(image courtesy of San Francisco Chronicle)

If you didn’t catch this story, as reported on the San Francisco Chronicle article the fender that protected the bay bridge from the tanker Cosco Busan last November has now been repaired. When this incident first happened, it made me think of society’s true cost in maintaining the petroleum diet. For those of us who don’t keep up with the ins and outs of fuel usages by such vessels, it was our first introduction to the fact that they burn the lowest quality of oil, mainly the byproduct of the refining of crude oil into gasoline. Not only do we now understand the cost to marine life during the spill, but we are also awakened to the air pollution caused by such vessels when they burn this foul fuel… This was a wake up call for us to look at how much unnecessary products we consume, ones manufactured overseas which inevitably have to be shipped over here on these very container ships.

Now to the fun part of this post. The new fenders used to replace the old ones are made of recycled plastic, a petroleum based product. Unlike their original wood counterparts that were waterproofed using a toxic compound, most likely a crude oil based product, it “should” be less toxic and last as long if not longer..(p.s. I say “should” only because the plastic that is being used is not food grade plastic, even these we know leach out toxic compounds such as bisphenol A or phthalates… in the beautiful vast ocean, I’d like to believe that the minute amount leaching from the plastic replacement fenders and their impact are minor in comparison to what is currently there. Now we can go back to either praying or hoping that another accident doesn’t occur either with another container ship or one of the many oil tankers that go in and out of the Golden Gate Bridge to supply the hungry Chevron Plant in Richmond.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under Green stuff, energy, environment, health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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