgoog/page/244/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/constharmenopul00heimgoog/page/2... ("Ἐπαρχιχὸν ΠΕΡῚ ΓΑΡΕΨΩΝ" / "Edictum DE GARI COCTORIBUS") > "22. Ἡ τέχνη τῶν γαρεψῶν καὶ ἡ τῶν τυροποιῶν οὐ τὴν τυχοῦσαν ποιεῖ τοῖς παρακειμένοις βλάβην· πολλὴ γὰρ ἡ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς ἀτμὶς δυσώδης τε ἀμέτρως ἐστὶ καὶ ἐπιβλαβὴς ἐπὶ πολὺ διάστημα. Ὅθεν χρὴ τοὺς τοιούτους ἅπασαν μὲν πόλιν μὴ οἰκεῖν μηδὲ κώμην. Εἰ δὲ χρεία τούτων εἴη πρὸς τὰς χρήσεις τῶν πόλεων καὶ τῶν κωμῶν, ἀφεστάναι στάδια τούτους δεῖ τρία. Εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ ὡς ταῦτα πάντα τὰ προειρημένα ἐπὶ τῶν ἐκ νέου κατασκευαζόντων εἴρηται· εἰ δὲ χάρται εἰσὶ παλαιοὶ ἢ καὶ δουλεία τις προλαβοῦσα, κεχρῆσθαι δεῖ τοῖς ἐξ ἀρχῆς περὶ αὐτῶν συμπεφωνημένοις." > "The craft of the salt‑fish merchants and that of the cheesemakers causes no ordinary harm to those nearby; for the vapour arising from it is exceedingly foul‑smelling and harmful over a great distance. Hence such persons ought not to dwell in any city or village. But if there should be need of them for the uses of the cities and villages, they must keep a distance of three stades [~555 m]. And it must be known that all these aforestated things have been said concerning those who set up (such establishments) anew; but if there exist old charters or some prior servitude (i.e., an established legal right or prescriptive practice), one must abide by what was originally agreed concerning them."
- kridsdale1 2mo agoPetition to restore “aforestated” to common parlance.
- psunavy03 2mo agoIf "aforementioned" is a word, "aforestated" is a word.
- riabor 2mo agoCan't remember where i've read that nor even if it's a real thing or not so do take the following with caution. I think Roman Empire garum (fish sauce) factories where one of, if not the first thing in known history to trigger lawmakers to set a minimum distance from factories to residential areas (something like 1 mile iirc).
- BoxOfRain 2mo agoDespite the fearsome smell when it’s collected together in bulk, modern garum in the form of Colatura di Alici is a genuinely magical ingredient. It’s very similar to what the Romans used, except it’s made exclusively from anchovies whereas the Romans used many varieties of fish to make garum. I use it often in pasta dishes especially, but it’s a versatile ingredient for adding umami in general. It’s similar to fermented fish sauces found in South East Asia, while being quite distinct from them. Max Miller does a lot with garum, he even made some at one point (not a process for the faint hearted!) and it was his and Historical Italian Cooking’s dishes where I first learned about colatura. Highly recommend them both, another ingredient I’ve become fond of through Roman cooking is long pepper. Not too sure about its global availability but in the UK I buy it from Indian shops. Parthian Chicken is another excellent dish, although some have an acute sensitivity to the smell of asafoetida resin as my unfortunate housemate discovered! Asafoetida is actually a substitute for silphium, a herb harvested to extinction by the Romans themselves.
- m463 2mo agoWhen I was growing up, there was a town nearby with a paper mill. If we would drive near that town... Wow! that place stunk.
- bsimpson 2mo agoMy mom wanted to stop in Savannah, GA on a roadtrip when we were kids. We got out of the car for a few seconds, got back in, and unanimously decided we were continuing on. It smelt like every bad smell you can imagine all at once, riding on a backbone of soggy cardboard.
- sinuhe69 2mo agoIt will be a very easy solution when one takes a less bureaucratic stance and be less hostile to foreign cultures: just mix the sauce with sea water and (really) slowly release it into the ocean. If Japan can release radioactive water into the ocean safely, I’m pretty sure you can do it with the fish+salt solution too. Yes, there is nothing in the fish sauce except these two ingredients. Better though, take samples and test against food standards from countries where they actually produce and eat fish sauce. If the sauce is still good (could be due to the high salt content, not sure though), just let Ngo bottle it and sell the good stuff, internationally!
- inigyou 2mo agomalicious compliance? The government shut down a fish sauce factory while it was in the process of making fish sauce. So the factory owner said fine, I'll stop operations right now.
- bsimpson 2mo ago> Ugo feels that he ran a good business, and the government unfairly barred him from operating. In his view, if the government wouldn’t allow him to sell the product, they could handle the disposal. Ngo paid off his debts before leaving, and feels the matter is settled. Although prior coverage of the factory closure portrayed Ngo as a ghost who absconded his duties, he doesn’t feel that way. To this day he spends half of the year in Canada, though not often in St. Mary’s. “The community is still very good to me,” he says. “When I go there I see my failure; that’s the reason I don’t want to go there.” From the linked article https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop-newfoundland-smell-fermenting-atlantic-seafood-sauce https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop...
- t0mpr1c3 2mo agoHe feels vindicated. What a sociopath.
- freediddy 2mo agoJust out of curiosity, would dumping a ton of bleach into the mixture get rid of the smell by breaking apart all of the components? Or maybe high concentration acid?
- philipkglass 2mo agoYes, bleach could destroy the complex odoriferous compounds in fish sauce. Ordinary chlorine bleach in liquid form is so dilute that you wouldn't be able to run the process in-place in the original fish sauce storage tanks, though. There are more concentrated forms like granular calcium hypochlorite that would take up less volume, but the heat generated by oxidizing organic matter on this scale makes it a sort of chemical engineering problem.
- samus 2mo agoAcid is a good way to modulate the flavor. There is a reason why in Vietnamese dishes are often served with limes.
- gus_massa 2mo agoRehashing another of my comments: The smell is caused by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine From a random google search I got this report https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468.pdf https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468... (mostly in Spanish, with an English abstract). It looks serious and as far as I understand it makes sense. One of the solutions in the report is to add iodine, so I guess bleach would work too. But I also guess the final product is more dangerous and may release other nasty fumes. Don't try it at home. I think acid can prevent the smell to escape to the air, but I guess you need a high concentration to destroy it, perhaps add heat to make the destruction faster. Anyway, you have to neutralize the acid before releasing the leftovers, and the boiling acid nasty goo sounds dangerous. Don't try it at home.
- bsimpson 2mo agoThe talk of glutamic acid made me wonder if fish sauce is related to MSG. Gemini confirms MSG is just salt and glutamic acid, which is to say fish sauce is naturally derived MSG. Fun story: I was riding a motorcycle across Vietnam a few years ago. Made some friends on an excursion, and we all went to dinner together. The restaurant was a little outdoor kitchen and some picnic benches in front of an apartment building. When we arrived, the mom was taking orders. She spoke enough English to serve travelers. One of my new friends ordered a sandwich, and fell in love with the sauce it came with. I offered to find out what was in it, but the mom had gone upstairs. Dad didn't speak a word of English. We managed to ask him about the sauce, and he beckoned us to follow him behind the counter. He pointed at a mason jar of white powder: sugar. He pointed at another: salt. He pointed at a third: salt … wait, we already did salt… It was MSG. This chef in a rural mountain town had just a handful of ingredients in his kitchen, and one was MSG. As a 90s kid who grew up hearing of MSG is the same breath as processed foods, sulfites, and other health boogymen, it was wild to encounter it as just another ingredient in someone's pantry.
- colechristensen 2mo agoYou can find msg in your local grocery store, usually under the Accent brand. I've seen two pound jars of it in Costco.
- tedd4u 2mo agoThe joke about KFC's "11 secret herbs and spices" is that they are • Salt • Pepper • MSG
- mlmonkey 2mo agoCan they not use some microbes to digest the sauce and reduce it to inert things like water and salt? I'm not a biologist, so pardon this naive take.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoThe salt is to ensure most microbes won’t survive, hence keeping it safe to eat.
- inigyou 2mo agoSo the solution to pollution is dilution - in the opposite way. Add water to a batch of it until the salt concentration is low enough for decomposition? Problem: it'll smell much worse while it decomposes. That's surely why they don't.
- driggs 2mo agoI purchased a bottle of good Vietnamese fish sauce after reading a thread on HN about its mythical flavor profile. Added a few meager drops to a noodle soup, and I was so overwhelmed with nausea that I threw out the entire pot, and threw the entire bottle of fish sauce into the trash. I can't imagine want an unholy stench this decades-old fish sauce plant must produce. I would have evacuated permanently, without question.
- TitaRusell 2mo agoThe real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money. Recently in my city they discovered that a laundromat had polluted the ground water. The owners are long gone. Unfortunately chemicals are forever. The municipality tried to send the bill to the current owners but that is not real justice either.
- left-struck 2mo agoListen, I hate shitty corporations too, but if you read the article it’s the government who shut down the business because of mold growth in the factory. Anyway, just saying there’s some nuance here. Like maybe if a government shuts down a business like this there needs to be some negotiation and an exit plan.
- schneems 2mo agoFar more companies just go belly up and leave whatever is left lying around. If we are lucky the land or whatever supports someone else tearing it down. In software we build without considering how to sunset or deprecate. But perhaps we would build differently if we did so.
- marak830 2mo ago"The value on the market [was] about three million dollars, but they would not let us sell it. And for that reason, we just [left] it there.”" I think that's the point OP is pointing out, for better or worse (for what it's worth I believe "He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began" may be correct). A company should have plans for cleaning up their product before just walking away and leaving other people to clean up their mess. Maybe it's rather naive of me, but that's what I believe.
- gucci-on-fleek 2mo ago> The real story here is how a corporation can just pack up and leave it's mess for the government to clean up. With public money. This is unfortunately a common issue in Canada :( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_wells_in_Alberta,_Canad...
- fsckboy 2mo agoI grew up in a seaside port and fishing community. 1st thing, what landlubbers think is stinky is not operative here, your thoughts are moo, like the opinion of a sea cow. The seacoast smells like rotten fish all the time, it's called low tide. The most vibrant sea biomes are shallow coastal waters. The capacity of the North Atlantic, rich with oxygen, to handle fish parts is basically limitless. Hell, you can probably sell this stuff to lobster- and shellfish- men. The quantity here is one whale carcass (yes, that's a mammal, but you get the idea) and whale carcasses happen all the time. Dump it in the Bay of Fundy, one tide will get rid of all of it. Worrying about the environmental impact of dead fish is like worrying that dumping manure on a field will leave it fallow. What you are really smelling here is a govt funding boondoggle.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoYou seem to be ignoring the salt that was added to those fish.
- BenjiWiebe 2mo agoThe ocean is salty. And dumping manure on a field can prevent growth, if you do too much. So I would think some degree of dilution would be a good idea before dumping it in the ocean.
- fsckboy 2mo agoeven if you "scorch" a field with too much manure one year, that field is going to come back with a vengeance at some point. There are all sorts of natural disasters that scar the forest (like fire), but it is a renewing process
- DarkStar851 2mo agoNewfoundland has no shortage of stinky fishing villages, but I've been to this one and my god man. I've talked to fishermen from the area who are put off by it. It's been sitting a LOOOONG time and there's a LOT of it. When the wind blows the right (wrong?) direction the stench covers part of the town. As for the disposal, yeah probably over the top, this stuff will kill marine life as is, but not if it's diluted enough / released slowly over enough time. We've certainly dumped worse stuff into the ocean here.
- fennec-posix 2mo agoAbsolutely foul, but the food science part is greatly interesting. Just glad I am unable to smell that place.
- legastenigga 2mo ago[dead]
- t0mpr1c3 2mo agoWhere I grew up farmers "muckspreading" would occasionally foul the locality. It was gross but after a day or two it would be back to normal. I've been to Phu Quoc. One or two of the villages had that amine smell. It was like chemical munitions. Reading between the lines, perhaps the factory owner blamed the shutdown on locals complaining to regulators and decided to stiff them on the way out.
- ferfumarma 2mo agoyour intuition is correct: in the Eatery link from the article that's explicitly stated. And honestly I don't blame him. He got screwed. > Ngo feels that he ran a good business, and the government unfairly barred him from operating. In his view, if the government wouldn’t allow him to sell the product, they could handle the disposal. Ngo paid off his debts before leaving, and feels the matter is settled. Although prior coverage of the factory closure portrayed Ngo as a ghost who absconded his duties, he doesn’t feel that way. To this day he spends half of the year in Canada, though not often in St. Mary’s. “The community is still very good to me,” he says. “When I go there I see my failure; that’s the reason I don’t want to go there.”
- gagabity 2mo agoThey are foing to store it underground in plastic covered hole? Would this really cause an issue just to dump it into the ocean maybe spread out a bit?
- shevy-java 2mo agoIt was just ripening!
- dennis_jeeves2 2mo agoOh Canada!