Comment on Ohio EPA weighs allowing data centers to dump wastewater into rivers

• buttmasterflex@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  TL;DR Yes, but reality is nuanced, as always.

  The recent federal bullshit is a definitely the culmination of decades of industry trying to undo environmental regulations. Moving forward, it’s going to take serious efforts and funds to repair and rebuild how much the US EPA and federal sciences were gutted. Some states are actually doing far better. On the environmental side of things, Ohio is actually pretty good. The programs are based on the federal ones and also have more protective limits to some things. Unfortunately, not all states have the resources or programs in place.

  To your specific points, treated sewage solids have been spread on ag land for decades. Concentrates animal feeding operations (CAFOs) have been polluting waterways through permit exemptions for decades. A huge issue with land applied sewage solids is PFAS, which is just now publicly coming to light. There are vast deficiencies in the way things have been happening all along that still happened in the “golden era”.

  Negligent or intentional releases of hazardous waste onto the surface or into waterways has been greatly curtailed across the board. There are going to to be ups and downs in speed due to the reality of investigation and cleanup work, regulatory review time frames, and the thorough nature of the programs. The “fast” version of a facility cleanup that I’ve been part of, where problems were addressed as they were discovered, still took from 2009 to 2018, then massive reporting efforts that took US EPA 5 years to come back with a final decision.

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  • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Environmental work is expensive, and the time frames for cleanup and monitoring can be years to decades to “in perpetuity” for some issues.

    My immediate reaction when I read something like this is

    • it would be hella cheaper to not let it get that way, yet we keep letting it
    • both the purchasing companies and whatever level of government don’t want to get stuck with the bill for someone else’s mess - why isn’t that yet more incentive to not let it get that way?

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    • buttmasterflex@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Totally valid. Most of the sites I work on, the contamination happened before regulations were written. Chlorinated solvents are a big problem from metal degreasing, industrial cleaning, etc. Pre-hazardous waste laws, the manufacturer instructions were to pour spent solvents on the ground and let it evaporate. With current knowledge that is clearly not a good thing to do, but the hazards were unknown to the general public. So that stuff happened in the 1950s to early 1970s is still being cleaned up. It would have been ideal for it not to have happened in the first place, but it’s not like companies are doing that anymore (if they are operating appropriately).

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  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Sounds like you worked on RCRA sites

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    • buttmasterflex@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yes, I work on both state and federally administrated RCRA closure and corrective action sites and state administrated CERCLA sites

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• XLE@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I was going to say, especially in this era, “lawful” does not necessarily mean “good,” and can often be far from it.

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