On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:39:41 -0700, "." wrote:

gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so most of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....


there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons". We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that
includes costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or
rivers poisoned by phosphates are both good examples - as are the
earthquakes in Arkansas from fracking, and of course photochemical smog.
If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free
market" might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include these
effects in pricing.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ult.../AcidRain.html

Current trends

Since the early 1980s, emissions of sulfur dioxide have been reduced in
both Europe and North America. Even though nitrogen oxides have not been
reduced proportionally, the result has been a reduction in the amount of
acid deposition. This seems to have stopped the acidification of lakes
but not yet reversed it. The technology exists to generate electricity
from coal with greatly reduced emissions and as this technology comes
into use, that aspect of the problem should improve.
What about forests?

Not enough is yet known to be certain, but my guess is that sulfur
dioxide will turn out to have only a supporting role to play and that
the major culprit will turn out to be ozone. Air pollution by ozone,
like that by nitrogen oxides, is largely a matter of automobile exhaust.
[Link]
--
Maxim 12: A soft answer turneth away wrath.
Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.

"." wrote in message ...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so most
of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....


there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the commons".
We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that includes
costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers poisoned
by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in Arkansas
from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price these
things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but there is
no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going to
annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for those
of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there was an
EPA.

--
Ed Huntress

ADHD acting up again?

Try to focus as much as possible.

-------------

"Gunner Asch" wrote in message
...

So mercury in your fillings has made you stupid?

-------------
On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:35:12 -0400, "Josepi"
wrote:

harmless when you aspire. Geeezzz... I never thought chemicals would combine
with anything before....duh. I guess mercury is OK in our food too. It
mixes with it.

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"." wrote in message ...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for
a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....


there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons". We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that
includes costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or
rivers poisoned by phosphates are both good examples - as are the
earthquakes in Arkansas from fracking, and of course photochemical smog.
If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free market"
might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include these effects
in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going
to annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for
those of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there
was an EPA.

--
Ed Huntress


Actually phosphorous in wastewater is not just a pollution issue. It is
also a matter of cost for sewage treatment plants. Removing phosporous is
the most complex and costly step in sewage treatment.

"anorton" wrote in message
m...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"." wrote in message
...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's
bound to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just
to do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for
a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar,
which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing.
It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all
fell in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get
the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....


there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons". We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that
includes costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or
rivers poisoned by phosphates are both good examples - as are the
earthquakes in Arkansas from fracking, and of course photochemical smog.
If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free
market" might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include these
effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going
to annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for
those of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there
was an EPA.

--
Ed Huntress


Actually phosphorous in wastewater is not just a pollution issue. It is
also a matter of cost for sewage treatment plants. Removing phosporous is
the most complex and costly step in sewage treatment.

Well, based on some discussion in the (legitimate) greenie press out here a
few years back, they don't even try in most of the wastewater treatment in
this area.

It requires a biological holding pool, right? Algae or something.

--
Ed Huntress

On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:38:51 -0400, "Josepi"
wrote:

ADHD acting up again?

Try to focus as much as possible.

-------------

"Gunner Asch" wrote in message
.. .

So mercury in your fillings has made you stupid?

-------------
On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:35:12 -0400, "Josepi"
wrote:

harmless when you aspire. Geeezzz... I never thought chemicals would combine
with anything before....duh. I guess mercury is OK in our food too. It
mixes with it.


Never learned to quote properly eh? Pity.

When you figure it out, get back to me.

That way I dont have to try to puzzle out your posts

Gunner

--
Maxim 12: A soft answer turneth away wrath.
Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"anorton" wrote in message
m...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"." wrote in message
...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's
bound to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job
they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just
to do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table.
Then get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and
start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until
there's wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter
for a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar,
which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope
anyone has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing.
It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all
fell in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of
money for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be
the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in
which we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get
the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....


there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons". We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that
includes costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or
rivers poisoned by phosphates are both good examples - as are the
earthquakes in Arkansas from fracking, and of course photochemical
smog. If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free
market" might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include
these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are
going to annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going
back, for those of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked
before there was an EPA.

--
Ed Huntress


Actually phosphorous in wastewater is not just a pollution issue. It is
also a matter of cost for sewage treatment plants. Removing phosporous
is the most complex and costly step in sewage treatment.

Well, based on some discussion in the (legitimate) greenie press out here
a few years back, they don't even try in most of the wastewater treatment
in this area.

It requires a biological holding pool, right? Algae or something.

--
Ed Huntress

There are special phosphorous absorbing algae, but most use reactions with
various inorganic compounds that require a specific pH. Then the precipate
has to be filtered or allowed to settle, then the pH re-adjusted.

Joseph Gwinn on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:43:47 -0400
typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:


I did look - they were all clean, mostly because I pre-rinse the heavy
stuff right into the disposal.

Joe Gwinn

FWIW, we're having exactly the same smell problem with our dishwasher, and I
haven't be able to figure it out for months. Now that you've filled us in,
I'm going to try some TSP in that machine, as well as in my clothes washer.

Bingo! It takes two maybe three washes to achieve full effect. I
assume that this is to clean out the hoses et al. I started with a far
heavier dose, but had some lime deposits that were cleaned off with
Bon-Ami and a rag.

Also, I came upon the following article:

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/89/8904cover.html

Hmm, haven't had a chance to check that link.

But the question comes to mind, would this lack of phosphate also
effect washing machines? Especially in a single bachelor house, where
laundry generally gets done once a month, "need to or not". Although
there have been times when I've let it slide for two months.

tschus
pyotr


Joe Gwinn
--
pyotr filipivich
Next Month's Panel: Suicide - getting it right the first time.

"Josepi" on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:40:10 -0400
typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
Bull****!

They use less, if you like dirty clothes. Too many people have experienced
them and the trend is to go back to normalcy. Haven't you noticed how the
three and four times the price front loads are down to the same prices now?
The same thing happened in the 50-60s with front loads. This isn't the first
time the public has been conned by slick sales people, only to return to the
old way they came from with thinner wallets.

Tain't just slick sales people, it is Energy Star ratings. Seems
that the top loaders "just use too much water and electricity", so to
get their usage down. the manufacturers have gone to front loaders.
All things combined, they do not get clothes clean.
Consumer Reports has a recent article about this, that they have
been unable to recommend an top loader model, due to this failure to
get clothes clean. Which is a result of the EPA/et al mandate to
lower "energy usage".
It doesn't help if I have to wash clothes twice to get them half
clean.

Fortunately, I 'm a career bachelor. If they don't stand up by
themselves, or aren't a hazard to have in contact with the skin, "good
enough".
--
pyotr filipivich
We will drink no whiskey before its nine.
It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!

Apparently, you wouldn't remember anyway.

-------

"Gunner Asch" wrote in message
...
Never learned to quote properly eh? Pity.

When you figure it out, get back to me.

That way I dont have to try to puzzle out your posts

Gunner

The units that have an "Energy Star" rating purchased for them shows the
manufacturers can't sell them.

"Energy Star" trademarks do not indicate the most efficient appliances only
the ones they are trying to squeeze more money, on the sale, out of. The
real MPG is in the user's corner and most won't touch a front load next
time. They use the same amount of water and take four hours to do their 15
cycles to save the water. Poor reasoning

If consumers or manufacturers really wanted to save water they would only
purchase machines with suds savers on them. Try to find one. The phony
eco-concern is only marketing hype to make you unhappy with your old
obsolete machine in white.

eco = economics for the manufacturer.

--------

"pyotr filipivich" wrote in message
...
Tain't just slick sales people, it is Energy Star ratings. Seems
that the top loaders "just use too much water and electricity", so to
get their usage down. the manufacturers have gone to front loaders.
All things combined, they do not get clothes clean.
Consumer Reports has a recent article about this, that they have
been unable to recommend an top loader model, due to this failure to
get clothes clean. Which is a result of the EPA/et al mandate to
lower "energy usage".
It doesn't help if I have to wash clothes twice to get them half
clean.

Fortunately, I 'm a career bachelor. If they don't stand up by
themselves, or aren't a hazard to have in contact with the skin, "good
enough".
--
pyotr filipivich
We will drink no whiskey before its nine.
It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!

In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]
Welcome.

Do you think it's time to storm the EPA?

g I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate their problem. They're
charged with reducing pollutants of many kinds. As a long-time fisherman
and
outdoorsman, I remember what it was like before we had the EPA. The
Delaware
River was a uniform gray on the bottom and the carp, which were almost the
only fish living in it, were gasping.

Now we have shad again, and blueback herring, and even trout as far south
as
Lambertville, NJ. Atlantic Salmon have been netted in the Delaware Bay --
not quite ready to brave the river, but hanging around and hoping it will
keep improving. They left nearly two centuries ago.

We lost one of the most beautiful and unique trout waters in the world when
the acid rain killed most of the trout in the Adirondacks. That reached
crisis levels when I was in my early teens. It broke my heart. I haven't
been back for decades, although I hear it's somewhat better since stack
scrubbers were applied to coal-fired plants in the Midwest, which is where
the acid rain came from.

So I try to look at it case-by-case. It's not easy.


The basic problem is that they don't know when to just stop, declare
victory, and move on.

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma


[1] "World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini, 20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.

On Jul 11, 1:05*pm, "Josepi" wrote:
The liquids and dissolved chemicals float right through a septic system,
over the two sediment tanks and through the leaching bed.

The chemicals have to go somewhere. They don't just disappear into thin air.

---------

"jim" *wrote in messagenews:2LCdnW2hRp1tpYbTnZ2dnUVZ_q2dnZ2d@brigh t.net....

Is there any adverse affect to the septic tank? I thought phosphates
from septic systems had adverse effects on clean groundwater.

-jim

Into the aquifer...and then they come out the faucet into your glass
of water which you then drink.

Or absorbed into your body when you bath.

Anyone who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT

On Jul 11, 1:58*pm, "Lloyd E. Sponenburgh"
lloydspinsidemindspring.com wrote:
"Josepi" fired this volley :

The chemicals have to go somewhere. They don't just disappear into
thin air.

Actually, you're fairly close, Josepi. *They just disappear into 'thin'
earth -- a layer only a foot or so deep.

And they do; *Bleach breaks down rapidly into chlorine, oxygen, and
calcium oxide, which further combines into calcium hydroxide, then
combines with organics to form harmless soaps.

TSP breaks down into sodium salts and phosphoric acid, which combines
with calcium carbonate in the soil.

TSP's only heavy-hitting harm to the environment is as an algal nutrient,
where it causes fish-choking blooms in static or heavily-contaminated
bodies of water.

LLoyd

Or the Gulf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

TMT

On Jul 11, 9:22*pm, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In article ,
*"Ed Huntress" wrote:





"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"anorton" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
Over the last year or so, my Bosch dishwasher (installed in 1999 or
so)
started to smell skunky, although it still seemed to clean OK if not
as
well as when new. *This slowly worsened, and I started haunting the
appliance repair sites.

The main suggestions were to not use so much soap (helped slightly),
run
a cycle with a cup of vinegar in the water (worked for two days),
and
(quite oddly) don't rinse the plates off before putting them in the
dishwasher. *All in all, the washer had worked just fine for years,
and
none of these are a solution, so kept looking.

Then I happened on an article in an electronics trade rag (Bob
Pease's
column in "Electronic Design" magazine, 5 May 2011, page 104)
pointing
out that all the phosphate had just been removed from dishwasher
detergents, and this was causing problems. *Hmm. *Phosphates were
always
considered essential when I was growing up. *What changed?

Using phosphate and dishwasher together as a google search term soon
led
to the answer, with tale after tale of dishwashers that no longer
work,
of people buying new dishwashers to no avail ... could this be the
reason?

What changed is that the EPA forced the makers of household
dishwasher
detergents to eliminate all phosphates, despite the fact the
phosphate
fertilizer is still used by the ton. *(Restaurants can still get the
phosphate stuff.)

Anyway, the suggested standard solution is to add your own
phosphate,
and it takes very little to solve the problem - phosphate was about
5%
of the mix in the pre-EPA days. *In my Bosch, the usual soap load is
maybe a tablespoon or a bit more of Cascade, to which I add
literally
one pinch of Trisodium Phosphate. *Swampy smells are gone.

There is however one thing to be careful of: *Not everything sold as
"TSP" is in fact Trisodium Phosphate these days. *I have some "TSP"
that
was sold to me as Trisodium Phosphate but in fact is Sodium
Silicate,
which will not work, and may cause damage (the package warns about
etching glass). *So, read the box carefully. *If it does not come
out
and clearly say that it is Trisodium Phosphate, it probably isn't.
It's
best to buy Trisodium Phosphate in a real paint store.

For some background, see
http://www.appliance.net/2010/states...n-dishwasher-s
oap
-1988

Joe Gwinn

If you have a swampy smell, there is some sort of decaying matter
causing
it. *I do not know about Bosch, but in my Kenmore there is a coarse
grate
above the macerator, a slight finer grate next to the macerator blade
,
and
a fine screen to filter recirculated water. All of these can trap
chunks
of
food, especially fibrous stuff. I have to take it apart and clean them
now
and then.

I did look - they were all clean, mostly because I pre-rinse the heavy
stuff right into the disposal.

Joe Gwinn

FWIW, we're having exactly the same smell problem with our dishwasher,
and I
haven't be able to figure it out for months. Now that you've filled us
in,
I'm going to try some TSP in that machine, as well as in my clothes
washer.

Bingo! *It takes two maybe three washes to achieve full effect. *I
assume that this is to clean out the hoses et al. *I started with a far
heavier dose, but had some lime deposits that were later cleaned off with
Bon-Ami and a rag.

Also, I came upon the following article:

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/89/8904cover.html

Well, that's darned interesting. Reading about the complications of finding
substitutes reminds me of the things those Oakite engineers were talking
about.

So, I have a load in the dishwasher, and my box of TSP is handy. I'll give
it a try. Thanks for all the info, Joe.

Welcome.

Do you think it's time to storm the EPA?

The basic problem is that they don't know when to just stop, declare
victory, and move on.

Joe Gwinn- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Take a look at this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)

The problem is not yet solved...just reduced.

TMT

On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 23:03:38 -0400, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:



This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma


[1] "World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini, 20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.

To be reasonable, the back-of-the-envelope calculations need to
account for the fact that most sewage treatment systems do not remove
phosphate, and often deliver it directly to water bodies vulnerable to
algal blooms. On the other hand, fertilizers are applied to soil,
which effectively binds the phosphorous. Which explains why, as
someone else mentioned, septic systems with leach fields generally do
not release much phosphorous.

Septic systems do release considerable nitrogen, which is the limiting
nutrient in salt water, at least here in the northeast. Excess algae
on the clam flats here is often a sign of nitrogen runoff in coves
with limited tidal flushing, whereas phosphorous isn't really a
problem.

--
Ned Simmons

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]
Welcome.

Do you think it's time to storm the EPA?

g I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate their problem.
They're
charged with reducing pollutants of many kinds. As a long-time
fisherman
and
outdoorsman, I remember what it was like before we had the EPA. The
Delaware
River was a uniform gray on the bottom and the carp, which were almost
the
only fish living in it, were gasping.

Now we have shad again, and blueback herring, and even trout as far
south
as
Lambertville, NJ. Atlantic Salmon have been netted in the Delaware
Bay --
not quite ready to brave the river, but hanging around and hoping it
will
keep improving. They left nearly two centuries ago.

We lost one of the most beautiful and unique trout waters in the world
when
the acid rain killed most of the trout in the Adirondacks. That reached
crisis levels when I was in my early teens. It broke my heart. I
haven't
been back for decades, although I hear it's somewhat better since stack
scrubbers were applied to coal-fired plants in the Midwest, which is
where
the acid rain came from.

So I try to look at it case-by-case. It's not easy.


The basic problem is that they don't know when to just stop, declare
victory, and move on.

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.


Joe Gwinn


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing clothes, in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall that it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much ag
runoff in that river as in many others.


As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma


[1] "World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini, 20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.

On Jul 12, 7:34*am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"." wrote in ...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.

Joe Gwinn

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? * I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so most
of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, *has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the commons".
We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and *that includes
costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers poisoned
by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in Arkansas
from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price these
things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but there is
no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going to
annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for those
of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there was an
EPA.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well said Ed.

All I have to remember is seeing rivers burn in America...

TMT

Too_Many_Tools fired this volley in
:

Anyone who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT, you paint the subject with too broad a brush.

IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.

Don't fall into believing the nanny-state mantra that ALL things
artificial are automatically permanent pollutants. They aren't.

LLoyd

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in message
. 3.70...

Too_Many_Tools fired this volley in
:

Anyone who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT, you paint the subject with too broad a brush.

IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.

Don't fall into believing the nanny-state mantra that ALL things
artificial are automatically permanent pollutants. They aren't.

LLoyd

====================

I guess you must be saying that chlorine is OK to inhale then.

Quite moronic. I can't see it so it must be OK.

--

Eric

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing clothes, in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall that it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much ag
runoff in that river as in many others.

There are a few problems here.

First, we are talking about dishwashing, not clothes washing, which
makes for a big difference in detergent use, at least a factor of ten.
I don't know about others, but I have not been having any problems with
clothes washing detergents. The problem is with dishwashing detergents.

Second, Delaware is an outlier, being a very small state with a very
large fraction of non-farming households. The Delaware River promptly
flows into the Atlantic Ocean, joining the outflow from the rest of the
Eastern Seaboard. What matters is the aggregate.

Third, animals (including humans) excrete phosphorus in their excrement:
"However, where used, detergent phosphates contribute only 5 - 20% of
phosphates in sewage (most phosphate in sewage comes from human bodily
functions and food wastes), and sewage itself is only a minority source
of phosphate to the environment compared to agriculture." [2]

To summarize, 95% of phosphate goes into agriculture, and thus to
phosphate runoff. Of the remaining 5%, detergents are a fraction of
that 5%. Of detergents, something like 90% was for clothes washing, and
maybe 10% was for dishwashing. This was before the effort to remove
phosphates from detergents was undertaken, but even then only (5%)(10%)=
0.5% went into dishwashing detergents. After the removal effort, this
has been reduced to a fraction of 0.5%.

So, the focus would have to be on agriculture. The problem is that crop
plants cannot be convinced that they don't need phosphorus to grow.

Joe Gwinn



As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma


[1] "World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini, 20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.

[2] "Questions and Answers on the use of phosphate in detergents", 10
February 2011, CEEP (Centre Européen d¹Etudes sur les Polyphosphates),
http://www.ceep-phosphates.org/Files...%20detergent%2
0proposal%2010%20February%202011.pdf.

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 7:34 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"." wrote in ...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's
bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.

Joe Gwinn

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just
to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most
of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for
a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar,
which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing.
It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all
fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get
the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons".
We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that includes
costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers
poisoned
by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in
Arkansas
from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price these
things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but there
is
no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going
to
annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for
those
of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there was an
EPA.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well said Ed.

All I have to remember is seeing rivers burn in America...

TMT

Speaking of which, I drove over the Cuyahoga the day before it caught on
fire. My luck was running good.

--
Ed Huntress

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an
issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers
or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing clothes,
in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall that
it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much ag
runoff in that river as in many others.

There are a few problems here.

First, we are talking about dishwashing, not clothes washing, which
makes for a big difference in detergent use, at least a factor of ten.

Right. I'm just comparing total househeld use versus the runoff. I didn't
even know there were phosphates in dishwasher detergent until you brought it
up.


I don't know about others, but I have not been having any problems with
clothes washing detergents. The problem is with dishwashing detergents.

I don't think I would have noticed except that I had Oakite as a client
while it was happening, and their engineers brought it up in discussion. But
I noticed as soon as I tried adding some TSP, per their suggestion, to
really dirty loads of clothes.


Second, Delaware is an outlier, being a very small state with a very
large fraction of non-farming households. The Delaware River promptly
flows into the Atlantic Ocean, joining the outflow from the rest of the
Eastern Seaboard. What matters is the aggregate.

Ok. As I said, I'm involved with the Delaware Estuary Project (I wonder what
the mailman thinks when he delivers my copy of _Delaware Estuary News_ every
month? g) The river has been important to me for most of my life. So I'm
concerned specifically with the issues involved there.

We've had some discussion here about the fact that phosphates are difficult
to remove in sewerage treatment, and I just followed up last night by
reading up on it, trying to refresh my slight memory of it and to learn
something. We apparently have poor sequestration of phosphates in much of
the Delaware watershed. And, as you say, it's an outlier, with very high
population in the watershed and relatively less agriculture. The lower
Hudson is in a similar situation.


Third, animals (including humans) excrete phosphorus in their excrement:
"However, where used, detergent phosphates contribute only 5 - 20% of
phosphates in sewage (most phosphate in sewage comes from human bodily
functions and food wastes), and sewage itself is only a minority source
of phosphate to the environment compared to agriculture." [2]

Overall, I don't doubt that.


To summarize, 95% of phosphate goes into agriculture, and thus to
phosphate runoff. Of the remaining 5%, detergents are a fraction of
that 5%. Of detergents, something like 90% was for clothes washing, and
maybe 10% was for dishwashing. This was before the effort to remove
phosphates from detergents was undertaken, but even then only (5%)(10%)=
0.5% went into dishwashing detergents. After the removal effort, this
has been reduced to a fraction of 0.5%.

The amelioration efforts in the Delaware watershed have been studied, and
isolated to the degree that was possible. As I stated earlier, eliminating
phosphates in clothes-washing detergent had a (claimed) measurable effect on
oxygen levels in the lower Delaware. Consumer education programs about lawn
and garden fertilizing and runoff did not. Commercial agriculture efforts
and regulations also had a measurable effect.


So, the focus would have to be on agriculture. The problem is that crop
plants cannot be convinced that they don't need phosphorus to grow.

Not having any background in this, I can't address the individual issues.
But my understanding is that fertilizing timing is an issue; release rates
are an issue; plowing practice is an issue; quantities are an issue. All are
being addressed by one institution or another.

It's better than sitting around and sucking our thumbs, but I don't know the
numbers.

--
Ed Huntress






Joe Gwinn



As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma


[1] "World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini,
20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.

[2] "Questions and Answers on the use of phosphate in detergents", 10
February 2011, CEEP (Centre Européen d¹Etudes sur les Polyphosphates),
http://www.ceep-phosphates.org/Files...%20detergent%2
0proposal%2010%20February%202011.pdf.

On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:44:05 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 7:34 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"." wrote in ...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's
bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.

Joe Gwinn

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just
to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most
of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for
a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar,
which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing.
It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all
fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get
the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons".
We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that includes
costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers
poisoned
by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in
Arkansas
from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price these
things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but there
is
no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going
to
annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for
those
of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there was an
EPA.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well said Ed.

All I have to remember is seeing rivers burn in America...

TMT

Speaking of which, I drove over the Cuyahoga the day before it caught on
fire. My luck was running good.

I had a bottle or two of "Burning River" beer in Cleveland last week
(along with an awesome sandwich at this place:
http://www.meltbarandgrilled.com).. while watching the Jays win over
the Tribe in the 10th.. so some good did come of it.

Eric wrote:
"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in message
....
IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.
...

I guess you must be saying that chlorine is OK to inhale then.
....

He's not saying that at all. Or implying it. Where do you get that?

Bob

"Spehro Pefhany" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:44:05 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 7:34 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"." wrote in
...
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's
bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job
they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big
successes.

Joe Gwinn

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and
cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just
to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes
it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table.
Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and
start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most
of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until
there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter
for
a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar,
which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope
anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing.
It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all
fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a
good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of
money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be
the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in
which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get
the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like
the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration.
I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles
or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons".
We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that includes
costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers
poisoned
by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in
Arkansas
from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price
these
things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but
there
is
no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are
going
to
annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for
those
of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there was
an
EPA.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well said Ed.

All I have to remember is seeing rivers burn in America...

TMT

Speaking of which, I drove over the Cuyahoga the day before it caught on
fire. My luck was running good.

I had a bottle or two of "Burning River" beer in Cleveland last week

Ha! We should try comparing that with New Jersey's finest, "River Horse,"
brewed on the banks of the Delaware in historic, scenic, Lambertville, NJ.
g

(along with an awesome sandwich at this place:
http://www.meltbarandgrilled.com).. while watching the Jays win over
the Tribe in the 10th.. so some good did come of it.

Feh. A pox on both their houses. Go Yankees. d8-) (yes, that's a Yankees
cap)

--
Ed Huntress

On Jul 13, 6:57*am, "Lloyd E. Sponenburgh"
lloydspinsidemindspring.com wrote:
Too_Many_Tools fired this volley :

Anyone *who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT, you paint the subject with too broad a brush.

IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." *Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.

Don't fall into believing the nanny-state mantra that ALL things
artificial are automatically permanent pollutants. *They aren't.

LLoyd

I agree...one needs to look at the science..the PR..from either side.

But the point is the environment is a closed system.

You need to know what will happen before you flush it down the
drain..not after which has been the case.

If one follows the mutant frog story, the first incident of it was
found in area with septic tanks..whose fields drained into a
pond...where the frogs were. The birth control chemicals from the
houses were the cause.

TMT

On Jul 13, 8:44*am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message

...
On Jul 12, 7:34 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:





"." wrote in ....
gigantic snip

There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's
bound
to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.

Joe Gwinn

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.

I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this
hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just
to
do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.

For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly
dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.

First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a
mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then
get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the
carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so
most
of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's
wax
in there that won't dissolve.

Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for
a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're
fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar,
which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.

So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone
has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet
just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?

Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing.
It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many
people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest
didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all
fell
in
the Northeast. Hrumph.

But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money
for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor
drain
it.g

That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which
we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get
the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the
prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the
fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA
regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.

I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I
was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....

there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons".
We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that includes
costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or rivers
poisoned
by phosphates are both good examples - as are the earthquakes in
Arkansas
from fracking, and of course photochemical smog. If we could price these
things so the creator pays then the "free market" might work, but there
is
no practical mechanism to include these effects in pricing.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are going
to
annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going back, for
those
of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked before there was an
EPA.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -
Well said Ed.

All I have to remember is seeing rivers burn in America...

TMT

Speaking of which, I drove over the Cuyahoga the day before it caught on
fire. My luck was running good.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Did you have the feeling a pork chop has just before the flame? ;)

TMT

On Jul 13, 9:09*am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message

...





In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph *wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed *wrote:

[snip]

look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? * I
choose the former. *And, I wash by hand so there has never been an
issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers
or
clean glasses. *Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. *The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing clothes,
in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall that
it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much ag
runoff in that river as in many others.

There are a few problems here.

First, we are talking about dishwashing, not clothes washing, which
makes for a big difference in detergent use, at least a factor of ten.

Right. I'm just comparing total househeld use versus the runoff. I didn't
even know there were phosphates in dishwasher detergent until you brought it
up.

I don't know about others, but I have not been having any problems with
clothes washing detergents. *The problem is with dishwashing detergents.

I don't think I would have noticed except that I had Oakite as a client
while it was happening, and their engineers brought it up in discussion. But
I noticed as soon as I tried adding some TSP, per their suggestion, to
really dirty loads of clothes.



Second, Delaware is an outlier, being a very small state with a very
large fraction of non-farming households. The Delaware River promptly
flows into the Atlantic Ocean, joining the outflow from the rest of the
Eastern Seaboard. *What matters is the aggregate.

Ok. As I said, I'm involved with the Delaware Estuary Project (I wonder what
the mailman thinks when he delivers my copy of _Delaware Estuary News_ every
month? g) The river has been important to me for most of my life. So I'm
concerned specifically with the issues involved there.

We've had some discussion here about the fact that phosphates are difficult
to remove in sewerage treatment, and I just followed up last night by
reading up on it, trying to refresh my slight memory of it and to learn
something. We apparently have poor sequestration of phosphates in much of
the Delaware watershed. And, as you say, it's an outlier, with very high
population in the watershed and relatively less agriculture. The lower
Hudson is in a similar situation.



Third, animals (including humans) excrete phosphorus in their excrement:
"However, where used, detergent phosphates contribute only 5 - 20% of
phosphates in sewage (most phosphate in sewage comes from human bodily
functions and food wastes), and sewage itself is only a minority source
of phosphate to the environment compared to agriculture." [2]

Overall, I don't doubt that.



To summarize, 95% of phosphate goes into agriculture, and thus to
phosphate runoff. *Of the remaining 5%, detergents are a fraction of
that 5%. *Of detergents, something like 90% was for clothes washing, and
maybe 10% was for dishwashing. *This was before the effort to remove
phosphates from detergents was undertaken, but even then only (5%)(10%)=
0.5% went into dishwashing detergents. After the removal effort, this
has been reduced to a fraction of 0.5%.

The amelioration efforts in the Delaware watershed have been studied, and
isolated to the degree that was possible. As I stated earlier, eliminating
phosphates in clothes-washing detergent had a (claimed) measurable effect on
oxygen levels in the lower Delaware. Consumer education programs about lawn
and garden fertilizing and runoff did not. Commercial agriculture efforts
and regulations also had a measurable effect.



So, the focus would have to be on agriculture. *The problem is that crop
plants cannot be convinced that they don't need phosphorus to grow.

Not having any background in this, I can't address the individual issues.
But my understanding is that fertilizing timing is an issue; release rates
are an issue; plowing practice is an issue; quantities are an issue. All are
being addressed by one institution or another.

It's better than sitting around and sucking our thumbs, but I don't know the
numbers.

--
Ed Huntress





Joe Gwinn

As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

[1] *"World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini,
20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) *p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.

[2] *"Questions and Answers on the use of phosphate in detergents", 10
February 2011, CEEP (Centre Européen d¹Etudes sur les Polyphosphates),
http://www.ceep-phosphates.org/Files...%20detergent%2
0proposal%2010%20February%202011.pdf.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

My guess is that the EPA went for the low hanging fruit...they could
control detergent usage much easier and quicker than ag usage of
fertilizer.

The irony is that field runoff of fertilizer would represent money
going down the drain for a farmer...so I think there would be strong
motivation to control it. Any farmers out there who know if farming
practices have changed to control fertilizer = money runoff?

TMT

Too_Many_Tools writes:


The irony is that field runoff of fertilizer would represent money
going down the drain for a farmer...so I think there would be strong
motivation to control it. Any farmers out there who know if farming
practices have changed to control fertilizer ^X money runoff?

Well, around the Chesapeake Bay, Frank Purdue and friends must
build grass strips protecting waterways; the idea being such
helps absorb the runoff before it overloads the watercourse with
nutrients.

--
A host is a host from coast to
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

"Bob Engelhardt" wrote in message ...

Eric wrote:
"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in message
....
IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.
...

I guess you must be saying that chlorine is OK to inhale then.
....

He's not saying that at all. Or implying it. Where do you get that?

Bob

=======

Basic chemistry tells us he is saying that "at all"

That is where I got that.

--

Eric

.. wrote:
gigantic snip

(...)

If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free
market" might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include these
effects in pricing.

There is a 'slippery slope'!
How much would a barrel of oil cost if we had to 'create' it
from decaying plants?

--Winston

On Jul 10, 10:28*pm, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
Over the last year or so, my Bosch dishwasher (installed in 1999 or so)
started to smell skunky, although it still seemed to clean OK if not as
well as when new. *This slowly worsened, and I started haunting the
appliance repair sites. *

The main suggestions were to not use so much soap (helped slightly), run
a cycle with a cup of vinegar in the water (worked for two days), and
(quite oddly) don't rinse the plates off before putting them in the
dishwasher. *All in all, the washer had worked just fine for years, and
none of these are a solution, so kept looking.

Then I happened on an article in an electronics trade rag (Bob Pease's
column in "Electronic Design" magazine, 5 May 2011, page 104) pointing
out that all the phosphate had just been removed from dishwasher
detergents, and this was causing problems. *Hmm. *Phosphates were always
considered essential when I was growing up. *What changed?

Using phosphate and dishwasher together as a google search term soon led
to the answer, with tale after tale of dishwashers that no longer work,
of people buying new dishwashers to no avail ... could this be the
reason?

What changed is that the EPA forced the makers of household dishwasher
detergents to eliminate all phosphates, despite the fact the phosphate
fertilizer is still used by the ton. *(Restaurants can still get the
phosphate stuff.)

Anyway, the suggested standard solution is to add your own phosphate,
and it takes very little to solve the problem - phosphate was about 5%
of the mix in the pre-EPA days. *In my Bosch, the usual soap load is
maybe a tablespoon or a bit more of Cascade, to which I add literally
one pinch of Trisodium Phosphate. *Swampy smells are gone.

There is however one thing to be careful of: *Not everything sold as
"TSP" is in fact Trisodium Phosphate these days. *I have some "TSP" that
was sold to me as Trisodium Phosphate but in fact is Sodium Silicate,
which will not work, and may cause damage (the package warns about
etching glass). *So, read the box carefully. *If it does not come out
and clearly say that it is Trisodium Phosphate, it probably isn't. *It's
best to buy Trisodium Phosphate in a real paint store.

For some background, see
http://www.appliance.net/2010/states...ishwasher-soap
-1988

Joe Gwinn

Would you mind listing some of those appliance repair sites?

Thanks

TMT

"Eric" on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:41:05 -0400
typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:
"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in message
.3.70...

Too_Many_Tools fired this volley:
Anyone who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT, you paint the subject with too broad a brush.

IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.

Don't fall into believing the nanny-state mantra that ALL things
artificial are automatically permanent pollutants. They aren't.

LLoyd

====================

I guess you must be saying that chlorine is OK to inhale then.

For you, it might just be.

But the assumption that the sole source compounds is human
activity is ludicrous. As is the assumption that things do not break
down.

I'd be interested how TMT figures that what gets flush will some
how windup up hill of the water intake.
Actually, I wouldn't.


tschus
pyotr
--
pyotr filipivich
We will drink no whiskey before its nine.
It's eight fifty eight. Close enough!

pyotr filipivich wrote:

I'd be interested how TMT figures that what gets flush will some
how windup up hill of the water intake.
Actually, I wouldn't.


Pumps would be the answer to your question.

If you have indoor plumbing the chances are good
that the water coming out of the faucet was
pumped from somewhere much lower down

On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:31:20 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
wrote:

On Jul 11, 1:05*pm, "Josepi" wrote:
The liquids and dissolved chemicals float right through a septic system,
over the two sediment tanks and through the leaching bed.

The chemicals have to go somewhere. They don't just disappear into thin air.

---------

"jim" *wrote in messagenews:2LCdnW2hRp1tpYbTnZ2dnUVZ_q2dnZ2d@brigh t.net...

Is there any adverse affect to the septic tank? I thought phosphates
from septic systems had adverse effects on clean groundwater.

-jim

Into the aquifer...and then they come out the faucet into your glass
of water which you then drink.

Or absorbed into your body when you bath.

Absorbed how? Through osmosis or through your spreading your ass
cheecks open to absorb through your butthole?


Anyone who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT

My flushes don't end up in my drinking water, we send our flushes down
to chocolate city. Do you live in a chocolate city? Laugh, laugh,
laugh!

In article
,
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

On Jul 10, 10:28*pm, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
Over the last year or so, my Bosch dishwasher (installed in 1999 or so)
started to smell skunky, although it still seemed to clean OK if not as
well as when new. *This slowly worsened, and I started haunting the
appliance repair sites. *

The main suggestions were to not use so much soap (helped slightly), run
a cycle with a cup of vinegar in the water (worked for two days), and
(quite oddly) don't rinse the plates off before putting them in the
dishwasher. *All in all, the washer had worked just fine for years, and
none of these are a solution, so kept looking.

Then I happened on an article in an electronics trade rag (Bob Pease's
column in "Electronic Design" magazine, 5 May 2011, page 104) pointing
out that all the phosphate had just been removed from dishwasher
detergents, and this was causing problems. *Hmm. *Phosphates were always
considered essential when I was growing up. *What changed?

Using phosphate and dishwasher together as a google search term soon led
to the answer, with tale after tale of dishwashers that no longer work,
of people buying new dishwashers to no avail ... could this be the
reason?

What changed is that the EPA forced the makers of household dishwasher
detergents to eliminate all phosphates, despite the fact the phosphate
fertilizer is still used by the ton. *(Restaurants can still get the
phosphate stuff.)

Anyway, the suggested standard solution is to add your own phosphate,
and it takes very little to solve the problem - phosphate was about 5%
of the mix in the pre-EPA days. *In my Bosch, the usual soap load is
maybe a tablespoon or a bit more of Cascade, to which I add literally
one pinch of Trisodium Phosphate. *Swampy smells are gone.

There is however one thing to be careful of: *Not everything sold as
"TSP" is in fact Trisodium Phosphate these days. *I have some "TSP" that
was sold to me as Trisodium Phosphate but in fact is Sodium Silicate,
which will not work, and may cause damage (the package warns about
etching glass). *So, read the box carefully. *If it does not come out
and clearly say that it is Trisodium Phosphate, it probably isn't. *It's
best to buy Trisodium Phosphate in a real paint store.

For some background, see
http://www.appliance.net/2010/states-ban-phosphate-laden-dishwasher-soap-1988

Joe Gwinn

Would you mind listing some of those appliance repair sites?

I didn't record most of them. The one mentioned above was the most
useful, but the most entertaining was the Appliance Samuri at
http://applianceguru.com/.

Joe Gwinn

In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an
issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers
or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing clothes,
in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall that
it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much ag
runoff in that river as in many others.

There are a few problems here.

First, we are talking about dishwashing, not clothes washing, which
makes for a big difference in detergent use, at least a factor of ten.

Right. I'm just comparing total househeld use versus the runoff. I didn't
even know there were phosphates in dishwasher detergent until you brought it
up.


I don't know about others, but I have not been having any problems with
clothes washing detergents. The problem is with dishwashing detergents.

I don't think I would have noticed except that I had Oakite as a client
while it was happening, and their engineers brought it up in discussion. But
I noticed as soon as I tried adding some TSP, per their suggestion, to
really dirty loads of clothes.

Yes. A lot depends on the composition of the local water. People with
water softeners seem to have far less trouble.


Second, Delaware is an outlier, being a very small state with a very
large fraction of non-farming households. The Delaware River promptly
flows into the Atlantic Ocean, joining the outflow from the rest of the
Eastern Seaboard. What matters is the aggregate.

Ok. As I said, I'm involved with the Delaware Estuary Project (I wonder what
the mailman thinks when he delivers my copy of _Delaware Estuary News_ every
month? g) The river has been important to me for most of my life. So I'm
concerned specifically with the issues involved there.

Is the Delaware Estuary News that heavy?


We've had some discussion here about the fact that phosphates are difficult
to remove in sewerage treatment, and I just followed up last night by
reading up on it, trying to refresh my slight memory of it and to learn
something. We apparently have poor sequestration of phosphates in much of
the Delaware watershed. And, as you say, it's an outlier, with very high
population in the watershed and relatively less agriculture. The lower
Hudson is in a similar situation.

I thought you lived in New Jersey.


Third, animals (including humans) excrete phosphorus in their excrement:
"However, where used, detergent phosphates contribute only 5 - 20% of
phosphates in sewage (most phosphate in sewage comes from human bodily
functions and food wastes), and sewage itself is only a minority source
of phosphate to the environment compared to agriculture." [2]

Overall, I don't doubt that.


To summarize, 95% of phosphate goes into agriculture, and thus to
phosphate runoff. Of the remaining 5%, detergents are a fraction of
that 5%. Of detergents, something like 90% was for clothes washing, and
maybe 10% was for dishwashing. This was before the effort to remove
phosphates from detergents was undertaken, but even then only (5%)(10%)=
0.5% went into dishwashing detergents. After the removal effort, this
has been reduced to a fraction of 0.5%.

The amelioration efforts in the Delaware watershed have been studied, and
isolated to the degree that was possible. As I stated earlier, eliminating
phosphates in clothes-washing detergent had a (claimed) measurable effect on
oxygen levels in the lower Delaware. Consumer education programs about lawn
and garden fertilizing and runoff did not. Commercial agriculture efforts
and regulations also had a measurable effect.

Are these measurable effects also significant? We can measure such
things to parts per billion, orders of magnitude below anything worth
worrying about.


So, the focus would have to be on agriculture. The problem is that crop
plants cannot be convinced that they don't need phosphorus to grow.

Not having any background in this, I can't address the individual issues.
But my understanding is that fertilizing timing is an issue; release rates
are an issue; plowing practice is an issue; quantities are an issue. All are
being addressed by one institution or another.

It's better than sitting around and sucking our thumbs, but I don't know the
numbers.

Really? Given the considerable effort and cost yielding trivial impact,
perhaps the same effort would yield far greater return elsewhere.

This is the proof that the EPA doesn't know when to stop.

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "."
wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]


look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and
cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers?
I
choose the former. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an
issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails
back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean
rivers
or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds
and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while
farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders
of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing
clothes,
in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the
phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall
that
it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much
ag
runoff in that river as in many others.

There are a few problems here.

First, we are talking about dishwashing, not clothes washing, which
makes for a big difference in detergent use, at least a factor of ten.

Right. I'm just comparing total househeld use versus the runoff. I didn't
even know there were phosphates in dishwasher detergent until you brought
it
up.


I don't know about others, but I have not been having any problems with
clothes washing detergents. The problem is with dishwashing
detergents.

I don't think I would have noticed except that I had Oakite as a client
while it was happening, and their engineers brought it up in discussion.
But
I noticed as soon as I tried adding some TSP, per their suggestion, to
really dirty loads of clothes.

Yes. A lot depends on the composition of the local water. People with
water softeners seem to have far less trouble.


Second, Delaware is an outlier, being a very small state with a very
large fraction of non-farming households. The Delaware River promptly
flows into the Atlantic Ocean, joining the outflow from the rest of the
Eastern Seaboard. What matters is the aggregate.

Ok. As I said, I'm involved with the Delaware Estuary Project (I wonder
what
the mailman thinks when he delivers my copy of _Delaware Estuary News_
every
month? g) The river has been important to me for most of my life. So
I'm
concerned specifically with the issues involved there.

Is the Delaware Estuary News that heavy?

g It's not the weight. It's the weirdness. Aside from people I've met at
meetings of the group, I've known only one other person who subscribes.

The mailman probably thinks I'm a card-carrying Green Peacer. Actually, I'm
just a fisherman and a boater who's watched the effects of pollution on my
favorite waters for about 58 years, up close and personal. It's gotten a LOT
better.



We've had some discussion here about the fact that phosphates are
difficult
to remove in sewerage treatment, and I just followed up last night by
reading up on it, trying to refresh my slight memory of it and to learn
something. We apparently have poor sequestration of phosphates in much of
the Delaware watershed. And, as you say, it's an outlier, with very high
population in the watershed and relatively less agriculture. The lower
Hudson is in a similar situation.

I thought you lived in New Jersey.

I do. I'm between the middle Delaware and the lower Hudson. The mouth of the
Hudson estuary is about fifteen miles from where I'm sitting right now.



Third, animals (including humans) excrete phosphorus in their
excrement:
"However, where used, detergent phosphates contribute only 5 - 20% of
phosphates in sewage (most phosphate in sewage comes from human bodily
functions and food wastes), and sewage itself is only a minority source
of phosphate to the environment compared to agriculture." [2]

Overall, I don't doubt that.


To summarize, 95% of phosphate goes into agriculture, and thus to
phosphate runoff. Of the remaining 5%, detergents are a fraction of
that 5%. Of detergents, something like 90% was for clothes washing,
and
maybe 10% was for dishwashing. This was before the effort to remove
phosphates from detergents was undertaken, but even then only
(5%)(10%)=
0.5% went into dishwashing detergents. After the removal effort, this
has been reduced to a fraction of 0.5%.

The amelioration efforts in the Delaware watershed have been studied, and
isolated to the degree that was possible. As I stated earlier,
eliminating
phosphates in clothes-washing detergent had a (claimed) measurable effect
on
oxygen levels in the lower Delaware. Consumer education programs about
lawn
and garden fertilizing and runoff did not. Commercial agriculture efforts
and regulations also had a measurable effect.

Are these measurable effects also significant? We can measure such
things to parts per billion, orders of magnitude below anything worth
worrying about.

I don't know. I'm sure you could find out. As I said, I was remarking about
a couple of reports published years ago about eutrification of the lower
Delaware. They were measuring oxygen levels.



So, the focus would have to be on agriculture. The problem is that
crop
plants cannot be convinced that they don't need phosphorus to grow.

Not having any background in this, I can't address the individual issues.
But my understanding is that fertilizing timing is an issue; release
rates
are an issue; plowing practice is an issue; quantities are an issue. All
are
being addressed by one institution or another.

It's better than sitting around and sucking our thumbs, but I don't know
the
numbers.

Really? Given the considerable effort and cost yielding trivial impact,
perhaps the same effort would yield far greater return elsewhere.

Maybe. If you're interested enough, there's plenty of information around.
I'm mostly interested in the marine life in the local estuaries, and the
rivers above them. I don't follow the issues closely. I've only read a
couple of reports about local efforts to keep phosphates out of the
Delaware.


This is the proof that the EPA doesn't know when to stop.

I don't think that this one example is "proof" of anything about the EPA.
The proof I'm most interested in is how effective they are, and there's
plenty of that. You can find people, I'm sure, who can discuss their
efficiency. You might even find one who knows enough to talk about it, but
don't count on that happening on Usenet. d8-)

My general take on the EPA is that they have a very big job, with
pathetically meager resources to do it. So they paint a lot of things with a
broad brush, out of necessity, and they're constrained in every direction by
our principles of equal treatment and so on. I don't envy their position. I
do admire many of their results.

--
Ed Huntress



Joe Gwinn

On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:56:35 -0700 (PDT), Too_Many_Tools
wrote:

On Jul 13, 6:57*am, "Lloyd E. Sponenburgh"
lloydspinsidemindspring.com wrote:
Too_Many_Tools fired this volley :

Anyone *who thinks what is flushed down the drain doesn't end up back
into your water supply does not understand science.

TMT, you paint the subject with too broad a brush.

IF you specify a particular chemical, you may say, "This does (or does
not) stay in the water." *Not all chemicals do, and household bleach -
which was mentioned - is one of the ones that completely decomposes,
quickly.

Don't fall into believing the nanny-state mantra that ALL things
artificial are automatically permanent pollutants. *They aren't.

LLoyd

I agree...one needs to look at the science..the PR..from either side.

But the point is the environment is a closed system.

You need to know what will happen before you flush it down the
drain..not after which has been the case.

If one follows the mutant frog story, the first incident of it was
found in area with septic tanks..whose fields drained into a
pond...where the frogs were. The birth control chemicals from the
houses were the cause.

TMT

So what did your daddy drink out of the ditch to make him mutate into
your second mother? Summer's Eve douche?