Slashdot Mirror
Ozone As Pesticide
Makarand writes "Purdue University researchers in the search for
alternatives to insect fumigants that damage Earth's ozone layer
have found that
ozone gas can be used as a potent
pesticide without causing any environmental harm.
Farmers could use ozone generators to get rid
of insects in their grain bins by releasing ozone
in them."
PETA protest to follow...
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
"Scientists say the ozone layer is too thick after 2 decades of overuse of ozone as a pesticide. This will result in global warming, and the eventual extinction of humans, unless some sort of ozone layer thinning can be done."
Might be wrong here, but I thought high levels of ozone near the ground was toxic to humans?
But the process won't add to the ground-level ozone that is a component of smog, they said. Maier said Purdue's ozone insecticide process uses such low concentrations of ozone that it rapidly dissipates. It would not add to ground-level ozone, which is a component of smog, he said. Can anyone clarify this reasoning? It seems to me that if a lot of farmers were using this that the 'low concentrations' at each location would add up. Yes, I know, that's only a thought experiment, but...
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
After reading this story I was thinking back and can confirm: Not a single photocopy clerk in our building has ever caught malaria from infected mosquitos.
Trolling is a art,
Ozone produced near the ground does not rise into the upper atmosphere to add to the ozone layer. It will sit near the ground and if the area has weak wind currents (like many vally areas) it will stay in that area and become air polution. LA is notable as an area that has significant ozone polution.
Well, low concentrations are present even in your body. Your immune system uses the ozone to punch holes in bacteria.
After a rainstorm, that funky smell is ozone, created by the lightning passing through the atmosphere.
So, small amounts isn't too bad.
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
Nice try at a first post that actually makes sense, but of course the ozone used as a pesticide would not help with the regeneration of the ozone layer. It's about 10 miles too low for that ...
It's always been a certain irony that, on the one hand, we have too few ozone in the upper atmosphere while we have too much in the air we breathe (that is, smog). Anyway, at least according to the article, the ozone used as a pesticide would not increase the smog problem in any relevant way. (Which was my first thought.)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
10 years from now someone discovers the increased quantity of ground level ozone is causing cancer (or whatever).
Suppose it's still better than DDT though.
because it is infringing on our patent. Please cease and desist immediately or we will be forced to initiate legal action.
Why don't they just put people in those areas? Humans make Ozone! :-P
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Ozone is already used in quite a few water treatment facilities. It's germicide properties are long known.
There's even a company (TSO3) which uses it to sterilize chirurgical instruments, instead of high temps.
Using ozone to kill bugs is simply another use for it, although I wonder if they try to get it back or if they release it in the atmosphere.
Is producing more poison, esp that damage the nerve system like this, a good thing?
I don't know.
I'd rather see a decline in the monocultures that are vulnerable to insect attacks. Growing for example hemp alongside your other crops helps against pests and is a lot less harmful to the environment.
Growing a single crop is almost begging for trouble, and using pesticides is not going to the root of the problem. The insects will evolve.
this reminds me of a story I saw once on 20/20 about a type of machine that released small amounts of ozone, trying to help people with asthma. Unfortunately, it only aggravated the symptoms. So, I see big lawsuits coming from farmers with asthma. Although the article claims it won't cause environmental damage, who knows. If it stays around, though, it might just sit there, and no further treatements will be necessary. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
Seems like grain silos and smog tend to be in different areas. I think smog comes from reacting ozone with unburned hydrocarbons.
Ozone might be effective and more environmentally friendly, but it might be too expensive or dangerous for widespread use. Of course, farm work has never been especially cheap or safe... this is just one aspect out of many.
There are health issues - though probably not that big - perhaps more free radicals in the air to give you lung cancer, and whatever you get when the ozone recombines with other gases, etc. Maybe nitrous oxides?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Ozone is also a much better oxidant than O2. Gotta be VERY careful with that grain, a bunch of it can just burn at a smallest spark. The environment at the grain elevators also becomes much more explosive. Right now it's prohibited to smoke or create any open fire on the facilities there. Why? Because flour (it's not really flour, but microscopic particles of wheat) suspended in the air is highly explosive. Now imagine this air has high ozone content. Also, there always WILL be leaks from grain storage and ozone is poisonous.
Is the discovery that it can be used directly around foodstuffs what makes it news? I didn't even know that was a big deal, but now that I think about it, I don't recall us using those generators in the kitchen.
Ozone will break down into oxygen in 20 minutes, so smog is a non-issue. Unpainted metals, rubber (especially natural rubbers) are seriously harmed however. From the site
With very high concentrations of ozone, metals can be attacked and oxidized but are protected if they are varnished or painted. Ozone can attack natural rubber, but the synthetic rubber shows a much higher resistance. The compatibility of ozone on materials like plastics, teflon, kynar, tygon, silicone, viton and others have no noticeable effect. Most processing equipment is made out of stainless which also shows no effect.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
In many large grain elevators inert gases such as nitrogen may be pumped into the silo's while the others gases are pumped out. N2 is pretty inert and is non-toxic. What is toxic is the lack of oxygen. Best yet, most of our atmosphere is nitrogen.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
The article says "It isn't clear how the ozone kills the insects," but apparently it does, and apparently in low concentrations. We are told that it "uses such low concentrations of ozone that it rapidly dissipates. It would not add to ground-level ozone." Ah, that word "dissipates." But as Barry Commoner reminded us, "everything must go someplace." "Dissipation" isn't the same as vanishing!
And generally speaking things that kill one kind of life (e.g. insects) are hazardous to others (e.g. humans).
See this factsheet, which notes, in part:
HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE FACT SHEET
Common Name: OZONE
CAS Number: 10028-15-6
DOT Number: None
* Ozone can affect you when breathed in.
* Ozone may cause mutations. Handle with extreme caution.
* Ozone can cause reproductive damage. Handle with extreme caution
* Repeated exposure can cause lung damage.
* ODOR THRESHOLD = 0.045 ppm.
* The range of accepted odor threshold values is quite broad. Caution should be used in relying on odor alone as a warning of potentially hazardous exposures.
WORKPLACE EXPOSURE LIMITS
OSHA: The legal airborne permissible exposure limit
(PEL) is 0.1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour workshift.
NIOSH: The recommended airborne exposure limit is 0.1 ppm which should not be exceeded at any time.
ACGIH: The recommended airborne exposure limit is 0.1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour workshift.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
FYI, There has always been less ozone on the poles because there is less light there, and if the ozone layer was going away - it would go away by the ozone layer moving to lower and lower altitudes, not by dissapating. This is because most ozone is created by certain frequencies of sunlight passing through regular O2.
Arguments like the freon argument are a fraud and have much more to do with DOW chemical loosing its patent on freon and having a patent on the only known replacement then they do to do with freon destroying the layer.
Here's one hypothesis. Ozone (O_3) is really unstable and disintegrates into regular oxygen (O_2) and a nascent oxygen atom (O) at the drop of a hat. Once the ozone is inside the insect, this free oxygen radical, in search of electrons, can wreak havoc with the internal chemistry of the insect at a very fundamental level.
[unsure] Isn't it harmful even for humans to inhale ozone? [/unsure]
It breaks down in 20 minutes to pure oxygen, unless shielded by a nobel gas. It is one of the most potent oxidizing agents known.
In other words, they'd have to dump a metric assload of the shit to do any damage.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
Right, or we could, you know, fix the hole in the ozone layer.
The fundamental problem[1] with the ozone layer is not a lack of ozone. Ozone is created when high-energy UV interacts with oxygen, and eventually reaches an equilibrium concentration where the rate of production equals the rate of destruction.
The "ozone hole" is a result of other chemical reactions that reduce the equilibrium O3:O2 ratio. As long as those other chemicals are present, it wouldn't do much good to dump additional ozone into the upper atmosphere.
[1] Assuming there is really a problem, and it wasn't just a convenient excuse to get CFCs off the market once their patent protection had expired.
but please keep the ozone OUT of my environment.
It's your choice whether you want to enter the silos in question.
Also, remember to stay away from power lines and electrical equipment like computers.
And it's definitely a better alternative to (non-dissipating) solutions based on Chlorine, which is another chemical which also is a good bacteria killer.
Having worked around tesla coils and other equipment that creates/gives off a lot of ozone, I can tell you, if you are going to die some way, this is probably one of the best.
:-)
You get very very high if the concentration of ozone in the air gets too high. It's a very mellow high as well.
I don't know how dangerous to your brain it is though. It hasn't caused any major problems for me yet. But around electrical equipment that gives off sparks, it's really easy to get a build up of ozone gas, or as we call it at work, happy gas.
Plus ozone definitely has a distinct smell, I find.
Just some interesting tips.
Yes though, ozone is deadly, and I am not recommending "recreational" use of ozone. I have to inhale it, you don't.
~ kjrose
So, how about we just store all the grain in LA?
is that a good thing?
Not really all that great--
A good part of smog near cities is ozone, and this is linked to health problems. The basic problem is that Ozone is not something you want to be breathing anyway, and it belongs in the upper atmosphere, not in our lungs. Basically Ozone is an oxidizing bleaching agent.
I have trouble believing that this would cause no environmental damage, though it could be better than our current alternatives.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You would do well to look around the various publications about CFC effects on Ozone.
CFC's are chlorine and fluorine containing hydrocarbons that were used as refrigerants, wlectronic cleaners, etc. A common CFC is Freon 12, C(F)2(Cl)2. In the atmosphere, C(F)2(Cl)2 undergoes the following reaction:
C(F)2(Cl)2 + hv -> C(F)2(Cl) + Cl
k5 = 1.0 x 10^-7 sec^-1
The Cl then reacts with O3(Ozone):
Cl + O3 -> ClO + O2
k6 = 2.1 x 10^-11 cm^3 molecule^-1 sec^-1
ClO + O -> Cl + O2
k7 = 3.8 x 10^-11 cm^3 molecule^-1 sec^-1
In short, a Chlorine breaks off of the Freon, and then just hangs around in the ozone layer, converting Ozone into Oxygen. As Chlorine is just a catalyst in this reaction, it continues breaking down Ozone as long as it is present.
It should be noted, for the sake of anyone at least somewhat versed in chemistry, that these Cl-O3 reactions may be slow, but they are still orders of magnitude faster than the O3 production reactions, which are about 10^-33 cm^6 molecule^-2 sec^-1.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
This is not necessarily a wonderful development. Ozone is a very chemically reactive molecule. Introduced into a grain silo, it is not going to be selective. It will not seek out bugs and pests first. What it will do is react with the organic molecules in the grain - generating all kinds of degradation products, many of which are going to be toxic, mutagenic, teratogenic, etc. Is that a good tradeoff for a few fewer beetle legs in your Cheerios?
n.b.: I buy Marcal paper goods, because they are trying to recycle and whiten their paper products using as many non-chlorinated oxidizing chemicals as they can. The paper industries use of chlorine and hypochlorite is a major source of the organochlorines in the environment.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
In this case, it breaks down into diatomic oxygen (whereas ozone is triatomic).I think that counts as dissipating.
This discussion has a couple places where i see people asking, if smog is bad for people and ozone is in smog, why isn't this ozone bad for humans? Well, i would like to ask the opposite question.
I'm from Houston. I am, incidentally, at Purdue now, but that's just a coincidence. Anyway, i'm from Houston.
Houston has a *lot* of ozone in the air. Houston surpassed LA as the nation's most polluted city a couple years ago. Houston also has a *LOT* of mosquitos.
If ozone kills insects, why hasn't all the ozone in the air in Houston killed some of the insects there?
Everyone keeps saying "well, the ozone they used wasn't dense enough to be harmful to humans." So if the ozone in the air is dense enough to be harmful to humans, as it seems to be back in Houston, it should be armageddon to mosquitoes, no? And someone else said that the ozone in smog is different from normal ozone becuase it's reacted with hydrocarbons. Okay, i guess that makes sense, but now that i think about it i very clearly remember days when the Houston city government released a "ozone warning". Not a smog warning, an "ozone warning". Did they actually mean "smog which contains ozone as one of its chemical components but also contains something that makes mosquitos immortal"?
Or have the insects in big cities just built up some kind of immunity to ozone? If that's possible, what's to stop the insects that live in grain vats from building up an immunity?
What am i missing?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Yes, but the reason I respect them is because of them, I get to eat :)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.