#water pollution

[thoughtportal]

The US Military in Hawaii

[scavengedluxury]

When politicians say they want to take Britain back the 1950s and they actually deliver.

[reasonsforhope]

"Discarded shells from restaurants and hotels are being used to restore damaged oyster ecosystems, promote biodiversity and lower pollution in the city’s bays...

Nestled in between the South China Sea and the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong has been seen historically as an oyster hotspot. “They have been supporting our livelihood since ancient times,” says Anniqa Law Chung-kiu, a project manager at the Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Hong Kong. “Both oysters and their shells are treasures to humans.”

Over the past five decades, however, the city’s sprawling urban development, water pollution, as well as the over-harvesting and frequent seafloor dredging by the lime industry – which uses the crushed shells to make construction material – have destroyed Hong Kong’s oyster habitats and made the waters less hospitable for biodiversity.

The more oyster colonies falter, the worse the problem gets: oysters are filter feeders and purify water by gobbling up impurities. Just one Hong Kong oyster can filter up to 200 litres of water a day, more than any other known oyster species. But decades of rapid industrialisation have largely halted their water-purifying services.

The depletion of Hong Kong’s natural oyster reefs also affects the ability of local farmers to sustainably cultivate their oysters in a healthy environment, denting the reputation of the city’s 700-year oyster farming tradition, designated by Unesco as an “intangible cultural heritage”.

Inhabitants of the coast feel abandoned, says Ken Cheng Wai-kwan, the community leader of Ha Pak Nai on Hong Kong’s Deep Bay, facing the commercial city of Shenzhen in China. “This place is forgotten,” Cheng says. “Oysters have been rooted here for over 400 years. I ask the question: do we want to lose it, or not?”

A group of activists and scientists are taking up the challenge by collecting discarded oyster shells and recycling them to rebuild some of the reefs that have been destroyed and forgotten in the hope the oysters may make a comeback. They’ve selected locations around the island where data they’ve collected suggests ecosystems still have the potential to be rebooted, and there are still enough oyster larvae to recolonise and repopulate reefs. Ideally, this will have a positive effect on local biodiversity as a whole, and farming communities.

Farmers from Ha Pak Nai were among the first to hand over their discarded shells to the TNC team for recycling. Law’s team works with eight oyster farmers from Deep Bay to recycle up to 10 tonnes of shells every year [over 22,000 pounds]. They collect an average of 870kg every week [over 1,900 pounds] from 12 hotels, supermarkets, clubhouses and seafood restaurants in the city, including some of its most fashionable establishments. About 80 tonnes of shells [over 176,000 pounds] have been recycled since the project began in 2020.

Restaurants will soon be further incentivised to recycle the shells when Hong Kong introduces a new fee for waste removal – something that is routine in many countries, but only became law in Hong Kong in July and remains controversial...

Preliminary data shows some of the restored reefs have started to increase the levels of biodiversity, but more research is needed to determine to what extent they are contributing to the filtering of the water, says Law.

Scientists from the City University of Hong Kong are also looking to use oyster shells to increase biodiversity on the city’s concrete seawalls. They hope to provide tiny, wet shelter spots around the seawall in which organisms can find refuge during low tide.

“It’s a form of soft engineering, like a nature-based solution,” says Charlene Lai, a research assistant on the team."

-via The Guardian, December 22, 2023

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The company behind the Coastal GasLink gas pipeline project in northern B.C. has received a whopping $346,000-fine from the B.C. government for environmental deficiencies and providing false and misleading information.

According to the Ministry of Environment, Coastal GasLink Pipeline Ltd. failed to meet conditions of its environmental assessment certificate. In a Thursday statement, it said compliance officers found inadequate erosion and sediment control during several inspections along the pipeline route in April and May last year.

The company also gave false and misleading information last October as well in relation to maintenance inspection records, the province found. That cost Coastal GasLink $6,000, while the erosion control matter cost $340,000.

“As a result of continued concerns, the Environmental Assessment Office has prioritized the CGL project for compliance monitoring, with nearly 100 inspections by air and ground since the project started in 2019,” B.C.’s statement reads.

“These inspections have led to the EAO issuing 59 warnings, 30 orders – including 13 stop-work orders – and more than $800,000 in fines.” [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

The water flowing from taps in Wilmington, North Carolina, looked clean, tasted normal, and gave no indication that it carried an invisible threat. For decades the Cape Fear River had provided drinking water to hundreds of thousands of residents in the region. But in 2017 tests revealed what many had feared: high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemicals linked to cancer, immune dysfunction, and reproductive issues, coursing through their water supply.

The contamination had been traced to Chemours, a spinoff of DuPont, which had been releasing PFAS chemicals from its Fayetteville Works plant for years.

The discovery sent shockwaves through the community, triggering lawsuits, emergency water-treatment plans, and a reckoning over how corporations and government regulators had failed to protect public health. But even as residents fought to hold polluters accountable, the company responsible for much of the contamination was tightening its grip on the agencies meant to regulate it.

A former DuPont and American Chemistry Council lobbyist, Nancy Beck, now holds a key position at the Environmental Protection Agency, shaping chemical safety policies that will determine how — or if — PFAS pollution is addressed. In the first days of the second Trump administration, the agency withdrew a proposed rule that would have imposed limits on PFAS discharges, a move that watchdog groups say amounts to giving polluters free rein to continue contaminating water supplies.

The crisis in Cape Fear and Bentham reveals the creeping, silent danger of PFAS, which has infiltrated groundwater, rivers, and drinking-water supplies across the world.

And yet, as the Trump administration accelerates its environmental rollbacks, the ability to regulate and mitigate this growing threat in the United States is being systematically dismantled.

“North Carolina is one area that I’m most familiar with where there’s an entire river system that serves hundreds of thousands of people [and] is very badly contaminated with PFAS,” Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Revelator. “A lot of people are drinking that water every day.”

[resist-the-oligarchs]

The Tories caused this pollution crisis by privatising our water utilities.

Shareholders make £millions while we have no clean rivers, lakes and beaches.

[tomorrowusa]

It's foolish to think that Putin isn't orgasmic over what the Trump administration has been doing to screw America.

Trump and his co-president Elon Musk have now targeted the EPA for revenge and retribution.

Trump, Musk move to oust EPA staff in the Great Lakes region, including dozens responsible for protecting drinking water for 30 million in U.S. and Canada

Trump purged dozens of career officials in the Chicago office during his first term. His latest attempt to cull the workforce is led by billionaire Elon Musk, whose companies Tesla and SpaceX have been fined by the EPA for multiple violations of environmental laws. “Elon Musk wants to turn EPA into every polluter’s ally,” U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Thursday at a rally in front of the agency’s headquarters. “He wants to take environmental cops off the beat.” History suggests Musk and scores of other polluters are going to catch a break during the next four years. Water pollution cases filed by the EPA in the Great Lakes region declined during each of the first three years Trump was president, according to an analysis of agency records by the nonprofit Environmental Law and Policy Center. Meanwhile, the number of chronic violators of the Clean Water Act in the heavily industrialized states skyrocketed under Trump, who as a candidate in 2016 vowed to abolish the EPA. [ ... ] More than 8 million people in Illinois get their drinking water from a utility where at least one PFAS has been detected, a 2022 Chicago Tribune investigation found. The discovery of high levels of ethylene oxide pollution led to the closure of a sterilization plant in southwest suburban Willowbrook and prompted a state law requiring another facility in north suburban Waukegan to dramatically reduce emissions.

Trump feels it's his right to make life easy for polluters who have given him and other far right Republicans huge campaign contributions.

States like Illinois can step up enforcement. But they don't have the reach and resources of the federal government. Be prepared to get sicker over the next few years.

[overwhelmedfernfrond]

writing prompt: 48 hours until the end

(optional bonus challenges (pick any, all, or none at all!): include a character who has outlived someone important, and/or include fish symbolism, and/or something that is bigger than it should be)

Hey! I might go a bit unconventional w this, hope you don’t mind :)

-

The Fish were prepared for Death.

The Crawfish had warned the Graylings, who’d warned the Catfish, who’d warned the young Carp— but they could do nothing but wait.

The Humans had first made contact a decade ago, disturbing the River-Fish with their sand-dredging and their eutrophication and their unslippery whelps of children that waded into the river and scattered the Fish.

At first, the Humans had seemed like collaborators; bringing the first Carp, unnaturally fattening up the massive Sturgeons of the River with tins of minnows released.

Now, too late, the Fish realized the truth; it was Time.

The Gulls had reported massive Human machines, gathering mounds of shore, preparing to suffocate the Fish by burying them in dirt, all within their own River. Then, the Gulls had snapped up some herring that had strayed too far from their School, effectively rendering them harbingers of Doom, and they had flown.

The Mackerel scattered. Candlefish fled. Eels slinked to the deepest, muddiest depths of the River.

But most of the Fish, dozens of species ranging from the greatest Paddlefish to tiny Pygmy Corydoras, trembled in preparation, ready to be killed with the River. Not because they would not prefer Life, but because Death was at least expected, and their tiny Fish brains could not fathom the purely inconceivable notion of Life aside from the River.

And so they all died, suffocated beneath tonnes of dirt, which they had swum above for so long.

Forgotten, their bones were the only remnants of their taken lives.

-

Hope you enjoyed :) and thanks for the ask!!

I challenged myself to use no italics in this short story

Thoughts? 🐟:D

[animalsoutloud]

[workersolidarity]

☢️ Today, on August 24th, 2023, Japan will be releasing over 1 Million Metric Tons of Radioactive waste water from the destroyed Fukushima Nuclear Reactor into the Pacific Ocean ☢️

[thoughtportal]

Tires and Microplastics and fossil fuel waste

[paeinovis]

Hi, our observatory is currently under threat of a sand mine being built 500 ft away from it. I'm going to a city council meeting tomorrow and it'd be very cool to have a petition with Numbers associated to point at saying "don't fucking do this", so if you wouldn't mind signing/sharing, I'd appreciate it!

There are a couple of glaring problems with the proposal that I'll list under the read more if you're interested:

Telescopes have mirrors. Sand + mirrors = Bad, since it will cover them and possibly cause scratches (on the mirrors that we've just replaced which cost millions of dollars and years to do)

Sand in the air will scatter light, which makes images blurry when taken by the telescope

It might also get in gears and such, ruining hardware

This observatory has been around for 60 years and is used for citizen/student outreach, including K-12

The mine would be threatening gopher tortoise environment when they are already endangered

The water coalition is also against this due to the possibility of pollution of the Suwannee river

Air quality will drop, making it dangerous for telescope faculty (including myself because I have asthma) and residents

The sand mine is trying to get an exception to be built in a residential zone. You know, where people live?

Noise pollution will bother residents and vibrations could affect instrumentation

Light pollution in one of the few remaining dark skies of Florida will negatively affect observing and residents

[reasonsforhope]

"Despite a huge amount of political opposition from the chemical industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its first regulations aimed at limiting quantities of PFAs, or ‘forever chemicals,’ in American drinking water.

For decades, Polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAs have been used for coatings that resist fire, oil, stains, and water and are now found in a wide variety of products like waterproof clothing, stain-resistant furniture, food packaging, adhesives, firefighting spray foams, and non-stick cooking surfaces.

There are thousands of PFAS compounds with varying effects and toxicity levels, and the new EPA regulations will require water utilities to test for 6 different classes of them.

The new standards will reduce PFAS exposure—and thereby decrease the health risk—for 100 million people in the U.S.

A fund worth $1 billion for treatment and testing will be made available to water utilities nationwide—part of a $9 billion investment made possible by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to assist communities impacted by PFAS contamination.

“Drinking water contaminated with PFAS has plagued communities across this country for too long,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan in a statement Wednesday.

Under Regan’s leadership, the EPA began in 2021 to establish a roadmap for dealing with widespread PFAS contamination, and so far they’ve gathered much data, including monitoring drinking water, and begun requiring more reports from businesses about use of the unregulated substances.

The agency reported that current peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that exposure to certain levels of PFAS may lead to a myriad of health issues that are difficult to specify because of the variety of compounds coming from different places.

Regardless, the 66,000 water utility operators will have five years to test for the PFAS pollution and install necessary technology to treat the contamination, which the EPA estimates that 6%–10% of facilities will need. [Note: Deeply curious where they got a number that low, but anyway.]

Records show that some of the manufacturers knew these chemicals posed health hazards. A few major lawsuits in recent years have been settled that sought to hold chemical companies, like 3M, accountable for the environment damage.""

-via Good News Network, April 13, 2024

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The cost of removing a contaminant toxic to fish after decades of coal mining in British Columbia's Elk Valley is more than three times what the company has set aside for the work, says an independent consultant's report.

Gordon Johnson of Burgess Environmental says in the report that it will cost $6.4 billion to reverse rising selenium concentrations in Canadian and U.S. waters and operate those treatment systems for 60 years. That amount does not include costs for land reclamation.

Teck Resources said it will set aside a total of $1.9 billion for the cleanup. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada