New York City will start enforcing its styrofoam ban.

[rcjordan]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/01/business/new-york-styrofoam-ban-trnd/index.html

[Rupert]

Not only used in the food industry:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-43292691

[rcjordan]

I once crushed and buried a damaged Hobie Cat using a backhoe as the fiberglass hull made for good, clean landfill.  About 20 years later, I had cause to dig in that area and turned up chunks of the styrofoam flotation packed in the hull.  Not only was it perfectly intact, but when I rinsed it, it was still stark white --totally unaffected by being buried in the surrounding clay.

>Not only

http://www.universalconstructionfoam.com/pastprojects/geofoam-concrete-void-fill/

Click some right column links.

[Brad]

They tried to build a road through a swamp around here using some special styrofoam as a semi-floating foundation.  Large parts of the roadway started sinking after a year and it just kept sinking. 

[ergophobe]

I think the building a road through a swamp part was the problem with that plan, not the styrofoam foundation part. Though I have no doubt that the styrofoam foundation salesperson influenced that decision.

[rcjordan]

>building a road through a swamp part was the problem with that plan

HHH!  You're not familiar with where I live, then?  Some of our swamp causeways were truly phenomenal engineering feats.  One of them, The Sunken Floating Road (now Camden Causeway), was legendary in the way the engineer finally fixed it on the third or fourth iteration. Hint: it involved a crapload of dynamite.

[rcjordan]

Excerpt from local history pdf:

The first place over the Pasquotank River bridge along our lane to the beach was our town's own island. Incredible that we were driving upon it at all. What a task it had been in the early 1920s for Engineer McNutt and his men to take a long island bog like Machelhe and try to succeed at putting a concrete road overtop of a floating corduroy of logs—''McNutt's Floating Road sank more than it floated,'' my aunt once told me. Another woman who had been but a girl during World War II remembered picnicking on the Pasquotank before crossing the bridge and enduring, though frightfully and queasily, the rippling unsteadiness and the underwater portions of the Floating Road. When, late in World War II, the state of North Carolina in the form of Engineer Ham Overman gave up on all that and brought in the big pumps and dredges, he and his men blew in a long mat of sand and laid atop it a tarmac road that worked. With Ham Overman's highway coup, Machelhe Island became popularly known, then and now, as the Camden Causeway.

[Brad]

Lots of swamps and bogs around here and they know how to build roads the old way through them.  It's just expensive and slow.  They did listen to the styrofoam sales guy and thought they could get it done fast and cheap.  They rebuilt the road the old way and it's fine.