From the 1960s marine pollution was one of the main drivers of the growing awareness of the need to protect the marine environment. Dumping waste at sea, high profile oil spills, sewage pollution and variety of toxic chemicals like methyl mercury and TBT were the drivers. The fashion now is ‘plastic pollution’ but the reality […]
Salmon & Trout Conservation ‘The Environment Agency (EA) turned 25 years old this April but our waters will not be celebrating. The freshwater aquatic environment is polluted, fragmented and we face a biodiversity crisis with many freshwater species in steep decline or even at risk of extinction, including iconic species such as the Atlantic salmon. […]
Untreated waste regularly flows into waters across England and Wales. Is it time to radically rethink sewage – or do away with sewers altogether asks the Guardian. Raw sewage in British waters is more than simply the horror of swimming amid human waste but also about the health and environmental threats of microplastics, endocrine disruptors, phosphorus, antibiotic-resistant […]
Information from established beach litter protocols is insufficient to implement targeted, preventive management measures. Complementary methodologies, named “Beach litter Deep Dives”, have been developed to get a better understanding of the sources of and behaviour behind littering. Deep dives involve identifying the type, country of provenance and age of household, food, oil and chemical containers. […]
One way to remove microplastics from water is to encourage them to clump together into compounds that can be filtered – or, in the context of the 20-year-old Irish inventor Fionn Ferreira’s work, magnetized – out. Ferreira created a homemade ferrofluid – a magnetic mixture of oil and powdered rust – and successfully used it […]
Link to the Inquiry here Written evidence from Water UK here Written evidence from Ofwat (rather weak and very non-committal) here Main article from Utility Week (scroll down to hear about use of artificial intelligence to map spills of untreated sewage) Eliminating the use of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) could cost £100 billion and nature-based […]
Plastics is the oil & gas industries Plan B … incinerating it simply adds to the emissions Plastic production is set to grow exponentially – undermining climate commitments Channel 4 is screening its Dispatches ‘The dirty truth about your rubbish’ programme the night before this newsletter comes out – Lucy Sielge – see below Client […]
Thames Water hopes to harness human ‘poo power’ to heat homes. Company says sewage plan would avoid 105,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over 30 years. From the Guardian On the downside, Thames Water fined £2.3m for raw sewage pollution incident. Judge says firm’s breach of environmental standards in 2016 amounted to ‘high negligence’. Read […]