Maybe they were ordered to clean up. This is a popular hazardous substances disposal scheme in EU:
You rent a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing.
You get paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, you stockpile until the place is full.
Finally you either set the place on fire to cover your tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal.
I would love to believe that would be the case as it would show there was some effort given, no matter how bad the implementation was. Unfortunately, Kuwait is ran by decade-old mass negligence that runs from small institutions/businesses all the way up to the government.
I think the funniest thing happened about this situation is that we never knew about the fire but from the international media picked it up THEN the local media picked up on it. It's even more comical when you realize how tiny Kuwait is.
Or if you're more conscientious, you ship it to China instead. Then, of course, one day COVID hits, China closes its borders and your green, eco-friendly, carbon-reducing recycling facility grinds to a halt because the plastic keeps coming but you can't ship it away.
I feel this must have been sarcasm, probably related to how sending plastic to a recycling facility was just as likely to end up in the ocean thanks to China buying it off of recycling dealers (for ballast IIRC, can't send all those cargo ships back empty)
Okay, seems like it was hijacked. My comment ("Are you seriously claiming that the Chinese government is better than the Polish government at making sure this kind of trash is handled correctly?") is currently at -4.
In other news, landfills in Romania have legal issues and waste disposal companies can't afford to do their work with the revenue from government contracts because the EU decided to mandate 50% waste recycling and high standards for landfills. So waste gets dumped on the streets and landfills operate illegally.
Sometimes high standards for environmental protection obviously have the opposite effect of their intent.
The Schengen area shouldn't have been expanded so rapidly, IMO.
Btw, what we in Scandinavia mostly read about is the constant flow of stolen goods to e.g. Poland and neighbouring countries. This was interesting to read about.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Schengen had a lot more effect on the border checks for people than it did on the border checks for goods, which were next to non-existent already.
I actually ran the numbers, napkin style, a while ago. I think an efficient border control was happening, and still could be happening soon, if we were to re-implement it.
I was looking at whether it would be financially prudent for Sweden to start up border checks again to stop the flow of stolen goods out of the country. The conclusion was a clear yes.
The amount of intraeuropean libel is truly outrageous. Such things are often presented without much context and comparison to crime inside the particular country and other misdeeds such country allows for. For example we in Poland often read about Scandinavians ruining the fish in Baltic sea by fishing way above their qoutas and getting away with it, without replenishing the fish population. I'm sur Scandinavians could say sth on their defence, but most media don't bother to double check the facts on each side because sensationalism and strengthening stereotypes get more eyeballs.
The difference is that when the borders were still up illegal goods movements were detected more frequently, but most of this waste movement is and was perfectly legal under EU single market rules. The 'four freedoms' explicitly spell this out.
Reminds one of the Polish, (but globally applicable) pre war joke, re-made during the communist era:
"How could you allow your warehouse to burn down, empty!?"
the joke would be that you should claim that the actually empty warehouse burn down full, to claim insurance on the content, right?
that reminds me of a rumor that I heard about the Atlantic Conveyor (UK merchant ship carrying military equipment sunk during the Falklands War): many military units claimed their equipment was on the ship (and thus lost), presumably to get replacements, that in the end the ship was supposed to carrying more supplies than its capacity
I think there is also a similar story told in Chickenhawk, which is Robert Mason's retelling of his Vietnam war experiences. It may be that he presented it as a rumour too though.
Off-topic: I enjoyed Chickenhawk much more than I would have expected from the synopsis. This random person on the web here (me) highly recommends it!
Over capacity and negligence on the part of someone who was supposed to check that are fairly good reasons for a legitimate vessel with too much stuff to get lost.
More plausibly everyone claimed what they should have been shipping, good luck proving who over-claimed and under-shipped.
Yes, but they usually break them up first, releasing the reactive, lead heavy acid into the ground. The lead itself is packaged and shipped, leaving the plastic casing and acid in the ground.
Used to be normal practice for scrap yards the world over.
"Rich" countries should not be allowed to externalize their environmental concerns.
What makes a country "poor" but the value placed on the lives of the people in it?
The resource-rich countries of Africa and South America are considered "poor" because the US and Europe see their people and institutions as expendable and replaceable.
> "Rich" countries should not be allowed to externalize their environmental concerns.
Morally sound, but how would you enforce that?
> What makes a country "poor" but the value placed on the lives of the people in it?
The value of the goods, services, business, and real estate that those people collectively control.
> The resource-rich countries of Africa and South America are considered "poor" because the US and Europe see their people and institutions as expendable and replaceable.
Assuming this is true, how did China shift from being poor to being not poor? Did they make their institutions unexpendable and irreplaceable, or did they do something else?
>The value of the goods, services, business, and real estate that those people collectively control.
You're asserting that the people collectively control the capital wealth (goods, services, businesses, real estate) of the country. This has been tried by more than a few countries but the folks that do try to do this are often labeled "communists" and toppled by US and European interests.
>how did China shift from being poor to being not poor?
China shifted from being poor to not being poor by asserting that control over its capital wealth, and thus far has been able to avoid having its institutions undermined by the west. Not that it hasn't[1] been[2] tried[3].
I mean “collectively” in the sense that some control one part and others control a different part, not that everyone has equal control over everything. In this sense it is also a description of America or even a hypothetical anarcho-capitalist zone.
The sum of all the stuff that all the people own or otherwise control is the sum of the wealth. That sense of “collectively”.
If your definition accurately described the difference between rich and poor countries, the people of the Global South would be considered wealthy.
If that wealth is not used to secure stable living conditions (like freedom from environmental hazards) for the people of the country, that wealth is not effectively owned or controlled by the people of the country.
>In this sense it is also a description of America or even a hypothetical anarcho-capitalist zone.
This also describes the conditions that result from the massive disparities in how America's wealth is distributed. After World War II massive resources were poured into segregating people into white-only neighborhoods[1] that accrue value (and wealth) over time and non-white neighborhoods that are targeted for dis-investment. When hazardous industries want to open, they choose the non-white neighborhoods[2] and when they close they leave the neighborhood with the task of cleaning up their messes[3].
America is able to reproduce the dynamics of its foreign policy internally because of this policy of geographic segregation. These dynamics continue to this day even as it has become taboo to implement segregationist policy explicitly. This is because there has been no appetite for the structural change that is necessary to keep the disparities from growing over time.
> If your definition accurately described the difference between rich and poor countries, the people of the Global South would be considered wealthy.
Please give an example of one country where the sum total of all the assets the residents control (I ought to have specified “divided by the population”) is high and the country is considered poor.
> This also describes the conditions that result from the massive disparities in how America's wealth is distributed.
And?
America is a rich country no matter how unfairly subpopulations are treated.
I will agree that there appears to be malicious unfairness, and to me it appears sufficiently severe that it cannot even be explained by pure greed. That’s a separate issue to this.
>I will agree that there appears to be malicious unfairness, and to me it appears sufficiently severe that it cannot even be explained by pure greed. That’s a separate issue to this.
It's really not. The same processes that underpin the unfairness within the US are reproduced in the relationships between the US and other "poorer" countries. The freedom of capital to do whatever it wants within the boundaries of the state is asserted abroad via "free trade" agreements--and barring that, militaristic threat--that ensure capital interests are preserved above all others. They ensure things like human rights, environmental concerns and labor safety can't interfere with the profit motive and maximization of investment growth.
As opposed to for instance the USA's internal border policies?
EU countries are closer now to US states than to independent sovereign entities when it comes to the movement of goods and people. This is by design, not by accident and there is nothing naive about it, it's a founding principle of the EU.
Why, do you think matters are very different if each country does it on its own turf?
The real issue is that the EU is coming up with extremely naive regulations that put the burden of cost and effort on citizens and inefficient local governments to enforce them. If they really want these substances to be disposed of safely, they have to make it free for corporations and individuals to hand them over to a government agency and fund this with taxes.
This waste is very toxic and very expensive to dispose of properly. Hence, Polish gangs make a ton of money by charging western industrial clients for properly disposing of their toxic waste, and then just dumping this waste wherever in Poland. There were probably hundreds of cases of discovered illegal toxic waste dumps across Poland in the past years (and who knows how many were not discovered yet). Just in one recent case, the city of Sosnowiec will have to pay around 20 million euros (a non-negligible part of the city budget) to dispose of waste left in one lot by some gang.
Fortunately, Polish authorities are slowly catching up to this and are creating special police units dedicated to fight this kind of crime.
If you only have a small amount of hazmat you find someone who's renting storage trailers and pay them cash, fill the trailer(s) and then drop off the face of the earth.
If you just have tires you can make a pile visible from the road. Given enough time some teenagers with a flare gun will make them go away.
Interesting that this satellite imagery is so recent. I tried panning over to the Dixie fire in California, which has been burning for a month, and it still shows unburned forest. So maybe what is showing up on Google is a different, earlier fire?
So they are likely showing same event, Maxar is pretty good at getting images of current events as they happen. Don't know what sort of deal they have with Google to show them on Maps though.
Hmm, that is enormous. At least it looks like just one pile is burning at present.
My understanding is whenever Iraq lit the oil wells on fire they just pumped up seawater to help with extinguishing the blaze. I wonder if that sort of thing could work here? Basically just flood the area with seawater.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting the photo, but I saw the path as a firebreak, like they were using the vehicles to separate the burning tires from the rest of them.
USSR nuked a gas well - an inferno was raging for 3 years and nothing elae could stop it.
"On that cold autumn day in 1966, an underground tremor of unprecedented force shook the [ground] with a sparse grass cover on white sand. A dusty haze rose over the desert. The orange colored torch of the blazing well diminished, first slowly, then more rapidly, until it flickered and finally died out. For the first time in 1,064 days, quiet descended on the area. The jet-like roar of the gas well had been silenced"
my guess is that the problem is the assignment of responsibility and the requirement to pay for cleanup - the technology is available and already nearby
FTA:
“ You may wonder why such flammable and hazardous material is stored in a place where weather conditions exceed 50 degrees Celsius”
Not to be too snarky, but if you wonder this, you don’t have much of a grasp of how fire works. This wasn’t spontaneous combustion, and tires burn just as well at 2* as they do at 50*…
I thought the same thing. Looking at the last 18 months of utter and complete quantitative illiteracy on display in journalistic institutions covering COVID, I'm not surprise at this absurdly simplistic thinking on other subjects.
Edit:
You weren't being snarky, and have every right to complain about ignorant, non-analytical people being given a platform to write foolish statements like "it's hot there so fires start easier".
So does the Australian government - "The higher the temperature the more likely it is that a fire will start or continue to burn. This is because the fuel is closer to its ignition point at high temperatures and pre-heated fuel loads burn faster." - https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/community-safety/bus...
I think to prove they are wrong is complicated. What they say is true. Intuition also makes people think it's true (anyone who's started a fire on a hot day knows it rips).
You have to simulate this effect is orders of magnitude lower than the other effects. Of which it's still hard to know which one that counts. Is it wind speed or the missing moisture or are they the same order of magnitude?
But one shouldn't complain about an article that thinks tires tires get executed when they are old, that's cute - "filled to the brim with executed car tires"
Fires at tire recycling plants are all too common.
There are good techniques for recycling tires. May not be profitable, but they work.[1]
When looking at YouTube videos of tire recycling operations, take a close look at the throughput. If the beginning is a front-end loader dumping in a load of tires, that's good. If it's one guy lifting a tire onto a conveyor, they're not serious about it.
Documentary showing the Kuwait tire facility. Close up view of the yard including the boss wearing a business suit and tie in the middle of the desert.
https://youtu.be/y0ah6QZpI3M?t=44
> Miraculously, the smoke was blown away to the direction of the sea, and not inland.
That actually seems like the worst outcome. According to the satellite photo in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28131932, it looks like Kuwait City is between the landfill and the sea. Inland looks like it's mostly desert.
The attitude that the oceans are huge and that it is just a minor event here or there that could not possibly affect the sea a lot is exactly the source of the problem. A fire here, a garbage patch there, some mercury from gold mining, ... it just adds up.
How can the World's Biggest Tire Graveyard hold only 7 million tires? Presumably they go through that many tires roughly every every year or two in Kuwait.
In small concentrations like you'd get downwind it smells like burnouts, not great, not too bad. In high concentrations tire smoke is pretty acrid and should be avoided.
Look at the author of the piece: "Aya is an aspiring journalist who is into everything related to culture. A curious explorer and traveler, she graduated from the faculty of Arts with one mission in mind: experience everything. She is interested in filmmaking and scriptwriting and hopes to one day write her own feature film."
can you expect "journalism" from someone who is not a journalist?
We expect middle-schoolers to address "who what where when why and how" when writing stuff. I think we should be able to expect the same from paid journalists whether or not they're professionally trained.
You are correct she is absolutely not a trained journalist.
I hope I can be forgiven for thinking she was considering that the article is under the news section of a website claiming to be a source of journalism.
It's for protesting. This article talks about it occurring in Lebanon but also some of the history behind it, and that it's fallen out of favor with some due to environmental impact.
Do you really? Or just don't care enough to look? Because I took the next part of your sentence, "arabs intentionally burning tires", plugged it into duckduckgo, and the first link explained it well enough for even this ignorant American to understand.
A small request from those of us more prone to breathing issues than average. Please stop setting large fires like this. The smoke crosses continents and oceans, and many of us miss being able to go outside with starting to cough after an half-hour.
You rent a warehouse/piece of land in Poland claiming to be a transportation/construction/recycling company usually using forged documents or homeless person fronting whole thing.
You get paid to remove hazardous waste from UK/Scandinavia/Germany, you stockpile until the place is full.
Finally you either set the place on fire to cover your tracks, or the owner stops receiving payments, discovers whats stored on his property and decides to take insurance hit instead of having his assets blocked for several years while courts try to figure out if/what/who is going to pay for lawful disposal.
Just 2 days ago https://wielun.naszemiasto.pl/kolejny-pozar-skladowiska-w-na... already mentions one from one week earlier. https://portalkomunalny.pl/gospodarka-odpadami/pozary-sklado... Usually couple a month up to one a week, year after year for the last >10 year. Seemingly no political will to fight this scheme.