safe bottom paint time

[ebb]

Along with the ethical problem of dumping bilge and greywater overboard is the looming problem of toxic bottom paint.

A great gift to the environment would be a slick teflon or silicon or silicate coating that would keep barnacles and weed at bay, or in the bay. I hope California takes the lead again, as the state did with VOC solvent coatings,

and ban soft and hard copper bottom paints.

Then corporate chemist$ will be forced to come up with clean and reliable alternatives like the waterbourn coatings in the market now.

I personally feel that sloughing copper bottoms should be outlawed immediately. That would send a shock wave into the industry.

It is completely unlikely that the feds would take the lead to fund the search for a non-toxic bottom coating and use it on every one of their ships. The USNavy is a major polluter. I believe any ship over 80' (freighters and cruiseships and aluminum boats) can still use TBT, a long lasting kill everything biocide that has entered the whole marine food chain. It's accumulative, once any living thing picks it up (that oyster you just et!) you gets it forever.
We can't eat the fish in SFBay and we've destroyed much of the spawning areas. Birds and bottom dwellers have been grossly affected as well.
The changes happened relatively slowly and therefor have become acceptable. Isn't that how it happens?
You know, our short term memory makes the negative changes inevitable.

Why not a silicate? An innocuous mineral coating that is composed of mineral flakes that fall off in a controlled uniform fashion. Evidently it's the marine insurance business that insists that coatings last at least five years. That drives the paint industry to invent very deadly products. Imco these jerks have the wrong attitude.

You hear of something, let us know, ok?
HNY2006