Thursday, July 9, 2009

This week's idea

...





When I was stationed at the Fire Department's HazMat team, we had these nifty tools called imbiber pads, and imbiber booms. What they are, is paper towel looking things, or sometimes giant sausage looking things, that suck up hydrocarbons (gas, oil, that sort of thing) but repel water. If you had an oil sheen on top of water, you could throw an imbiber in there and absorb all the oil, leaving just the water.
So here's what I want to do.... Make cigarette filters out of imbiber material. I'd have to figure out how temperature stable the material is, and if any nasty vapors would be released (not that the smoker isn't already inhaling nasty stuff, but I'd rather not contribute to that damage.... Anyway, here's the advantage. First, maybe the imbibing butts would absorb some of the tar while being smoked. The bigger benefit, though, is when the butt is tossed out the car window as they inevitably will be tossed, they end up in the gutter and storm drains. Next rainfall when all the road grime and oil is rinsed down the road, the carelessly discarded butts will help soak up the oil. They'll be collected in the storm drain traps periodically and disposed of in the landfill

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Unrelated but something you might enjoy reading Hansen the No. 1 Global Warming high priestess stating that cap and tax is worthless for what it is meant to do.

flyingvan said...

That WAS an interesting read. It still strikes me as two people arguing about how far they'd have to walk to reach the edge of the flat earth. I hope my great grandchildren can pick up my blog in an online 'roots' search---guys, I know you're laughing at how stupid my generation was to buy into the whole 'global warming' nonsense. Be assured many of us were able to objectively scrutinize the tripe the media spewed out and remained very, very skeptical. Our president just told us the sea levels were rising. The beach and jetties are exactly the same as they were when I was a kid 35 years ago, and it's been 11 years since global temps were actually going up, yet the myth marches on...