I recall reading there were zoning laws in the classical era about where you could manufacture garum (the Roman fish condiment). Here's one attributable example I could find, from the tail end of the Eastern empire. This is 2.4.22 in the Hexabiblos (1344–1345) of the Byzantine jurist Constantine Harmenopoulos of Thessalonica; it legislates a ~450-600-meter exclusion zone (three stadia).
The archive.org page I linked is in Byzantine Greek with a Latin translation. I've quoted the Greek part here, and I used Deepseek V4 Flash for OCR-cleanup and machine translation.
> "The craft of the salt‑fish merchants and that of the cheesemakers causes no ordinary harm to those nearby; for the vapour arising from it is exceedingly foul‑smelling and harmful over a great distance. Hence such persons ought not to dwell in any city or village. But if there should be need of them for the uses of the cities and villages, they must keep a distance of three stades [~555 m]. And it must be known that all these aforestated things have been said concerning those who set up (such establishments) anew; but if there exist old charters or some prior servitude (i.e., an established legal right or prescriptive practice), one must abide by what was originally agreed concerning them."
Sounds like the Canadian Food Inspection agency screwed the town out of spite. Like they had a target on Ngo's back. Anyone have more details? From the linked Eater article:
>He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began. Ngo claims that he had been vocal about their interactions, and speculates “if they shut [us] down, nobody makes any complaints anymore.”
>After the government-run lab found Ngo’s product to be safe, he went on to win a court case and an appeal against the government. Even after those victories, the CFIA moved to restrict the sales of his product to the province of Newfoundland. “If I sell there, who will use my product?” Ngo says, pointing out the small population of Newfoundland and its non-existent Vietnamese community. “I could sell maybe one or two cases a month[...] we can’t survive.” The CFIA declined to comment, citing the amount of time that has passed since filing its initial complaint.
They could have stopped production in the moldy factory but allowed sale of the remaining product.
I don’t think he was targeted but he met the reality of bureaucracy. One agency actually funded him and approved the building and allowed him to operate for 11 years. Another agency said you can’t operate or sell because of the growing mold. Another agency said dump the forbidden fish sauce in the sewer. Another agency said to bury it.
>In 1985, the Canadian government tried to stop Jamaican bakeries and restaurants from using the term "beef patty."
>At the time, Canada's Meat Inspection Act classified a beef patty as what goes in a hamburger. It could contain only meat and seasoning and it couldn't be encased in dough or a crust. Therefore, a Jamaican patty — widely known as a flaky pastry with a spiced beef filling — didn't meet the criteria.
That actually vaguely seems reasonable? Especially in contexts where there's only text to go by (eg. on a menu), people might actually be confused.
It’s not that it’s unreasonable to think the word “patty” is ambiguous —it’s that it’s unreasonable to spend tax dollars on saving people from that ambiguity
Can't remember where i've read that nor even if it's a real thing or not so do take the following with caution.
I think Roman Empire garum (fish sauce) factories where one of, if not the first thing in known history to trigger lawmakers to set a minimum distance from factories to residential areas (something like 1 mile iirc).
There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell the rotten fish smell. I'm sure professional chefs must know about these.
I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.
Rotten? Do you have any more info about this product, even a name? Salted anchovies are common in at least Spain, Italy & Portugal (and you usually rinse off the excess salt and optionally store them in olive oil for a while before consuming), but I've never seen a "rotten" anchovy...
Instead of "rotten" I should have probably used "fermented". They're dark brown, not dry but not in a liquid, individual anchovies that are starting to fall apart. They smell like a stronger version of fish sauce.
If it's the salted anchovies I'm thinking of what I'm thinking of (like in the yt video in your sibling comment), salted anchovies are a lot cheaper and more versatile (the downside is that more processing is required on your end). Colatura is great in sauces, but you can use whole anchovy filets to make a gilda in addition to adding flavor to a sauce.
I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).
Its also a common misconception that all glutamates are MSG (thats one salt of glutamate) and that all umami compounds are simple glutamate salts.
So while MSG is an excellent "neutral" umami ingredient, fermented products like this have a whole host of complex flavors that are often very desirable beyond just their glutamate salt.
While your comment is true, it is reductive. While celery seed does in fact contain nitrates which are turned into nitrites, it’s the next step that’s important. Unlike synthetic sodium nitrite, celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.
The subtle differences in how our bodies process synthetic vs natural ingredients significantly impacts our bodies and health.
>celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.
This just sounds like post hoc justification. There's hardly any vitamin C in celery seeds[1][2]. Broccoli has 5x the vitamin C per 100g, despite much of it being water. Moreover, if the point is that vitamin C protects against nitrates, why not add vitamin C directly, rather than doing it in a roundabout way by adding celery seeds which also happen to contain vitamin C?
They can't actually label it "nitrate free", only a superficially sounding term like "no nitrates added", with the hope that people (like you) think it's the same as "nitrate free".
Since this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?
>Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the provincial government ordered the factory’s drains to be blocked to prevent any more sauce from seeping into the ocean.
In 2016, they dumped forty bats into the ocean but Environment Canada did some testing on the sludge and found that it would kill fish within five minutes. The environmental cost would have been obscene - it’s acidic, extremely salty and has little to no oxygen. This would have been a disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss before they bury it - they don’t want it to touch the water table.
I don’t really see what the problem is with letting scientists work.
Sewers go places, and it is nearly a million liters of extremely concentrated stinky. If you do this, you take a single location source of stinky and smear it over a much larger set of locations that will then ALL be extremely stinky, in a way that isn’t easily cleaned with water as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.
That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.
This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.
This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.
The risk of dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."
> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”
The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.
I'd say dump it in the ocean, but I don't guess any boat will take it. Still, sounds like they're going to make the area around the landfill stink forever.
Isn't the ocean filled with salt and already knows how to biologically degrade fish? I sort of think that you could deposit this at sea somehow, just need to spread it out sufficiently.
I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.
I wanted to crack a joke that Swede's do like their stinky fermented fish, why not sell to them… But I figured why not see if other cultures might also like it, and was floored with how many there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_fish
Slightly Offtopic but the voice in the embedded youtube Video is so sounds so unnatural and creepy.
I guess its AI generated and no one bothered to check the end result.
Sounds like a normal news broadcaster voice to me. I suppose the inflection is a bit over-the-top. The speaker says her name at the end - Leila Beaudoi.
I am surprised that after this long the smell isn't gone. If one were to open all these tanks and spread it around on the ground in a layer, wouldn't it dissipate after a few months when the bacteria finish up?
After 20 years of legal battles abandoned factory containing tanks of rotting fish in St Mary’s NL is getting cleaned up, paid for by provincial taxpayers.
From a random google search I got this report https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468... (mostly in Spanish, with an English abstract). It looks serious and as far as I understand it makes sense. They recommend to add iodine to burn/oxidize the trimethylamine or use bacteria and bubbles or air/oxygen, or a mix or bacteria+algae+light that produces the oxygen inside the mix. It looks like without an active source of oxidizer, the mix will be stinky for years.
I recall reading there were zoning laws in the classical era about where you could manufacture garum (the Roman fish condiment). Here's one attributable example I could find, from the tail end of the Eastern empire. This is 2.4.22 in the Hexabiblos (1344–1345) of the Byzantine jurist Constantine Harmenopoulos of Thessalonica; it legislates a ~450-600-meter exclusion zone (three stadia).
The archive.org page I linked is in Byzantine Greek with a Latin translation. I've quoted the Greek part here, and I used Deepseek V4 Flash for OCR-cleanup and machine translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantine_Harmenopoulos
https://archive.org/details/constharmenopul00heimgoog/page/2... ("Ἐπαρχιχὸν ΠΕΡῚ ΓΑΡΕΨΩΝ" / "Edictum DE GARI COCTORIBUS")
> "22. Ἡ τέχνη τῶν γαρεψῶν καὶ ἡ τῶν τυροποιῶν οὐ τὴν τυχοῦσαν ποιεῖ τοῖς παρακειμένοις βλάβην· πολλὴ γὰρ ἡ ἀπ᾽ αὐτῆς ἀτμὶς δυσώδης τε ἀμέτρως ἐστὶ καὶ ἐπιβλαβὴς ἐπὶ πολὺ διάστημα. Ὅθεν χρὴ τοὺς τοιούτους ἅπασαν μὲν πόλιν μὴ οἰκεῖν μηδὲ κώμην. Εἰ δὲ χρεία τούτων εἴη πρὸς τὰς χρήσεις τῶν πόλεων καὶ τῶν κωμῶν, ἀφεστάναι στάδια τούτους δεῖ τρία. Εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ ὡς ταῦτα πάντα τὰ προειρημένα ἐπὶ τῶν ἐκ νέου κατασκευαζόντων εἴρηται· εἰ δὲ χάρται εἰσὶ παλαιοὶ ἢ καὶ δουλεία τις προλαβοῦσα, κεχρῆσθαι δεῖ τοῖς ἐξ ἀρχῆς περὶ αὐτῶν συμπεφωνημένοις."
> "The craft of the salt‑fish merchants and that of the cheesemakers causes no ordinary harm to those nearby; for the vapour arising from it is exceedingly foul‑smelling and harmful over a great distance. Hence such persons ought not to dwell in any city or village. But if there should be need of them for the uses of the cities and villages, they must keep a distance of three stades [~555 m]. And it must be known that all these aforestated things have been said concerning those who set up (such establishments) anew; but if there exist old charters or some prior servitude (i.e., an established legal right or prescriptive practice), one must abide by what was originally agreed concerning them."
Sounds like the Canadian Food Inspection agency screwed the town out of spite. Like they had a target on Ngo's back. Anyone have more details? From the linked Eater article:
>He suggests that a prior conflict with the CFIA over product labeling motivated them to close the factory before the inspection began. Ngo claims that he had been vocal about their interactions, and speculates “if they shut [us] down, nobody makes any complaints anymore.”
>After the government-run lab found Ngo’s product to be safe, he went on to win a court case and an appeal against the government. Even after those victories, the CFIA moved to restrict the sales of his product to the province of Newfoundland. “If I sell there, who will use my product?” Ngo says, pointing out the small population of Newfoundland and its non-existent Vietnamese community. “I could sell maybe one or two cases a month[...] we can’t survive.” The CFIA declined to comment, citing the amount of time that has passed since filing its initial complaint.
They could have stopped production in the moldy factory but allowed sale of the remaining product.
I don’t think he was targeted but he met the reality of bureaucracy. One agency actually funded him and approved the building and allowed him to operate for 11 years. Another agency said you can’t operate or sell because of the growing mold. Another agency said dump the forbidden fish sauce in the sewer. Another agency said to bury it.
Canadian bureaucracy around food is at times insane (and vaguely racist). Just look up '1985 Jamaican patty wars'.
From cbc:
>In 1985, the Canadian government tried to stop Jamaican bakeries and restaurants from using the term "beef patty."
>At the time, Canada's Meat Inspection Act classified a beef patty as what goes in a hamburger. It could contain only meat and seasoning and it couldn't be encased in dough or a crust. Therefore, a Jamaican patty — widely known as a flaky pastry with a spiced beef filling — didn't meet the criteria.
That actually vaguely seems reasonable? Especially in contexts where there's only text to go by (eg. on a menu), people might actually be confused.
It’s not that it’s unreasonable to think the word “patty” is ambiguous —it’s that it’s unreasonable to spend tax dollars on saving people from that ambiguity
Smelly, rotting fish sauce that needs to be handled in hazmat suits? In Europe that's called a "condiment".
Can't remember where i've read that nor even if it's a real thing or not so do take the following with caution.
I think Roman Empire garum (fish sauce) factories where one of, if not the first thing in known history to trigger lawmakers to set a minimum distance from factories to residential areas (something like 1 mile iirc).
There's a farmers market here in Zurich where some Italians drive up and sell Italian products like cheeses, sausages, etc. but one thing I buy from them I've never seen anywhere else - they are rotten salted anchovies packed with peppercorns. Stink super bad and are falling apart but when you're making a sauce you drop one in and the anchovy dissolves and delivers tons of umami - glutamates - and you no longer smell the rotten fish smell. I'm sure professional chefs must know about these.
I keep them in baggies in the freezer so that they don't stink up the fridge.
Rotten? Do you have any more info about this product, even a name? Salted anchovies are common in at least Spain, Italy & Portugal (and you usually rinse off the excess salt and optionally store them in olive oil for a while before consuming), but I've never seen a "rotten" anchovy...
Instead of "rotten" I should have probably used "fermented". They're dark brown, not dry but not in a liquid, individual anchovies that are starting to fall apart. They smell like a stronger version of fish sauce.
This but also with pepper corns?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23QDS0xclw4
Yeah, rough-ground peppercorn.
Why not just use colatura di alici?
If it's the salted anchovies I'm thinking of what I'm thinking of (like in the yt video in your sibling comment), salted anchovies are a lot cheaper and more versatile (the downside is that more processing is required on your end). Colatura is great in sauces, but you can use whole anchovy filets to make a gilda in addition to adding flavor to a sauce.
I mean, instead of investing so much effort to get glutamate into your food, why not use MSG directly? Sounds like much less hassle? Reminds me of the time when Big Food over here in Germany replaced MSG with "yeast extract" so they could claim that their foods contained no artificial flavor enhancers (although the yeast extract also contains a lot of glutamate).
Its also a common misconception that all glutamates are MSG (thats one salt of glutamate) and that all umami compounds are simple glutamate salts.
So while MSG is an excellent "neutral" umami ingredient, fermented products like this have a whole host of complex flavors that are often very desirable beyond just their glutamate salt.
Because people like the fish flavor ?
Same reason we use tomato paste instead of a MSG + food coloring or parmesan instead of MSG + some protein I would say.
Like labelling bacon nitrate free while also including celery seed something-or-another that is... Just nitrates.
While your comment is true, it is reductive. While celery seed does in fact contain nitrates which are turned into nitrites, it’s the next step that’s important. Unlike synthetic sodium nitrite, celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.
The subtle differences in how our bodies process synthetic vs natural ingredients significantly impacts our bodies and health.
>celery seeds contain vitamin C which acts as an antioxidant that converts the nitrites into harmless nitric oxide whereas the synthetic sodium nitrite is converted into harmful nitrosamines.
This just sounds like post hoc justification. There's hardly any vitamin C in celery seeds[1][2]. Broccoli has 5x the vitamin C per 100g, despite much of it being water. Moreover, if the point is that vitamin C protects against nitrates, why not add vitamin C directly, rather than doing it in a roundabout way by adding celery seeds which also happen to contain vitamin C?
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170920/nutrients
[2] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/170379/nutrients
They can't actually label it "nitrate free", only a superficially sounding term like "no nitrates added", with the hope that people (like you) think it's the same as "nitrate free".
Since this is just salted, fermented fish, which the scientist in the article claims he would like to taste, why does it need to be buried in plastic? Why not slowly pour it into a sewer, over the course of several months?
From the linked Eater article:
>Perhaps the most promising and most discouraging event for the factory happened in 2016. That year, the provincial government approved a cleanup plan, and a private company began the process. But the cleanup was halted soon after it started when it became clear that the contractors were dumping several dozen vats of rotten fish sauce directly into the ocean. According to Ryan, the provincial government ordered the factory’s drains to be blocked to prevent any more sauce from seeping into the ocean.
https://www.eater.com/2019/5/23/18634704/st-marys-irish-loop...
I think dumping it slowly would be better than a hazardous waste landfill, but government bureaucracy is not capable of handling this situation.
In 2016, they dumped forty bats into the ocean but Environment Canada did some testing on the sludge and found that it would kill fish within five minutes. The environmental cost would have been obscene - it’s acidic, extremely salty and has little to no oxygen. This would have been a disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss before they bury it - they don’t want it to touch the water table.
I don’t really see what the problem is with letting scientists work.
Put it on a boat, navigate to an area with a current away from any land and then slowly release it
Take it outside the environment.
Or dump it in a volcano.
Shoot it into space.
What's out there?
More environment
Sewers go places, and it is nearly a million liters of extremely concentrated stinky. If you do this, you take a single location source of stinky and smear it over a much larger set of locations that will then ALL be extremely stinky, in a way that isn’t easily cleaned with water as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
Instead the stinky will be spread through time.
The solution to pollution is dilution, and the ocean would metabolize it away fairly quickly.
The solution to pollution is dilution was a philosophy prior to modern environmental protection laws, which were a reaction to the fact that we were absolutely destroying all kinds of ecosystems, even when we thought we were just diluting toxins down to nothing.
That just sounds like it's a knee jerk reaction from regulators. For decades their reaction to pollution was "yeah just dump it in the ocean", then we figured out it was bad. So now the pendulum swung the other way where we can't dump anything in the ocean, even if it's probably benign, because if it turns out to be not benign, it'll super bad on you. "You did what? Approved dumping pollutants in the ocean? Haven't you learned anything from us dumping radioactive super-mustard gas in the oceans decades ago?" Better to play it safe. After all, you're not picking up the tab.
This sludge was actually tested and analyzed- it’s not compatible with marine life and would in fact cause an ecological disaster. It’s why they’re mixing it with peat moss and also why they’re doing the work now - the factory itself has been battered by waves and the vats are in danger of being washed into the sea.
Is fish sauce a toxin?
It's the dosage that makes the poison. If you dumped it all in the ocean in a single spot then yes, it would probably kill the local ecosystem.
This stuff is barely pollution. Everything there is a natural part of the environment and biological processes. Literally the only issue here is the concentration of it. Dumping it in the ocean is an ideal course of action. Failing that it should be dumped out in the wilderness, not in bags, but just on the ground. It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.
The risk of dumping it in the ocean is that some asshole will see that happening and think "gosh, i should slip my barrels of hazardous toxic waste in with that dumping activity."
> ”It may have a short-term change in the local environment, but long term it's fertilizer.”
The fish would make for great fertilizer, but the salt would not. High salt concentrations will kill many plants and probably would stick around in the soil for a long time.
> as the fats and oils (also extremely stinky!) are of course not soluble.
Just use a lot of Dawn dish detergent
So, but… where do most fish go when they die?
I'd say dump it in the ocean, but I don't guess any boat will take it. Still, sounds like they're going to make the area around the landfill stink forever.
Isn't the ocean filled with salt and already knows how to biologically degrade fish? I sort of think that you could deposit this at sea somehow, just need to spread it out sufficiently.
I am sure I am overlooking something that would lead to an unintended ecological disaster.
"just need to spread it out sufficiently"
Use a crop duster type aircraft - what could go wrong?
Edit: Growing up in a fishing village I'm fully aware of the potential for WMD level stench that the fishing industry is capable of generating.
"The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds" - prior failure of intuitively appealing disposal option.
It’s organic solids. Just get it to the ocean. It’s not like it’s crude oil or volatile chemicals.
The solution to pollution is dilution.
It might not always be true, but it is here.
They should blow it up like they blew up that whale carcass. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6CLumsir34
A little treat for all the seagulls keytar solo
Why on earth are they not composting it, but instead putting in a landfill and locking it up? What a dumb idea.
Salt... it has lots and lots of salt in it. It's been sitting for 20+ years. It isn't going to "compost" any more than it already has.
Salty.
I don't have much familiarity with composting or fish sauce production, but wouldn't the high salt content make it a bad fertilizer?
I wanted to crack a joke that Swede's do like their stinky fermented fish, why not sell to them… But I figured why not see if other cultures might also like it, and was floored with how many there were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_fish
Can you die from a umami overdose?
Slightly Offtopic but the voice in the embedded youtube Video is so sounds so unnatural and creepy. I guess its AI generated and no one bothered to check the end result.
Sounds like a normal news broadcaster voice to me. I suppose the inflection is a bit over-the-top. The speaker says her name at the end - Leila Beaudoi.
> But this person who ended up becoming my wife, she's like, "I love fish sauce. I need more of it in my life."
Possibly the least expected ending to that article, and very heartwarming.
> I would 100 percent taste the forbidden fish sauce. I would do it for science. My wife would kill me if I'm not already dead.
Count me in.
Can you actually taste the goo and not get killed instantly? This sounds so crazy to me. lol
I am surprised that after this long the smell isn't gone. If one were to open all these tanks and spread it around on the ground in a layer, wouldn't it dissipate after a few months when the bacteria finish up?
Hmm, curious, could there be any use for this substance?
Fertilizer or something?
With all the salt, you'd turn your fields into the next Carthage.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/st-mary...
tl;dr
After 20 years of legal battles abandoned factory containing tanks of rotting fish in St Mary’s NL is getting cleaned up, paid for by provincial taxpayers.
After 20 years this hasn't completely rotted and scentless? I need to read the article.
If the goo is too salty, probably bacterias can grow enough to eat the cause of the bad smell, in particular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethylamine
From a random google search I got this report https://uvadoc.uva.es/bitstream/handle/10324/18877/TFG-I-468... (mostly in Spanish, with an English abstract). It looks serious and as far as I understand it makes sense. They recommend to add iodine to burn/oxidize the trimethylamine or use bacteria and bubbles or air/oxygen, or a mix or bacteria+algae+light that produces the oxygen inside the mix. It looks like without an active source of oxidizer, the mix will be stinky for years.