I know this is old news to most readers, but some had found fault with my earlier experiment in that it was tested on fresh water rather than sea water. I was in West Palm Beach over the weekend and decided to run the test again using water taken from the Atlantic Ocean. Can sawdust be used to slow or stop the spread of oil, and facilitate its mechanical removal from water?
As we grow more impatient with the corporate efforts, we may want to know how to take matters into our own hands.
The current BP approach reminds me of the old wastewater engineer's maxim, dilution is the solution to pollution... if you spread it around so you don't see it, it has been effectively controlled.... then came all the man made chemicals whose effect we have witnessed even when present in almost immeasurably small quantities. BP thinks that if you add enough other toxic chemicals to disperse oil, the problem goes away. Over 1,000,000 gallons to date.
I had noticed that sawdust is an excellent hand cleaner, removing oil, and furniture finishes from the hands better than soap or other hand cleaners, so I wrote about it recently in Fine Woodworking. Then, I read an article in Huffington Post describing various lay ideas for solving the oil disaster, and the article was illustrated with a man's oily hands... My thought, "He needs some sawdust to clean those hands." My second thought, "Sawdust might have applications beyond what I had previously imagined." That led to my first experiment which I reported here on the Daily Kos.
The interesting thing about sawdust's performance on oily water is that it absorbs the oil and tends to clump for easy removal. A shovel can do it, or as shown in my experiments, a tea spoon. Because it clumps, it does its own "booming." Oil saturated sawdust could easily be removed by a force of human beings. And actually, it need not even be actual sawdust. Other fine agricultural wastes could be used. One reader asked where we could possibly get enough sawdust. Just think of the pulp and paper industry.
I have the photos of my latest round of experiment on my blog at this address: Oil, Water and Sawdust Part 3