I have in mind to use an off-cut of butyl rubber pond-liner to seal a leaking wildlife pond on a local nature reserve. But I am conscious of the need to reduce or eliminate unnecessary plastic being introduced into the environment. How does butyl rubber rank in the scale of plastic nasties, and will it be OK and acceptable to use it or should I find another solution?
Butyl has been the lining of choice for garden and larger ponds for decades, you can be very confident that it will not leach out anything unpleasant.
I'm far from convinced that plastic particulate in the oceans is the risk that it is made out to be, but in this case there is no significant route for your liner to end up there. It will still maintain most of its integrity in 100 years or more even if it has started to show some surface degradation. It is likely to contain some carbon black filler, so (for example) material exposed to sunlight may gradually release this together with microscopic rubber particles. Overall, it probably contains the soot equivalent of a small garden bonfire. How long do you think that would take to get into the atmosphere or watercourses?
So don't worry about it!
I have no axe to grind here but I recently saw a report that a research vessel found that most of the plastic it dicovered in the ocean came from the vessel itself.
Another Dave
Thanks for that reply. I was looking for opinion or hard information in order to combat the ultra-green wing of the group I volunteer with, for whom anything that comes under the broad umbrella of the term 'plastic' is an anathema, and butyl rubber is probably one such.
My butyl rubber pond liner came with a twenty year guarantee and must be about thirty years old now without any change in the visible bits. That has got to be better than something which gradually breaks up. Tyre rubber is apparently a massive contributor to 'microplastics' but that is being constantly eroded by wear on the road, which pond liners dont get!
Those people aren't logical, so a logic-based response is pointless. That clears the way for you to legitimately tell them to f*ck off.
Bill
I bet you are retired from the diplomatic service :-)
Plonk!
As Bill says, you can't counter these people with logic because there will be multiple different strands of why plastic is such a disaster.
As I implied, the route I would take is the same one that is used for considering releases of radioactivity from civil and military applications, namely to look at the pathways and probabilities.
There is an emotional argument that says only a single atom of plutonium is required to cause a fatal cancer. You can't prove that this is not possible, but you can argue the statistics: early in the weapons program, a small cohort of workers suffered quite serious plutonium contamination; they were carefully followed over their lifetime and IIRC there was no statistically detectable effect. The models might well have predicted one.
Most of the Magnox nuclear power stations had a steel pressure vessel which was surrounded by a thick concrete "biological shield" to reduce gamma and neutron doses to operating staff. That shield was cooled by a forced draught of air which of course contains argon. That can capture a neutron to produce a radioactive isotope of argon which escapes freely into the atmosphere. If you express this as becquerels or curies, you can alarm people. But, it's only potentially harmful to people if it decays when it is in your lungs. If you do the sums for half life, dilution, and all the other factors you find that the actual dose even to people living on the site boundary is very small compared to the natural background from terrestrial radon and cosmic rays. And that is the basis on which the regulators and EA regard it as acceptable.
The trouble with car tyres is that a proportion of the dust from wear gets suspended in the air, so it can be relatively high in towns, especially near motorways etc. Your rubber is underground or under a fixed body of water for its entire working life. What happens at the end of life? I'd suggest it might often just become part of the sub-soil. Even if it is retrieved it is just likely to be chopped up into manageable pieces and disposed of in landfill or perhaps backfill in construction projects.
Does your existing pond already have a liner? Probably, I guess, in which case it is a like for like repair. If it happens to be puddled clay (c.f. canals) then it *could* be repaired by the same process, but presumably only at the cost of draining at best a significant area of it, which sounds disruptive for the ecosystem.
Just tell them that it is rubber and rubber comes from trees - and hope they don't think it through.
The pond doesn't have a liner. It's in woodland, and was initially formed by the root-plate of a tree when said tree blew over in a gale, leaving a semi-circular depression which filled with water, fed by a trickle that runs down from the slope above. The depression was enlarged and a low dam of mud and stones constructed. It is that dam that leaks, and my plan is to put a strip of butyl liner, left over from lining a domestic pond, along the inner side of the dam to make it watertight, or more so than it is now. Some leakage is acceptable, essential even, as the trickle then flows on to a second and third pond further down-trickle, as it were.
We had thought that mud alone would be sufficient, but it slowly washes out from between the stones, and then the water level in the pond drops to almost nothing. If the leak is stopped, the pond will fill and a robust overflow can be constructed from stones and slate that will allow the trickle to continue to the lower ponds. The depth of the pond when filled and the soft mud in it's floor is just slightly more than my wellingtons. DAMHIKT!
Don't many countries dump waste at sea? Including the UK (but perhaps not now)
and neither should you try, as it is perfectly possible, just unlikely. One could point out that the Greeny's body is already loaded with radio-isotopes, a fact which has been true since life first evolved. Ask them how they plan to deal with those.
Point out to them that the sun, source of all 'renewable' energy is in fact a giant unshielded nuclear reactor whose radiation causes 3000 skin cancers a year in the UK...
Why did you sign your message 'Plonk'?
Perhaps he's a plonker.
You could do a mini-Johnson and tell them it is natural rubber.
From the butyl tree!
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