Glad most of my bikes are steel after this sludge story in Hungary, in case you thought our sport was environmentally friendly…I can only imagine the byproducts of steel and carbon.

I would feel more guilty if i had given the ok to storing that much sludge for such a long period of time and had’t made sure the engineering was up to the task.

This gets on my goat though. From the BBC website.

Funny enough, they’ve left out some more everyday descriptions:-

“Silicon dioxide” – Sand.

“Aluminimun oxide” – Inert, non-toxic – found in suncream along with –

“Titanium Dioxide” – Also know as the food colourant E171 and universal toothpaste additive

I use to work in the Aluminium industry and never saw a storage facility of that size at any of our plants – but then it is usually cheaper to store it than dispose of correctly…, for a while anyway

I’ve just checked my stumpy and it turns out it isn’t made in Hungary so no I don’t feel guilty. Hope that helps.

Believe it or not, it’s not just bikes that are made of aluminium…..

(unwraps sandwich from aluminium foil……..)

I just had a look on google maps, the place is pretty distinctive.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=&sll=47.087131,17.512808&sspn=0.050844,0.086002&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=&ll=47.081228,17.522507&spn=0.050849,0.086002&t=h&z=14

Auginish Alumina Ireland – sure it’ll only be the Atlantic that is polluted!

Wow! Snap! I thought about this this morning, when I broke my news embargo for the first time in months. Then I thought, probably no worse than the total daily damage from fuel oil production. Then I turned the news off.

That bbc graph is shocking!

Silica, as pointed out above is sand. Very fine particles of silica can cause lung cancer/silicosis. However, the way to remove this hazard (we use it in the lab) is to supply or handle it as a slurry.

To the best of my knowledge I have never seen an MSDS for TiO2 that contains a cancer warning label. I use it everyday.

Think that got me about this story was what were they going to do with all that waste anyway? They couldn’t go on storing it like that indefinitely…just adding and adding to it. Were they actually processing the waste and just using the reservoir as a temporary storage area? Reading the news stories didn’t give the impression they were dealing with the waste.

TiO2 is one of the most abundant compounds in the earth (something like 6th most if my ageing memory is correct) and is used as a whitener in just about every application (paint, soap powder, toothpaste etc) due to its low cost. Thats the modern media for you, the BBC get excited every year at wimbledon when they mention “the chalk lines are in fact made of titanium”. FFS.

Small particles of just about anything have a tendency to cause lung cancer, I remember reading an article in New Scientist many years ago about bracken spores being carcinogenic.