edit: Don’t do this. Embrace modernity and don’t pollute the soil.
I’m sure there will be people that take this seriously lol, PSA to others don’t do this. It fucks up the land and nearby water sources as it spreads out. In the US you can be forced to replace the contaminated soil
This really was the advice given till the 90’s or so.
My dad use to have a hole filled with cat litter to pour oil as that was the recommendation.
I was told the solution to pollution is to ship it to Asia so the poors there have something to root around in for treasures.
When I was a yout, they had trucks with a huge tank and a sprayer on the back. The truck would drive all the country roads spraying the dirt with waste oils. This was done to keep the dust down. Smelled terrible. Miles and miles of dirt roads that ran all around by rivers and lakes.
It is crazy to think about that now.
There are still places which basically make rural roads like this. They spray down a layer of heavy oil and then scatter small rock chips and recycled asphalt on top of of the sticky layer to make a roadway. Obviously it’s not suitable for heavy use, but it’s way faster than actually paving the surface.
Chip sealing! I know the process as they still do this for neighborhood streets around here. The oil is more like a tar and solidifies as it cools thus ‘gluing’ the chips to the older road surface. Sort of a stopgap before having to repave completely. I don’t think this is done on dirt surfaces as it doesn’t seem workable.
This process is pretty different than what I described originally. The dirt roads only hold those oils for a relatively short period.
I’m sure you know this, but that’s exactly how a town got turned in to a EPA superfund site due to Dioxin contamination, because of a fuck up over chain of command for waste oil from the creation of napalm or pesticides(IIRC?). The guy running the spraying business didn’t know, which I can believe, but the company that paid for him to dispose of it should’ve informed him.
They still do that on sites with dirt tracks that get dusty. Only, they spray with water.
It’s pretty shitty and foul smelling water, mind.
I assure you they still do that, source: my dad still lived on a back country road that they regularly tarred until they finally paved it about two or three years ago. When I lived there I hated when they did it because I had a white car and didn’t want all the oil on it since it was so hard to wash off and I had to go to the car wash every time I left the house
I was reading about one where the oil was contaminated with some truly terrible shit, dioxin maybe? Several people died. They turned that whole area into a Superfund site.
