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" |
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