edit: Don’t do this. Embrace modernity and don’t pollute the soil.
This is not a meme. Apparently this is a difficult concept.
With the !lemmyshitpost community shut down for now, non-memes are struggling to find a home
Child porn. There’s an official statement from the folks running lemmy.world explaining it. I really wish I was joking, but there were a couple of suuuuuuuper inappropriate posts, even for shit posting standards. I came across one and reported it. It was a porn gif and at the end, there was a text card saying the person in the gif is a child. Fucking pedos ruining shit for everyone else, they should make like a leaf and hang from a tree
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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.
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.
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.
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.
So return to its source. Basically.
Oil is weird.
I mean this is probably how we found it in the ground in the first place. The world goes round and round.
Shit like this is why people doing home gardening, especially in areas that have been inhabited for hundreds of years, without testing the soil first give me heart palpitations. What are you eating?? I don’t know, and neither do you!
Almost everyone I know of that gardens at home just tills the soil they have available. Gardening soil isn’t cheap and they view it as an unnecessary expense. It’s especially hard to convince people in rural areas that just using the dirt out back can be harmful.
When I lived in a private house with a garden, we would buy new soil EVERY YEAR. Because fuck all grows otherwise.
My neighborhood soil is laced with arsenic and lead from an old foundry that used to be nearby.
A bunch of my neighbors grow and eat food in that soil knowing it. It boggles my mind.
Yea, and the response has been ‘I’ve been eating food I’ve grown here for 20 years and I’m totally fine!’
I know you can send soil to be tested by your local university extension, but how do you test for conaminents like used hydrocarbons, arsenic, lead, glyphosate-based herbicides, etc?
I am about to embark on a hobby of composting and would like to know.
If your local university doesn’t test for the specific contaminants you’re concerned about you can send samples to a private lab instead, sometimes they offer more testing options. I don’t know the specifics of how each one is tested for, but on your end they usually just require you to take (and possibly dry) soil samples before sending them in.
If you don’t have a good idea of the history of the site, it would be good to try and figure it out through your local historical society if you have one, or land records from your local records office. Whoever is testing the soil will have a better idea of what to test for if they know it used to be a mining town, or it’s 50 feet from a house old enough to have used lead paint, if it was farm land, etc.
Tradition is to save it and use it as a wood oil so the wood will not decay after some time on the rain. Absorbs really good, doesn’t stink or stick…
Yeah, but there’s stuff for that that doesn’t give you eleven different cancers.
There’s a lot of plant based oils you can use, without additives, that give excellent weather protection. Choice of wood is also a huge factor.
Tbh I’d rather replace my fence every five years than cake it in used motor oil.
So you’re saying I have to take up an entirely new hobby I have no interest in just to dispose of my used engine oil?
Was about to mention that. But you forget to mention the half-and-half mix of oil and diesel to prevent wood rot and insects.
If you got a very thick oil, yeah a mix of diesel and oil is good so it would lose on viscosity and would be easier to get it on and into the wood. But today’s engine oils are not really that thick and can be used without any mixing with oil of lesser viscosity such as diesel. Nowadays you can find those very thick oils mostly in tanks (military vehicles) and big machines not your everyday family car.
I mentioned that in particular because the house I’m living has beams that were treated with that mix when it was built, back in the 40’s. And the neither rots nor gets infested. But the added fire damage is there.