27 Apr 2021

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. […]

13 Apr 2021

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 […]

17 Mar 2021

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 […]

09 Mar 2021

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 […]

03 Mar 2021

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 […]

16 Feb 2021

Revealed: no penalties issued under ‘useless’ English farm pollution laws Exclusive: Environment Agency has failed to prosecute or fine any of 243 documented violations since 2018 Campaigners have called legislation designed to reduce water pollution caused by agriculture in England “useless” as data reveals there have been no prosecutions or fines issued despite regular documented […]

09 Feb 2021

The Guardian ‘A local authority has admitted it should not have granted planning permission for a vast broiler unit in the “poultry capital of Wales” after campaigners crowdfunded a judicial review. Powys county council opposed the legal challenge, brought by activists from Sustainable Food Knighton (SFK). Knighton is a small market town near the border with England.  […]