Jet biofuel.. err.. Cancer fuel from plastic
February 24, 2023 11:01 AM Subscribe
Among the "biofuels" approved under a new speedy EPA process, about half come from waste products, especially plastics, which "the EPA acknowledges .. may present an 'unreasonable risk' to human health or the environment." Among these, one new jet fuel by Chevron "could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer", a risk "250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA."
"All of the waste-based fuels are the subject of consent orders, documents the EPA issues when it finds that new chemicals or mixtures may pose an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment. The documents specify those risks and the agency’s instructions for mitigating them."
"But the agency won’t turn over these records or reveal information about the waste-based fuels, even their names and chemical structures. Without those basic details, it’s nearly impossible to determine which of the thousands of consent orders on the EPA website apply to this program. ..."
We've learned these risks only because journalists obtained one consent order covering a dozen fuels made from plastics at Chevron'n Pascagoula, Mississippi refinery, but the EPA blacked out sections, including the chemicals’ names. It's believed residence face the highest risks. Pascagoula is roughly 29 miles from Mobile and 90 miles from New Orleans.
"All of the waste-based fuels are the subject of consent orders, documents the EPA issues when it finds that new chemicals or mixtures may pose an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment. The documents specify those risks and the agency’s instructions for mitigating them."
"But the agency won’t turn over these records or reveal information about the waste-based fuels, even their names and chemical structures. Without those basic details, it’s nearly impossible to determine which of the thousands of consent orders on the EPA website apply to this program. ..."
We've learned these risks only because journalists obtained one consent order covering a dozen fuels made from plastics at Chevron'n Pascagoula, Mississippi refinery, but the EPA blacked out sections, including the chemicals’ names. It's believed residence face the highest risks. Pascagoula is roughly 29 miles from Mobile and 90 miles from New Orleans.
off the top of my head I can't think of a worse idea for the environment than turning fossil oil into plastic and then into fuel and then burning it
posted by BungaDunga at 11:14 AM on February 24, 2023 [18 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 11:14 AM on February 24, 2023 [18 favorites]
like it might be less bad to just incinerate the plastic
posted by BungaDunga at 11:15 AM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 11:15 AM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]
It’s almost like we learned nothing from tetraethyl lead.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 11:17 AM on February 24, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by Big Al 8000 at 11:17 AM on February 24, 2023 [9 favorites]
I mean, one of the primary effects of tetraethyl lead is that it grows increasingly difficult to learn from it, so… yeah.
posted by Ryvar at 11:20 AM on February 24, 2023 [29 favorites]
posted by Ryvar at 11:20 AM on February 24, 2023 [29 favorites]
At least cancer will just kill you painfully rather than making you stupid and violent for your entire long life.
posted by rikschell at 11:21 AM on February 24, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 11:21 AM on February 24, 2023 [8 favorites]
ha HA hahaha!
Like, as art, this has a beauty to it. A perfect villian, almost too trite for a post modern audience who wants nuance to their antagonists.
An answer, unironically, of who deserves the death penalty.
The gall to use a loophole to get something though regulation... regulation designed to limit damage to life... Well, it makes Cruella's desire to peel 101 puppies for a jacket seem so small.
The writers here need to be brought on to the Fern Gully reboot.
posted by The Power Nap at 11:34 AM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
Like, as art, this has a beauty to it. A perfect villian, almost too trite for a post modern audience who wants nuance to their antagonists.
An answer, unironically, of who deserves the death penalty.
The gall to use a loophole to get something though regulation... regulation designed to limit damage to life... Well, it makes Cruella's desire to peel 101 puppies for a jacket seem so small.
The writers here need to be brought on to the Fern Gully reboot.
posted by The Power Nap at 11:34 AM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
ahh, the green revolution *takes a deep breath, dies*
posted by dis_integration at 11:53 AM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 11:53 AM on February 24, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's particularly egregious how the EPA keeps secret the chemicals being released into locals' lungs, like regulatory capture perfected, or maybe the EPA just verifies that locals are poor and block today.
It's jet fuel so it'll leak out from airports & transport and be sprayed over other cities too. Just fyi, small planes still spray tetraethyl lead over everyone today.
Also real biofuels bring a host of serious problems, definitely not green either.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:10 PM on February 24, 2023 [7 favorites]
It's jet fuel so it'll leak out from airports & transport and be sprayed over other cities too. Just fyi, small planes still spray tetraethyl lead over everyone today.
Also real biofuels bring a host of serious problems, definitely not green either.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:10 PM on February 24, 2023 [7 favorites]
it might be less bad to just incinerate the plastic
on first glance I read this as "it might be less bad to just incinerate the public" and that also worked, in a grim way
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:13 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
on first glance I read this as "it might be less bad to just incinerate the public" and that also worked, in a grim way
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 1:13 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's all so boondoggly.
Traditional fossil fuels will continue to be the only reasonable choice for planes for decades. Oil exists and will continue to exist.
Yes, we'd be better off incinerating plastic - that stuff is packed with Joules.
posted by Glomar response at 1:27 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
Traditional fossil fuels will continue to be the only reasonable choice for planes for decades. Oil exists and will continue to exist.
Yes, we'd be better off incinerating plastic - that stuff is packed with Joules.
posted by Glomar response at 1:27 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
Meanwhile, they breathlessly tell us we can't enjoy a bit of dark chocolate anymore....
posted by coffeecat at 2:10 PM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by coffeecat at 2:10 PM on February 24, 2023 [5 favorites]
I'd always heard that burning plastic was a baaad idea. Dioxin was the main thing I'd heard about but turns out there's others.
[snip]
Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere.
posted by aleph at 4:42 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
[snip]
Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere.
posted by aleph at 4:42 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
"I live my life like there's no tomorrow
And all I've got, I had to steal
Least I don't need to beg or borrow
Yes I'm livin' at a pace that kills
Ooh, yeah
(Ahh)
Huffing with the Devil"
posted by clavdivs at 5:29 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
And all I've got, I had to steal
Least I don't need to beg or borrow
Yes I'm livin' at a pace that kills
Ooh, yeah
(Ahh)
Huffing with the Devil"
posted by clavdivs at 5:29 PM on February 24, 2023 [1 favorite]
I propose we take the long carbon molecule chains of the plastic and bury it in old coal mines and seal it up. Heat and pressure will eventually turn it back into something a bit like oil or coal.
posted by interogative mood at 7:30 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by interogative mood at 7:30 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]
My AI client disclosed:
No, it is not true that small planes still spray tetraethyl lead over everyone today.
Today, most small planes use aviation gasoline without TEL or they use alternative fuels like ethanol or unleaded gasoline. In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that all aircraft engines certified after 1983 use unleaded aviation gasoline.
posted by yclipse at 11:08 AM on February 25, 2023
No, it is not true that small planes still spray tetraethyl lead over everyone today.
Today, most small planes use aviation gasoline without TEL or they use alternative fuels like ethanol or unleaded gasoline. In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that all aircraft engines certified after 1983 use unleaded aviation gasoline.
posted by yclipse at 11:08 AM on February 25, 2023
Long-term exposure to air pollution is tied to an increased risk of having a heart attack
posted by jeffburdges at 11:23 AM on February 25, 2023
posted by jeffburdges at 11:23 AM on February 25, 2023
My AI client disclosed
I don't know wtf this is or where tf it comes from or why tf you posted it in this thread, but it takes less than a minute of actual research to determine that this "AI client" is spewing utter nonsense.
The situation with aviation fuels is complex, but one thing that is true is that leaded avgas still routinely used in many small airplane engines. The FAA says: "Avgas remains the only transportation fuel in the United States to contain lead." Avgas is only used in a subset of planes, but it's a pretty big subset: "[m]ore than 222,600 registered piston-engine aircraft can operate on leaded avgas."
No idea where the "AI client" got 1983 from, but it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the issue. As noted on the above-cited FAA page, the initiative to transition to lead-free fuels for piston-engine aircraft didn't hold its inaugural meeting until 2022. Moreover, the first unleaded avgas wasn't approved in the US until 2021.
(End derail, hopefully.)
posted by Not A Thing at 11:56 AM on February 25, 2023 [10 favorites]
I don't know wtf this is or where tf it comes from or why tf you posted it in this thread, but it takes less than a minute of actual research to determine that this "AI client" is spewing utter nonsense.
The situation with aviation fuels is complex, but one thing that is true is that leaded avgas still routinely used in many small airplane engines. The FAA says: "Avgas remains the only transportation fuel in the United States to contain lead." Avgas is only used in a subset of planes, but it's a pretty big subset: "[m]ore than 222,600 registered piston-engine aircraft can operate on leaded avgas."
No idea where the "AI client" got 1983 from, but it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the issue. As noted on the above-cited FAA page, the initiative to transition to lead-free fuels for piston-engine aircraft didn't hold its inaugural meeting until 2022. Moreover, the first unleaded avgas wasn't approved in the US until 2021.
(End derail, hopefully.)
posted by Not A Thing at 11:56 AM on February 25, 2023 [10 favorites]
America averages one [dangerous] chemical accident every two days
posted by jeffburdges at 1:31 PM on February 25, 2023
posted by jeffburdges at 1:31 PM on February 25, 2023
Ministers told to get a grip on scale of ‘forever chemicals’ pollution in UK
posted by jeffburdges at 2:36 PM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 2:36 PM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]
Didn't we just pass another law about burn pits not even six months ago?
posted by meowzilla at 2:46 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by meowzilla at 2:46 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'd always heard that burning plastic was a baaad idea. Dioxin was the main thing I'd heard about but turns out there's others.
[snip]
Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere.
There's a big difference between combustion in an open field and combustion at ultra-high temperature in a purpose built incinerator. Not that the latter doesn't have its own challenges.
PFAS are an absolute clusterfuck. Partially because like a lot of nasties, they're so good... except for the toxicity. So giving up on all those low friction seals and greases and water repellent clothes and pans is a real loss but given the length that this stuff sticks around (rounds to forever on a human timescale) we have to get the sources under control right now and even doing so will still face inevitable decades of exposure rise since it's so accumulative
They can be removed from drinking water but at enormous expense and only demonstrated at lab scale. (Or through reverse osmosis, the " yeah but that's cheating" of water treatment technologies but that's even more expensive and energy intensive.)
And obviously just taking whatever old mix of garbage plastics and sticking a downstream process on it that is any more complex than "burn at insane temperatures" is going to be crazily difficult to control. Even if you think you know what you're making and emitting, that knowledge is based on an assumed fuel mix - just try and get a pure plastic wastestream that's all the same polymer, same plasticisers and dyes and etc. Impossible outside of factory waste-recycling streams.
posted by atrazine at 9:32 AM on February 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
[snip]
Incineration of plastic waste in an open field is a major source of air pollution. Most of the times, the Municipal Solid Waste containing about 12% of plastics is burnt, releasing toxic gases like Dioxins, Furans, Mercury and Polychlorinated Biphenyls into the atmosphere.
There's a big difference between combustion in an open field and combustion at ultra-high temperature in a purpose built incinerator. Not that the latter doesn't have its own challenges.
PFAS are an absolute clusterfuck. Partially because like a lot of nasties, they're so good... except for the toxicity. So giving up on all those low friction seals and greases and water repellent clothes and pans is a real loss but given the length that this stuff sticks around (rounds to forever on a human timescale) we have to get the sources under control right now and even doing so will still face inevitable decades of exposure rise since it's so accumulative
They can be removed from drinking water but at enormous expense and only demonstrated at lab scale. (Or through reverse osmosis, the " yeah but that's cheating" of water treatment technologies but that's even more expensive and energy intensive.)
And obviously just taking whatever old mix of garbage plastics and sticking a downstream process on it that is any more complex than "burn at insane temperatures" is going to be crazily difficult to control. Even if you think you know what you're making and emitting, that knowledge is based on an assumed fuel mix - just try and get a pure plastic wastestream that's all the same polymer, same plasticisers and dyes and etc. Impossible outside of factory waste-recycling streams.
posted by atrazine at 9:32 AM on February 26, 2023 [5 favorites]
I'd always heard that burning plastic was a baaad idea. Dioxin was the main thing I'd heard about but turns out there's others.
Burning plastics that contain chlorine and/or fluorine is a terrible idea because so many of the combustion products turn out to be very toxic forever-chemicals. Burning polystyrene or polycarbonate other than in a specialized high temperature reactor is not so great either because the smoke from both contains loads of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and most of those are nasty.
Polyethylene and polypropylene both burn very clean, because their molecules are pretty much just very long chain waxes with a bit of crosslinking and they also don't usually contain plasticizers. I would have no problem with the idea of using these in waste-to-energy schemes if they were genuinely displacing other fossil fuels, because burning them emits only about as much CO2 as the fossil fuels they'd be displacing and reduces the amount of microplastics that would otherwise end up circulating and causing trouble. But I'm not even slightly confident in any of the proposals I've seen for separating out the clean-burning varieties from real-world plastic waste streams.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 PM on February 26, 2023
Burning plastics that contain chlorine and/or fluorine is a terrible idea because so many of the combustion products turn out to be very toxic forever-chemicals. Burning polystyrene or polycarbonate other than in a specialized high temperature reactor is not so great either because the smoke from both contains loads of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and most of those are nasty.
Polyethylene and polypropylene both burn very clean, because their molecules are pretty much just very long chain waxes with a bit of crosslinking and they also don't usually contain plasticizers. I would have no problem with the idea of using these in waste-to-energy schemes if they were genuinely displacing other fossil fuels, because burning them emits only about as much CO2 as the fossil fuels they'd be displacing and reduces the amount of microplastics that would otherwise end up circulating and causing trouble. But I'm not even slightly confident in any of the proposals I've seen for separating out the clean-burning varieties from real-world plastic waste streams.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 PM on February 26, 2023
Ministers told to get a grip on scale of ‘forever chemicals’ pollution in UK
I mean technically we are all getting a grip on forever chemicals by storing them in our bodies.
posted by srboisvert at 6:22 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I mean technically we are all getting a grip on forever chemicals by storing them in our bodies.
posted by srboisvert at 6:22 AM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I mean technically we are all getting a grip on forever chemicals by storing them in our bodies.
At cremation temperatures, PFAS are destroyed so there's a slow but steady solution right there!
(unfortunately while high temperatures above 1000C destroy most fluorinated compounds like PFAS and temperatures above 1400C destroy all PFAS, the fluorine then cools and recombines into various other and potentially unknown fluorinated compounds which go bye-bye out of the flue stack where the hot gas carries it nice and far. Maybe we could add calcium sorbents to the flue gas to return the fluorine to the fluorospar mineral where mined it from but I can't imagine that's easy.)
posted by atrazine at 7:17 AM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
At cremation temperatures, PFAS are destroyed so there's a slow but steady solution right there!
(unfortunately while high temperatures above 1000C destroy most fluorinated compounds like PFAS and temperatures above 1400C destroy all PFAS, the fluorine then cools and recombines into various other and potentially unknown fluorinated compounds which go bye-bye out of the flue stack where the hot gas carries it nice and far. Maybe we could add calcium sorbents to the flue gas to return the fluorine to the fluorospar mineral where mined it from but I can't imagine that's easy.)
posted by atrazine at 7:17 AM on February 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Synthetics created in the 20th century have become an evolutionary force, altering human biology and the web of life
posted by jeffburdges at 10:55 PM on February 27, 2023
posted by jeffburdges at 10:55 PM on February 27, 2023
Nuclear waste slowly destroys itself. PFAS, not so much.
Unlike radioactive materials, stable-by-design toxic chemicals don't have characteristic radiation signatures that help us to track them down without intensive sampling of every place they could feasibly find their way to.
posted by flabdablet at 11:41 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Unlike radioactive materials, stable-by-design toxic chemicals don't have characteristic radiation signatures that help us to track them down without intensive sampling of every place they could feasibly find their way to.
posted by flabdablet at 11:41 PM on February 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
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posted by Space Coyote at 11:05 AM on February 24, 2023 [15 favorites]