Flint's Water Problem, the Dummy Solution

Flint water

Staffers here at the Antisocial Network pride themselves on being well-informed, not only about their favorite science and DIY topics but also about current events. We're pretty certain that anyone here can name at least eight of the nine justices of SCOTUS; can you?¹ But enough about that: today's DotD candidate has been here before, precisely because of a failure to comprehend complex current events. Dalo (of InfoBarrel.com) is back again, this time with "An Idea for the Flint Water Crisis."²

Dalo; who claims to be an inventor, artist, and auto industry worker; opens his post with a bit of misinformation:

"It is ironic that anyone in Michigan could run out of fresh water but that is exactly what has happened in the city of Flint, Michigan."

That's not what happened in Flint: the city had plenty of water, it just wasn't fit to drink! Dalo further demonstrated his ignorance of the problem by telling his readers that,

"Out [sic] lakes are nearly as big as oceans³, and they have provided an abundant source of clean, fresh water for millions of people in Michigan, but [Michigan Governor Rick] Snyder wanted to isolate Flint from the lake water, and he wanted Flint to obtain their water from the muddy old Flint River."

The decision to switch from buying water from Detroit to using Flint River water was made by the city officials, not the state. More misinformation follows:

"The government officials who were responsible for Flint studied the problem, and they discovered that the water in Flint had high levels of lead. The lead was coming from lead pipes that are part of antiquated plumbing systems all over the city."

The cause is a lot more technical that "coming from lead pipes": the difference in chemistry between water sources stripped a natural protective coating from supply pipes and allowed them to corrode. The city could have treated the water before distributing it, but did not.

But that's not why we're here. We're here because Dalo not only doesn't have a good handle on the causes of Flint's water problems, we're here because he came up with a truly moronic "solution":

"I propose that all the empty plastic bottles in Flint should be collected and recycled. The plastic obtained by recycling all those plastic bottles should be used to manufacture pipes, and these pipes should be used to replace all the lead pipes in Flint's water system."

Say what? Dalo's idea sounds attractive on its surface, but a deeper dive suggests that it is unworkable. Among other reasons, it wouldn't work because

• Plastic bottles are made of polyethylene. Rigid plastic pipe is made of polyvinyl chloride. You can't recycle one into the other.
• A plastic water bottle weighs about 13 grams, less than half an ounce. A 16-inch diameter PVC pipe weighs about 15.5 pounds per linear foot, suggesting that every foot of the pipe (even if it could be made from water bottles) would require around 32 bottles per foot or 169,000 bottles per mile.

That's the kind of thinking Dalo didn't perform before expounding on his "solution." Failure to think is every bit as good a reason to be named our Dumbass of the Day as failure to understand the question. So, here you go, Dalo!

¹ Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, Kagan, Kavanaugh, Barrett
² InfoBarrel has deleted all user-generated content and become a "green" website, but this post can still be reead by using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   infobarrel.com/An_Idea_For_The_Flint_Water_Crisis__
³ Not really: oceans are lots bigger.

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