11 May 2021

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 […]

04 May 2021

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 […]

27 Apr 2021

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. […]

27 Apr 2021

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 […]

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 […]