VaporRemed and non-point oil pollution
Non-point pollution is all the different routes oil takes to enter the wastewater stream
It was much colder today, therefore the number spots that I could see were considerably less. We did find one spot near our railway station and when we see them we "do not leave the scene of the crime till remediation is done".
Lets talk about these videos and why I am convinced that this is an approach to preventing oil pollution although not the only way as these small acts of pollution (for example the oil that was cleaned up in the above video, was probably much less than a pint. These pints add up as they remind us. Just as we are looking at alternatives to fuel our economy, we need to pre-emptively react to these spills and treat them at source.
Treat them at the source
We have believed in this approach to pollution since the early days of our products long history. We have generally recommended cleaning up the soil contaminated above the ground water along with the treatment of groundwater. This approach has seen the costs of treatment come down, because anyone who has worked with groundwater contamination will tell you that the equipment is not cheap.
Some projects have had a nice story to tell us such as this one where we recovered some oil during the remediation. Our experience tells us that soil/dirt acts as a sieve for oil as the oil finally seeps into either groundwater or storm water drainage which accounts to about 37 percent of marine oil pollution which can amount to about 100,000 metric tonnes (20 MM gallons assuming a specific gravity of about .8 for composite oil). Suffice it to say that these numbers cannot be ignored and need to be addressed. There is a school of thought, which for reasons unknown became quite popular in recent times, that the oil will eventually get consumed by naturally occurring bacteria therefore we do not need to remediate the oil. Although, there may be some truth to this, we haven't seen that happen in cases that we were asked to close, much in line with what this research concluded. For example, were asked to help close projects that had opened at least 3 years before we were asked to close the site or this one that opened in 1991 and was closed in 2006. Well, apart from the fact that our solutions do handle a "scene of spill" (cue the most popular television series on the law) completely, this also proves that the claim that oil will naturally attenuate even if true is not occurring at a rate that is practical or in the case where the contamination is in a residential property, not a function of the mortgage payments and depreciation curve of the property (alright, depreciation was not a word of the 2000's).
Back to these posts: we are trying to take up the "community involvement" part of the remedy and want to start at home (my home and my product). Watch this space!
