Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
h a l f b a k e r y
Inexact change.

idea: add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random

meta: news, help, about, links, report a problem

account: browse anonymously, or get an account and write.

user:
pass:
register,


                     

Please log in.
Before you can vote, you need to register. Please log in or create an account.

Permanent Mass-Pollution Solution

On teaching mass-polluters good manners
  (+2, -3)
(+2, -3)
  [vote for,
against]

Any factory that significantly pollutes the environment has an Owner or owners (stockholders of a Company).

The Permanent Pollution Solution actually has two components:
1. The definition of an "industrial ecology" logically follows the definition of the ordinary biological ecology: The waste products of every organism on Earth is food for some other organism. So, in an Industrial Ecology, every waste product of every factory should become feedstock/materiel for some other factory.
2. It is necessary to get factory owners to understand just how badly the human world needs an Industrial Ecology.

In support of #2 above, I now propose the following, with respect to all the pollution from each factory:
1. Temporarily tank/store it.
2. Subdivide it into smaller tanks based on the ownership of the company. For example, if a company has 3 owners, and the percentages of ownership are 60, 20, and 20, then the pollution is to be subdivided into percentages of 60, 20, and 20.
3. Ship it to the homes of the appropriate owners, and dump it inside. If an owner has multiple residences, the pollution can be subdivided further, before shipping.

Obviously the owners will now have incentive to practice good manners, and not pollute the neighbors of their factories (everyone on Earth, that is).

To be fair, these Rules should be announced perhaps a year before being enforced, to allow time for the factories to either be upgraded to non-polluting status, or to arrange for each polluting factory to feed its wastes into some other factory, thereby helping to build the Industrial Ecology.

Vernon, May 10 2011

[link]






       You could get a free bag of manure, pesticide run-off and slaughterhouse waste with your grocery shopping.
hippo, May 10 2011
  

       Similar to the idea of, during a garbage strike, having all the residents "vote" by dumping their waste onto various aldermen or union-leaders' lawns.
FlyingToaster, May 10 2011
  

       rant thinly disguised as an idea
Voice, May 10 2011
  

       collecting all waste is impossible. Some waste is in the form of dispersed gas. Other waste is greatly diluted in water. Enforcement of these rules would require all investors to receive tiny mailings of industrial waste.
WcW, May 10 2011
  

       But most of the shareholders of such companies will themselves be large companies, who will then have to consolidate and then resubdivide the waste for transportation to their shareholders who will in turn be companies with their own shareholders, which leads to, I suppose, the creation of jobs and, self-defeatingly, a massive amount of wasted fuel, shifting plenty billions of tonnes of waste across jurisdictions, smaller Carribean and Central European states being most heavily clogged. And Delaware is fucked.
calum, May 10 2011
  

       And of course it would lead to a massive new market in international waste credit trading, allowing you to nominally buy a massive slag-heap of arsenic mining tailings in China in order to allow you to dump your fish-processing by-products into the sea. This market and the rampant speculation it will encourage will become all-powerful and the derivative products traded on this market will come to dominate world trade, sink major economies and plunge the world into a thousand years of recession with millions of people dying in horrific wars and billions falling into a nightmare existence of starvation and serfdom.
hippo, May 10 2011
  

       //This market and the rampant speculation it will encourage will become all-powerful and the derivative products traded on this market will come to dominate world trade, sink major economies and plunge the world into a thousand years of recession with millions of people dying in horrific wars and billions falling into a nightmare existence of starvation and serfdom.//   

       Business as usual then.
pocmloc, May 10 2011
  

       Folks, I was assuming that the mere threat of such rules would cause owners to clean up their factories. Especially if they had to pay for all that waste-collection and transportation! Thus, simpler to not generate waste in the first place.   

       Note that there is NO physical substance that cannot in some fashion be altered to become some other substance. This is the essential logic behind an "industrial ecology", in which every substance is useful for something-or-other.
Vernon, May 10 2011
  

       What [Voice] said.   

       And what [MaxwellBuchanan] said just now.
MaxwellBuchanan, May 10 2011
  

       I have a whole pile of entropy, going cheap. Anybody have an interest?   

       How much waste would be created by the ecology police trying to enforce such rules? And how much crap would end up at their office?
RayfordSteele, May 10 2011
  
      
[annotate]
  


 

back: main index

business  computer  culture  fashion  food  halfbakery  home  other  product  public  science  sport  vehicle