SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Ship Sinking Off Sri Lanka Looks Like A Lasting Environmental Disaster
A sinking cargo ship off the coast of Sri Lanka is causing an environmental disaster for the country that looks set to have long-term effects.
The X-Press Pearl caught fire on May 20 and burned for two weeks, but the fire appears to have mostly burned out. The crew was evacuated. The ship is now partially sitting on the seabed with its front settling down slowly.
Its cargo is the concern: The ship was carrying dangerous chemicals, including 25 tons of nitric acid and 350 tons of fuel oil. The ship's operator says oil has not spilled so far. But what's already having an impact on beaches nearby are the 78 metric tons of plastic called nurdles — the raw material used to make most types of plastic products.
Wave after wave of plastic pellets are washing ashore. The ship is about 5 miles from the nearest beach.
Also at The Guardian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:52PM (4 children)
It is quite a lot of bullshit. The different qualities and mixed colors make the plastic structurally unsuitable for much of anything, and the color mixing will make color options limited or require painting. On top of that, raw industrial plastic is incredibly cheap, so VLM's capitalist solution won't work until we hit peak oil or electric cars drive demand for oil down. Lurching from one crisis to the next hoping that humanity's scientists will be able to save us from the consequences is just not a smart approach to living.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:54PM (1 child)
We don't even do science any more. We fund lottery-style innovation leaders and 21 year old entrepreneurs who sell pretty dreams.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:41AM
Not really true, but as a trend depressingly accurate enough.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @02:59AM
So melt all the plastic together, dye it brown, mold it into "natural-finish" picnic tables and lawn furniture, and sell it to trendy westerners. It's still worth more than it was before.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 07 2021, @12:13PM
I used post consumer recycling price from a google search; "someone" was buying recycling center plastic around that price in 2019.
Its a surprisingly difficult figure to locate; I wanted post consumer "recycling bin" plastic not pre-consumer manufacturing waste or whatever.
Note I'm aware that just because some recycling center got a price of $$$$ on 50 kilotons of sorted shredded plastic waste does not necessarily mean I'd get the same $/pound price on one ton. But the whole point is the ship had a bazzillion tons of the stuff leaking out so I'm sure they will recycle more than a couple pounds.
If they don't like the local price, I suppose they could just shove nurdles into a shipping container and ship it to a recycling center in the USA and .... oh wait thats kinda how this disaster started. I suppose they'll want to locally process instead of causing another shipping accident?