What happened to the glut of Hanjin containers after the bankruptcy? Those things were piling up in ports around the world.[1] Back in February, creditors were trying to dispose of them.
According to a factory I discussed painting options with in Dongguan (near Shenzhen) recently, local environmental pollution regulations have made traditional approaches to anodized steel powder coating (my inquiry) effectively illegal. The processes are still 'available' through amorphous parties (no discussion of distance or environmental regulation legality). However, that's coming from a factory so take it with a grain of salt. My takeaway, if any, would be this is part of a broader shift toward stronger environmental protection efforts led by forward-thinking regional governments, not Beijing.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Beijing sets the broad emissions/pollution targets and then leaves it up to the regional governments to decide how to make it happen. If the regional leadership does well they get rewarded, and if they fail they get replaced.
Side note: at places like automotive plants where solvent based paints are applied in the US, you are required to "burn" the air to reduce the VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds).
If your VOC burner is off, you can't paint cars - the EPA levies a SERIOUS fine, like thousands of dollars a minute.
Even with the VOC burner on, paint shops always smell funny.
If you helped with the changeover, you should know this.
VOC is not the same as HAPS.
(Nor is VOC in any way related to how harmful the compounds are to people)
Trivial example:
Acetone is VOC exempt in the US.
It's pretty trivial to make a 0 VOC solvent based coating using acetone.
They tend not to because it's not horribly friendly to use, due to, among other things, how quickly acetone flashes off.
In truth, water based or solvent based doesn't really change the VOC level that much these days, nor would it really matter to people.
A lot of the auto paints are 2k urethanes.
a 2k water based polyurethane is still gonna be isocyanate + something else.
It doesn't really matter whether it's 0 VOC or not. You are going to use a supplied air respirator (minimum) because breathing isocyanate is a really bad idea.
So the idea, often floated, that lowering the VOC helped people's occupational exposure, is usually unsupported by evidence, at least in the auto industry (i'm only familiar with wood and auto :P).
The auto industry did not used to spray water based 2k urethanes. Now they do. Spraying and breathing a post-cat lacquer with n-butyl acetate in it + some acid, is infinitely better for you than spraying + breathing a water based 2k urethane with isocyanate in it.
Are there cases it ended up better for people? Sure, of course. But most of that is completely and totally independent of VOC content.
Because of course, most coatings manufacturers, surprise, optimized for legal VOC content, often at a cost to harmfulness to humans.
Note that, of my professional wood coatings, my water based and solvent based still have exactly the same amount of VOC (2.75lbs). Are there some that don't? Sure. They are mostly crap, because nobody has come up with magic ways to dissolve or emulsify various polymers and catalysts :)
So i can't get a water based post-cat conversion varnish that is anywhere near as good as a solvent based one. The chemistry to do it simply doesn't exist.
I can get a water based 2k urethane that has as nice (or nicer) properties than that conversion varnish, but at a high possible cost to my health. I'll pass.
I worked on a changeover in about 2013. I can't speak to much besides that. I've been let to believe there are still some plants running solvent, but those might not be in the US.
It feels weird when ever I read stuff where China is doing things to improve or protect the environment where as US is doing the opposite. Like we are living in a mirror world.
How is the US not improving as well? Renewable energy usage went up from ~9% to ~13% from 2002 to 2013[1]. The growth in photovoltaics continues[2]. The portion of electric cars as part of the fleet is going up[3] etc.
It is true that the US could be doing better, but it's not doing the opposite of what China is doing when it comes to energy & environmental improvements.
Trump may make the national optics look bad, but that doesn't change the optics completely at the state and city level.
For instance, on the renewable energy angle, according to the American Wind Energy Organization, five states now regularly generate 20%+ of their energy from wind. (http://www.awea.org/MediaCenter/pressrelease.aspx?ItemNumber...) That number would've been unthinkable 10 years ago.
(Note that the windy states tend to be Republican voting rural mid-west ones. That doesn't mean that Trump isn't going to stop mocking wind energy (as he just recently did). Rather, it does mean there is bipartisan support in these states for wind energy, and that Trump's negative comments on wind in Iowa didn't go down very well with Iowans and Iowa politicians from both sides of the aisle -- https://apnews.com/a2b500b82d5a44eeb9759ca31d0b4a33)
Having a national leader that seems hostile to anything environmental certainly doesn't help matters, but it's not all doom and gloom.
A fake treaty based on hype and slogans. whose temperature goals when overlaid with existing models shows no change. a fake treaty which allows each nation to set their own goals, change them at will, and no fines or similar mechanisms to insure compliance? A treaty which then veered off into rules on gender equity, biodiversity, disabled people, migrants, and a just transition of work forces.
as in, it was propaganda act by politicians who used ignorance of what it stood for so you would think they were doing something about it when they were doing absolutely nothing. it had no power of enforcement because they could not even come to an agreement of who would be allowed to enforce it. when you let the fox set the rules the chickens outcome does not change.
it was worse than no treaty. with no treaty people can be brought back to the table and iron out one that has limits that apply equally to all nations with an agreed to enforcement. (per capita limits are the means some countries used to skirt any impact they have on the world)
I'm curious if you believe there is any room for people who care about the environment, but thought the Paris agreement was a waste of money and resources?
The United States' energy use per capita[0] is the largest in the world. How does the total energy consumption of renewables v. non-renewables compare?
Nitpick: the US is #3, behind Iceland and Canada. Iceland is an incredible outlier, with a figure well over two times higher than Canada, I assume because aluminum production is such a huge part of the economy due to cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power.
The US is actually #9 behind Iceland, Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait, Brunei, Luxembourg, UAE and Canada[1]. Just sort that table by kgoe/a. You're right about why Iceland is so high, see [2].
I moved from china (Beijing) to the USA (LA) for the much cleaner air. Ya, parallel universe for sure, it's like comparing mordor to the shire, where the former is freaking out over its horrible pollution problem while the latter doesn't notice anything wrong.
People in LA, and Californians in general do care about pollution. After all, it is one of the birthplaces of the modern environmental movement in the US.
Despite its urban sprawl, LA has one of the lowest emissions per capita in the US, lower than nyc even. The pollution tends to accumulate due to it's geography, being that the city is in a basin instead of dispersing. Tear down the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains, and the air quality would be greatly improved.
I was being a bit sarcastic, but ya, you are completely right. My point really was that the US isn't falling behind, China just has much larger problems to deal with ATM and so they are beginning to take the environment seriously.
Both LA and Beijing have similar topological bowl and inversion problems. Tear down the western and northern hills in Beijing, and the air quality would also be greatly improved.
Carbon dioxide doesn't mean shit when the current PM2.5 AQI outside is 200 or 300+. You are talking about a global problem, I'm referring to the local one that will give you lung cancer and not just cause sea levels to rise.
And I suspect that similar reasons of geography lead to New Yorkers not caring about pollution as much as they should. From what little I know about weather, all of the pollution in New York City gets blown right out into the Atlantic
Except NY/NYC has extremely low greenhouse gas production per capita. I am aware this is not equivalent to all pollution, but its asinine to claim that New Yorkers don't care.
Renewables keep dropping in price. By the time it comes it may not cost that much.
I was in Beijing in 1983 and the air was clean and everyone rode bicycles with almost zero cars. They could do that although it wouldn't fix the steel plants...
There's nothing in this article about why the containers need to be painted. Could the shipping companies just paint their logo on rather than painting the whole container and save a bunch of money?
My understanding is that shipping containers are usually made of COR-TEN steel, which forms a protective layer when it does rust (similar to the protective oxide layers that form on aluminum and stainless steel). But considering the containers are exposed to sea salt spray pretty much continuously, it makes sense that the additional protection of a coat of paint is necessary.
COR-TEN® steel requires alternating wet and dry cycles to form a properly adhered protective layer. Areas that have salt laden air, high rainfall, humidity, or persistent fog are typically not the proper environment for COR-TEN®.
Aware of that one. The trail bridge at Pilarcitos Creek on the California Coastal Trail in Half Moon Bay was made of unpainted Cor-Ten steel. That will not last in the coastal zone, where it never dries out. The bridge collapsed when park staff drove a tractor across it.[1] No injuries, but the heavily used trail was out for most of two years.
even if the containers are made with corten, it's not good for sea. The protective rust keeps getting washed off by the rain and the salt is too much for it to handle. Ends up rusting just as bad..
That's not why cars don't rust as much. Coatings have just gotten better and simulations have gotten better so engineers can know in advance that all the salty water that runs down the vehicle will be channeled through a few spots that will rust out in short order then do it anyway.
Galvanization was popular for a brief time while the industry was still trying to find replacements for lead in paint that didn't have crap performance.
Cold galvanization is expensive and involves nasty chemicals. Hot galvanization is cheaper but not as cheap as paint and involves equally nasty chemicals and molten metals.
Completely off topic but I don't understand why wikipedia doesn't simply select the desktop/mobile version of the website based on the user agent (with maybe the possibility to override the behaviour via a cookie if you really want to use the desktop version on mobile or vice-versa).
The number of times I have to manually edit a wikipedia URL every day to remove the ".m" part is getting frustrating. I'm sure there's a browser extension for that but really, I blame wikipedia's poor ergonomics.
My guess is that this is similar to StackOverflow switching to HTTPS [1]. Once you get to a certain size, something seemingly simple like turning on HTTPS or detecting desktops and redirecting comes with non-trivial problems. I can only imagine all the nuances that have to be addressed when you're serving the fifth largest site in the world [2].
Personally, I love that Wikipedia doesn't coerce you into the desktop or mobile version based on user agent. Being able to switch to the (somewhat more complete) desktop version when browsing on a phone is invaluable.
Sure, I mentioned that they could put an override, but sane defaults would be good. I don't know how many people actually mean to visit the mobile version of WP on the desktop when they follow a ".m" link, but I'd wager that it's pretty damn low.
Amongst other points, the article says that a water based paint takes 5 times longer to dry than the oil. From a production stand point you have a bottleneck. You now need 5x capacity to dry the containers to stay even with the normal production. Since I doubt they have vertical drying racks, production should slow due to that alone.
Either you increase the number of 'machines' (lines in this case) or you increase your drying area foot print to compensate.
Once you do the latter you can produce at the same rate assuming all products produced are identical) since you the ones coming out the dry end do so at the same speed as the input end.
Edit: This does assume production demand is constant, longer pipelines make responding to demand more difficult.
I am pretty certain paintings used for containers have little to none in common with paintings you get at the home improvement store but some observations I have made concerning water vs. oil based paintings:
* Water based paintings dry much faster than oil based paintings
* The durability is pretty much the same
* The scratch resistance of oil based paintings, once fully dried, is light years better than that of water based paintings.
In some aspects the green movement has brought us water based colors where you could water your home plants with but are inadequate for some (read: wide) range of application.
Oil based paint gets brittle and chips and it also yellows.
A downside I have noticed in water based paint is the manufacturers have started adding extra water, thinning the paint. Presumably selling more water is more profitable.
You don't need 5x capacity. This is latency vs bandwidth - you're going to delay the orders during the process switch 4x the drying period, but after that, your normal throughout I back up.
> There's nothing in this article about why the containers need to be painted. Could the shipping companies just paint their logo on rather than painting the whole container and save a bunch of money?
I read about so colled 'shunts'. Steelplates you put into the earth to protect your construction site for water. It is also partial used on a river side.
Those things are not painted and google told me that you can calculate how much is oxidized in a year.
I would really love to know how a shipping container is so much more fragile.
Perhaps it is not that relevant but in masses it makes a relevant amount of money. Like steel container 20 years and with color 25 years and that makes it just better.
Is there vertical integration in the shipping + container industry?
I imagine Hyundai, Maersk, etc. could buy or start some container manufacturers, but it sounded like in the article that they were just going to unhappily deal with it.
Maersk used to produce their own refrigerated containers. I think this has stopped as Chinese manufactures are just way cheaper than doing this yourself. Maybe the highly specific 'super freezer' containers (stuff to transport fish at - 60 Celsius see http://www.maerskline.com/~/media/maersk-line/reefer-cargo/f...) are still created themselves, but doubt it.
Regarding this article: either you lease more containers to handle a peak season, or you choose to just have a bigger container fleet. I question if it really makes sense to lease containers only during a peak season. If you already bought those containers last year then increased prices this year doesn't affect things as much as this article pretends: you still have your entire container fleet. Containers yet reused and written off over many years (e.g. 8+.. though just guessing), it is not a one-off activity!
FTFY, Bloomberg: "A shift in China toward less toxic coatings for containers has shifted costs from health care costs for employees to shipping costs for customers"
Thanks! My comment was more directed at the Bloomberg article and authors, which institutionally see situations like this as a "cost increase" because they don't consider the existing environmental/ health consequences to workers as a "cost" (but of course it is).
It's like this account was made by a bot which just googles political terms and then astroturfs the opposing viewpoint. It's so irrelevant to the rest of the conversation. lol
The cycle thing needs at LEAST 50% approval ratings. I am not seeing Trump getting that unless something drastic happens.
Bernie has two problems, he is too old (by 2020), and he is too extreme for most Democrats. Sure 45% of Democrats really really really love Bernie, but to win president you need a bit more than that, and to pull a few swing voters in. I cannot imagine the people who want to dismantle the ACA would swing over and vote for "free education for all" Bernie.
> Bernie has two problems, he is too old (by 2020), and he is too extreme for most Democrats.
Age is a problem, yes; Bernie's other problem, though, is that he is seen as too unorthodox (moderate, rather than the extreme, to reduce things to a linear scale) on key issues for much of the Democratic base. He's too progressive on economic issues for the neoliberal elites, but that's mostly a problem in getting resources too build a national following if you don't already have that, and while it was a drag in the runup to the 2016 primaries when Bernie wasn't a national household name and the most popular politician in the country, but it's not much of an issue for 2020.
> Sure 45% of Democrats really really really love Bernie
As of April (the most recent I can find) Sanders had 57% favorability nationally (not just among Democrats.)
> I cannot imagine the people who want to dismantle the ACA would swing over and vote for "free education for all" Bernie.
There's two kinds of people who want to dismantle the ACA; those who are ideologically opposed to government programs, and those who aren't but think then subsidy and mandate approach simply doesn't work.
The former aren't even remotely swing voters, and the latter seems to be a good fit for Sanders, who, after all, is one of them.
Agreed. Universal for healthcare is one thing, because it's about people's lives. However college in my opinion is mostly a waste of money. You can learn the same thing on YouTube for free. It would be a terrible misallocation of resources to make college free for everyone. I hope college degrees go out of fashion, not that everybody gets one.
George HW Bush. Jimmy Carter. LBJ. Hoover, if you don't mind going back nearly a century. And before you say "well that's just three examples!" there have only been 45 presidents in 250 years. Just about the only presidential thing you can get dozens of examples of is white men.
I'm not sure how "Well Trump got elected" is any proof of your "parties alternate 2-term presidents" thesis. I doubt Sanders will run in 2020, but I don't pretend to know what will happen in the future.
You should add Nixon to that list, since they said two full terms, and Nixon's example may well be followed again. Gerald Ford belongs on that list too. In fact, only four of the ten most recent former Presidents served two full terms. (JFK is something of a different category, of course.)
Carter and Bush both lost because the economy was in a recession during their final years. Bush might have won if the economy had pulled out quicker. LBJ did not run for reelection.
If the economy is doing well, it is quite possible for Trump to be reelected.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/hanjin-creditors-fighting-over-...