Therisa Timan from Pittmetals B.C. wants to know what to do with her old paint cans. How do you handle paint waste responsibly?If you dump solvent wastes like paint and paint thinners down the street drains, they usually go straight into the lake or rivers. If you dump it down the household dra...
Oil stains are almost impossible to get out of concrete. Substances that tend to sit on the top surface of the concrete are much easier to get off. We did some testing with various stain and graffiti removal products. Nothing worked perfectly.Since this show I have been looking for somethin...
There are many products on the market designed to remove oil stains from driveways. Some of them actually work. The primary problem with them is that they basically dissolve the oil, much of it soaking even deeper into the concrete. That means you have to soak it up and attempt to not worsen ...
There are now a number of products on the market specifically designed for cleaning concrete, and when I tested them on the TV show, most of them appeared to work on asphalt stains. One of the keys is to brush in the cleaner, and then to use a high-pressure water power washer system to flush eve...
Oil spills in water can be a real problem -- ranging from oil in your swimming pool, to around a boat dock or serious spills from commercial vessels. Old techniques try to contain the oil, but wave action can sabatoge that. Dispersents have proved to cause more problems than they solve. New te...
In 2002, one of my HGTV staff read an article on the web about a man that had found the miracle solution for cleaning up oil spills in the ocean. He claimed that all you had to do was to put paraffin flakes on the oil and it would all gather together in one concentrated mass and you could simply ...
Most driveway cleaners are powerful solvents that dilute the oil, even dissolve the asphalt, and create more pollution. Research in British Colombia has shown that more oil gets into the ocean from streets, driveways and parking lots than from oil tanker spills.
So in an effort to clean the ocea...
Underground tanks are banned
Many years ago we buried oil tanks in the ground. Think a minute about how bad an idea that was. When a very old tank developed a leak, we never knew about it and it just leaked oil into the ground for years, creating quite an environmental problem. That is why it is...
