Action needed to fix Somerset Levels and Moors’ phosphate level Natural England has downgraded the environmental condition of the Somerset Levels and Moors Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) due to water quality issues. Natural England and Environment Agency ‘Published 2 June 2021 – Phosphates are causing algal blooms in the Somerset Levels, like Tealham SSSI This […]
Anyone working on plastic pollution should start the day looking at these graphs of the projected growth in plastic production … here is the link to those graphs . We need measures that really reduce the scale of pointless plastic items. Greenpeace Video ‘The UK government wants to be seen as a leader in tackling […]
New Environment Bill provisions to tackle storm overflows – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) The Environment Bill will include new legal duties to tackle sewage discharges into rivers and help protect our waterways. Three new measures on storm overflows, announced last month by Defra, will be added by government amendment to the Environment Bill later this year. The Bill […]
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 […]