The environment

reynoldston

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One of the earlier post got me thinking. Just what dose a lawn mower do to our environment. I go through a case of grease in a season. Just where dose all this grease go to. I would think it would just flake out onto our lawns and end up in our drinking water supply. The same with our oil and exhaust fumes that go's into our air we breath. I know its a small amount compared to the car and trucks of the world. I have a small water stream that flows pass my side lawn and I have seen this black sludge form on the surface at times and often wondered what it comes from. Yes it takes money to find a solution to fix this but I is a good investment. I am a old man and will be gone in a few more short years but sure would good to have my future children to enjoy this world.
 

bertsmobile1

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One of the earlier post got me thinking. Just what dose a lawn mower do to our environment. I go through a case of grease in a season. Just where dose all this grease go to. I would think it would just flake out onto our lawns and end up in our drinking water supply. The same with our oil and exhaust fumes that go's into our air we breath. I know its a small amount compared to the car and trucks of the world. I have a small water stream that flows pass my side lawn and I have seen this black sludge form on the surface at times and often wondered what it comes from. Yes it takes money to find a solution to fix this but I is a good investment. I am a old man and will be gone in a few more short years but sure would good to have my future children to enjoy this world.

Sleep easy in your bed.
Oil is a natural product and as a natural product nature can handle it , IN SMALL AMOUNTS. Eventually bacteria will break it down and turn it into fertilizer.
As far as the enviroment is concerned the most damage you can do is to cut down all of the trees and bushes and grow a monoculture of grass.
So yes while the CO2 is not good nore are all of the fumes that come off the tools you use to cut your grass, it is the grass itself that does the greatest amount of damage.
Go to any nature reserve and try to find 1 sq yard of ground with only 1 type of plant growing in it.

We had a brilliant researcher who worked out you can grow fungus in heavy oil contaminated ground.
Cattle can feed on this fungus and when it stops growing the soil is rehabilated.
He got laughed out because we knew better, you had to put heavy detergents on oil contaminated ground, dig it all up wash the detergents out , treat the detergent rinse water to concentrate it, then burn it off at well over 1500 deg C and finally use the ash in concrete to protect us .
Really ?

Go find an old gas station.
All the ground around it we will call "polluted beyond use" the greenies will list all of the highly toxic heavy metals and how dangerious it is .
They will want it concreted over, the top soil removed to be chemically treated to remove all the toxic products ( that will end up in a toxic waste dump ) .
However there will be grasses growing in the cracks in the concrete forecourt where all the "HIGHLY TOXIC FUEL " was spilled for 50+ years shrubs will start growing where the oil tanks were and where 100,000,000 gallons of oil slowly dripped out of the taps or got spilled when the attendant was watching a well turned ankle & not the oil in the bottle.
One of the greatest people who ever lived Bill Mollison, termed the "Global Gardiner" defined pollution as a resource going to waste.
he was one of the rare people who could look at and understand the enviroment as a complete unit rather than micro analysing it , one plant, insect , bacteria at a time.
The movement he set in place Permaculture, was considered so dangerious he was kicked out of most of the 3rd world countries because it went against the grain of the big argo companies like Monsanto.
Charities hated him because he used the resources of the actual villagers to lift them out of subservecy and make them self supporting. That makes them hard to control & governments both in 3rd & 1st world countries hate that.
 

Greenfinger

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Sleep easy in your bed.
Oil is a natural product and as a natural product nature can handle it , IN SMALL AMOUNTS. Eventually bacteria will break it down and turn it into fertilizer.
As far as the enviroment is concerned the most damage you can do is to cut down all of the trees and bushes and grow a monoculture of grass.
So yes while the CO2 is not good nore are all of the fumes that come off the tools you use to cut your grass, it is the grass itself that does the greatest amount of damage.
Go to any nature reserve and try to find 1 sq yard of ground with only 1 type of plant growing in it.

We had a brilliant researcher who worked out you can grow fungus in heavy oil contaminated ground.
Cattle can feed on this fungus and when it stops growing the soil is rehabilated.
He got laughed out because we knew better, you had to put heavy detergents on oil contaminated ground, dig it all up wash the detergents out , treat the detergent rinse water to concentrate it, then burn it off at well over 1500 deg C and finally use the ash in concrete to protect us .
Really ?

Go find an old gas station.
All the ground around it we will call "polluted beyond use" the greenies will list all of the highly toxic heavy metals and how dangerious it is .
They will want it concreted over, the top soil removed to be chemically treated to remove all the toxic products ( that will end up in a toxic waste dump ) .
However there will be grasses growing in the cracks in the concrete forecourt where all the "HIGHLY TOXIC FUEL " was spilled for 50+ years shrubs will start growing where the oil tanks were and where 100,000,000 gallons of oil slowly dripped out of the taps or got spilled when the attendant was watching a well turned ankle & not the oil in the bottle.
One of the greatest people who ever lived Bill Mollison, termed the "Global Gardiner" defined pollution as a resource going to waste.
he was one of the rare people who could look at and understand the enviroment as a complete unit rather than micro analysing it , one plant, insect , bacteria at a time.
The movement he set in place Permaculture, was considered so dangerious he was kicked out of most of the 3rd world countries because it went against the grain of the big argo companies like Monsanto.
Charities hated him because he used the resources of the actual villagers to lift them out of subservecy and make them self supporting. That makes them hard to control & governments both in 3rd & 1st world countries hate that.

This is perfect I couldn't have put it any better myself
 

zman111666

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I'm with you, Bert. The Earth is surprisingly resilient and able to clean itself, as long as we treat it with a little respect.
 

bertsmobile1

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For around 100 years the Sydney water supply was run through tanks with Macquarrie bass swimming in them.
This bass is one of the worlds most sensitive fish so when they swam funny ( or didn't swim as the case may be ) they knew the water was off.
Then we got 'all scientific" and installed automatic water monitoring equipment at a massive cost.
Then suddenly we had a problem with 2 bacteria and the entire city went into meltdown about using the water.
I tested mine and kept on drinking it, nothing wrong except the new gear was way to sensitive.

I daily hear about "heavy metals contamination" which is bollocks.
Metals came from the ground and will oxadise & return to the ground.
But again the twats who failed chemistry when they were 12 get results they don't undrstand, look up the metals in toxicology tables and go into panic mode.
What was that quote again "apes can read phlosophy, they just can't understand what they have read"
 

hrdman2luv

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I'm not so much of a tree hugger. But I do enjoy clean water, clean air, clear views of nice scenery. One thing that's i'm very strict on is what is dumped on the ground. Like used motor oil. Somewhere down there, is a water source. And the oil and things of that nature will eventually get to it before the earth has a chance to make detox it.

I recently picked up a water pump. It's gotta be clean up and fixed before I can use it. But I'm planning on digging me a shallow well to water my garden & yard next year. I don't want any contaminants in it. Since the well is probably gonna be less than 30ft deep, it gotta be careful as to what I spray or spill.

The big oil pipelines are a good way of transporting large amounts of crude. But they're also extremely dangerous when they spill. Sure, the earth will eventually clean itself. But that takes decades. My son is a pipeliner. They replace a lot of pipelines. Some of them are like 50 years old. Just in the last 6 months, since he's started this, said he can't count the amount of small leaks they've discovered in the old pipes.

I hope that our kids or theirs can come up with a way of getting off of petroleum all together. We progressed into petroleum energy like 100 years ago. It's time we progressed into something better. I don't care what makes the pick up go, the lights come on, or what heats & cools my house. I just want it cheap & clean. I know that sounds pretty foolish with gas being $2.50 per gallon, and electricity being .07 per kilowatt.
 

bertsmobile1

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used engine oil spilled on the ground takes around 2 years to break down.
The deeper it goes the longer it takes because the hot zone for bacteria is around 4" after which there is not enough air for them to breathe, although the sulphate producing bacteria need no air which is why deep holes have that foul smell.
This of course ingnores insects & worms that can burrow very deep.
The reason why we bury people 6' deep is because that is beyond the depth a fly can burrow which was based on incorrect theories that maggots would feed on the disease ridden corpse then break out and spread the infections.
My grandfather painted the fences around his property with used engine oil to prevent dry rot & termites, my parents did the same as did I till I married and moved out.
This included pouring some oil around all the posts into the ground to protect the post underground.
He grew veggies in the garden against one fence ( sunny side ) and strawberries / peanuts / gooseburries & passionfruits agains the shadow side fence.
He ate them, his 6 children ate them, my parents ate them, their 4 children ate them, & I regularly took the veggies home & fed my family on them. We are all fit & healthy.
The chooks scratched around in the gardens and they reproduced quite fine and we ate both them & their eggs with no problems.

Unless you have very deep and very sandy soils it is not a problem.
tipping a 44 into your lawn is a problem but small spills are fine unless you are a pencil d**k desk jockey without the science background to understand what you are reading and the common sense to apply it to the real world.
Stop and have a think.
Cars & truck run on your local roads dropping oil all day & night and depositing tyre dust in the gravel, yet every time it rails , weeds come up in the highly oil polluted soil on the road verges, birds eat the seeds from the weeds and lots of small animals ( rabbits mainly here ) eat the vegetation on the side of the road that is growing in these highly polluted soils.

The biggest danger to the enviroment is found in those bottles of pretty coloured liquids under your kitchen sink and they present the biggest risk to the health of you, your family and the planet.
All the crap you use to make your toilet smell sweet enough to drink , kill spiders, cockroaches, "sanitise" your kitchen benches etc, etc, etc are what is killing the planet, not a little oil spilled into the grass.
All the fungasides, insecticides & anti-bacterials are the real culprits and what is making your children sick and successive generations of children weak such that they can not so much as look at a nut without dieing.

Anti bacterial hand wipes have a use, IN HOSPITALS and to a very limited extent in the home when some one has a bacterial infection like a cold or flu, the rest of the time all they do is destroy the bacteria on your hands and wreck your skin so you have to buy moisturisers and hand creams to counter the damage stuff you should never have been using in the first place is doing to your skin.

We went "green" 40 years ago.
Under the kitchen sink you will find vinegar in varing concentrations, bicarb solutions & caustic solutions + a bottle of ammonia that occasionally gets added to the vinegar.
There are spiders in the house but no cockroaches, no slaters, no silverfish, the bathroom has BIG windows in it which get opened so bad smells can pretend they are Elvis & leave the building and a ceiling vent , piped through the roof which creates strong natural ventilation during the day when the metal vent heats up with sunlight.
There is lavender growing against the front door so when you walk past or open the door lavender scent permeates through the house.
The back door has aromatic herbs & spices that again overgrow the path so you brush against them or the door brushes against them again releasing pleasant scents.
We cook with fresh herbs from the garden so there are always pleasant herby smells in the kitchen and every now & then we make up pot porries that get tossed into draws again using herbs from the garden.
The windows on the sunny side have tea trees that not only have fragrant leaves but excrete natural oils that counter bad smells and naturally deodorise the air whenever we open a window, for free.
The same trees are heavily planted around the local tip to alleviate the foul smells created by the bacteria breaking down the waste.
We have similar tea trees encircling the septic tank for the same reason and lillies in pots on the tank cover . It is such a pleasant spot my wife oft sits there to read book in winter.
Then there are vases that have real flowers in them .
 

reynoldston

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Your soil must be different in Australia. Any time I spill oil or gas on the lawn it kills the grass and you use it as fertilizer.
 

hrdman2luv

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I'm not sure how much bacteria is in used motor oil. I'm thinking none. Well because it's motor oil

I think people aren't buried 6' deep. That was a long long long time ago, before we had metal sealed caskets. In Texas, the minimum us 1.5" from the top of the ground to the top of the casket. NY is 3'.

I understand, we can't not spill some. And small amounts don't hurt much. If any. Like I said, I'm not a tree hugger environmentalist. But I do care a lot about the environment. I enjoy clean water, clean air. I enjoy looking out over a mountain top and not seeing something like LA or Houston. I'm not going to stop running my V8 or trade in the wife's V8 for a smart car.
But with that said, since I do know that used motor oil is toxic, that my neighbors have well water, I'm gonna be careful about recycling the used oil I drain. I only do about 3 to 6 oil changes a week. So it's not like I have to have a drum for it yet. (Not as long as Walmart and the other oil change places keep taking it.)

The thing about it to me is, I understand that not every human is the same. I used to haul chemicals to food and beverage manufacturers. Like Driers Ice Cream, and Pepsi Cola. When I haul it, it had to have a Flammable 3 placard and a Corrosive 8 placard on the side of my trailer. Let's say 1 out of 10,000 got cancer from one of those chemicals. (Even in it's diluted form) I know several people who drink at least one coke or pepsi per day. Or Mountain Dew. But 1 out of 10,000 people get cancer from those soft drinks. It's not enough to cause alarm for the FDA. But still, someone gets cancer when someone else doesn't. From the same thing.

Just in this country, almost 3/4 of a million people per year find out they have cancer. And about 1/2 a million people per year die from cancer. Some people get cancer from smoking cigarettes. Some smoke their entire lives and never get it.

I agree with you about all the cleaning chemicals. They're toxic. They get air born and breathed. But about the drop or two of oil on your lawn, I'm not talking about that at all. More or less, I'm talking about dumping a gallon or two in one spot.

All the other stuff you're talking about, how you use certain plants by the doors and window, is an awesome idea. I'm starting to get things like that around the house. Not close by yet. Got plans for a front and back deck. No sense in planting anything right now. But one of my favorite memories was at my aunts house, when I was younger. They didn't have AC. So the window were opened 80% of the time. During the summer, her mimosa tree's would bloom and the breeze would fill the whole house with that smell.
 

bertsmobile1

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When you got 300,000,000 to bury sooner or latter the regs will change.
We still use wooden coffins and the enviromentalists are going to fiberboard made from non- recyclable high clay glossy paper.

We would use around 4 gallons to do 500 yards of wooden fence, both painted and poured around the posts.
The pailings were painted from the lower rail to the ground but the posts got painted top to bottom.
That fence is still there although my parents are now long gone which makes it better than 50 years old so there is 1 tree that did not get cut down trucked to a mill then to a lumber yard and finally to the property.
We also had a wooden shack tat a friend of my grandfather lived ( hid) in during the great depression and that was painted inside & out with used sump oil as well.
The BEST THING any one can do for the enviroment is USE LESS of everything.
It takes exactly the same amount of energy & resources to make a throw away mower, chainsaw, shirt etc etc as it does to make a top quality one that will last for decades.
It takes the same amount of resources to ship a piece of junk as it dose to move a top shelf product except junk gets replaced every few years and the good stuff lasts for decades so much less transport with quality goods.
As you have been in transport I am sure you are aware of how much resources go into moving stuff around.
AS for pepsi or its brother poison coke well the 10 spoons of sugar per can is a lot more damaging than the chemicals used to make it.
There is a good reason why the USA has the largest proportion of fat children than any other country in the world and soda is one of them.

Oil is bacteria or rather the excrement of bacteria and like everything else in the planet , the poo of one is dinner to another.
Digging a hole & pouring several gallons of oil in there is pollution and that will take a very long time to breakdown, but it will eventually do it.
Taking it to a recycling depot is better than pouring it on the ground, but you end up breathing it cause most becomes bunker oil and is burned by ships once they are in international waters and not subject to air pollution laws.
Because it is very heavy and burns poorley , a lot of what goes in the engines comes back out and drops into the oceans.
So while it is better than using it once & dumping it it is nowhere as good as breaking it down then reassembling it which is what synthetic oil processing promised but never did.
We used to burn bunker oil in the furnaces but it required a lot of oxygen to be introduced into the air and the EPS was always jumping down out throats making us install all sorts of stupidity so the exhaust ended up being cleaner than the air which went in so they switched to gas.
We were burning around 10,000 gallons a month.
The lab manager got the tom tits about it as did the national manager so wer ran the exhaust system for 3 months while the furnace was being rebuilt, got a fine from the EPA when we submitted the meeter readings then went to court & won the case as we were sucking in air then blowing it out through all of the cleaning equipment and that could not meet the standards pencil d**ks put on the operating furnaces, Finally the plant closed down and 600 men lost their jobs, many never worked again.

As for people dying from all sorts of cancers, we used to die at 40, from "natural causes" . Now days there always has to be a reason.
We used to have a 25% infant mortality now days it is around 0.25 % so the weak who would have died in infancy live long enough to pass on their bad genes to their children who pass them on the their children so the entire population becomes weaker.
People who breed horses can understand this, people who breed dogs can understand this however some how the laws of genetic selection are not supposed to apply to humans ?

Carbon has become the new whipping boy and reducing carbon useage is not in itself a bad idea, using less of everything is a better one.
So enjoy your enviromental passive yard, plants lots of trees & bushes, put in some ponds for frogs & lizards and reduce the amount of lawn to the minimum unless you are gong to run buffalo. Plan a cottage garden in your front yard and accept that nature looks messy and in nature messy is good.
 
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