Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 02:06:58 -0500
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@IBM.NET>
Subject: Re: Amish and polution
In-Reply-To: <001301bf7f5b$a0c54ea0$6e20480c@pavilion>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
At 01:43 AM 2/25/2000 , Karl Wolz wrote:
>Can you imagine just how deep the sh*t would be if we all had horse drawn
>carriages instead of cars? Not to mention that those horses keep on
>polluting whether they're being used or not! Manure, properly composted is
>an aid to agriculture, especially on a small farm, but large quantities of
>it, laying in a city street, it is a breeding ground for disease and when
>run off into rivers and into the sea, is a severe environmental problem.
Right-o. Lots of things are good and/or work when only a few people are
doing it -- scavenging frying oil from restaurants comes immediately to
mind -- lessee, Portsmouth NH, 25,000 souls, 85 restaurants, considered a
remarkable number for the population. Let's suppose each restaurant
disposes of 5 gal/day of frying oil -- which I sincerely doubt, I suspect
it's more like 5 gal/week. They don't give that stuff away (the fresh oil,
that is). But anyway...that would be a total of 30 gal/year for each
family of 5. If as I suspect I'm an order of magnitude high, it would be
more like 3 gal/year/family. Not to mention that if there was demand for
the stuff, you can bet that a price would soon be on its
head. Incidentally, I once rode a moped through some chunks of England,
and I can't tell you the number of towns I passed through where the primary
evidence of "town" was a single Zebra crossing (pedestrian crossing where
the ped. has right-of-way as soon as he puts foot off the pavement and onto
the street) and about a quarter-mile radius smell of fish &
chips. Amusing, but I wouldn't like it as a steady olfactory diet. I
suppose the inhabitants actually don't smell it, I never asked.
Ditto heating with wood -- the particulate emissions are
astounding. Woodstoves these days tend to have some sort of catalytic
converter on them, which helps with the hydrocarbons etc -- not sure it
does much to the soot. I've driven through Jay, Maine (which sits in a
sort of bowl) at night during a winter temperature inversion, and it looked
like a scene from hell. All the smoke from chimneys was going ten feet
straight up and then taking a 90-degree bend, and in the HP-sodium street
lights it was just amazing. Glad I like the smell of woodsmoke, but even a
good thing can be overdone.
And in Scotland they use a lot of coal still for heating dwellings (in the
smaller towns anyway), and that smells downright foul on a chilly day. I
don't think they have the population density to get deadly fogs like London
used to...
david
David Beierl - Providence, RI
http://pws.prserv.net/synergy/Vanagon/
'84 Westy "Dutiful Passage"
'85 GL "Poor Relation"
| 
