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‘Forgotten, but not gone’:
‘Forgotten, but not gone’:
How governments have deliberately ignored the safety of contaminated sites in England – and why climate change makes this worse
‘The Metablog’,
No.18, Podcast:
This is an over thirty-year long story about my involvement with contaminated sites, and helping communities to get action to clean them up[1]. It’s innately connected to my home town, Banbury: An average small town, on the border between the Midlands and the South East; yet in the 1980s, this place taught me about the issues of waste disposal and land contamination. Not because it was exceptional, but because these issues affect almost every community across Britain.
Generations of my family have lived here, from at least the early Nineteenth Century. By word of mouth I learned about local industrial sites, what they did, and where their waste was buried.
The problem with today’s highly mobile society is that such local knowledge is increasingly rare; and before the late 1970s, records of waste or pollution releases were rarely kept. Despite warnings about the issues of contaminated land since the 1960s, governments have failed to act to create a comprehensive system to track down, assess, and where necessary decontaminate these sites.
Just like other major ecological issues – such as climate change – the obstacle to change are the economic vested interests that pressure decision-makers not to act. Valuing profit over the lives of ordinary people, they prevent effective action.
‘What’s past is prologue’
Climate change is important, but it has pushed other pressing ecological issues off the agenda. Like climate change, land contamination is a direct result of historic industrialisation. It is done. Now we have to manage those impacts. Unfortunately, climate change will make those impacts far worse.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Cleaning the Earth Nature’s Way – Phytoremediation.
Cleaning the Earth Nature’s Way – Phytoremediation.
Phytoremediation1,2 may be defined as the treatment of environmental problems by using plants in situ so to avoid the need to excavate the contaminant material for disposal elsewhere. It can be applied to the amelioration of contaminated soils, water, or air, using plants that can contain, degrade, or eliminate metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives, crude oil and its derivatives (refined fuels), and related contaminating materials. Phytoremediation has been used successfully for the restoration of abandoned metal-mine workings, and cleaning up sites where polychlorinated biphenyls have been dumped during manufacture, and for the mitigation of on-going coal mine discharges. Phytoremediation uses the natural ability of particular plants (“hyperaccumulators”, described below) to bioaccumulate, degrade, or otherwise reduce the environmental impact of contaminants in soils, water, or air. Those contaminants that have been successfully mitigated in phytoremediation projects worldwide are metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives, and crude oil and its derivatives, and the technology has become increasingly popular and has been employed at sites with soils contaminated with lead, uranium, and arsenic. A major disadvantage of phytoremediation is that it takes a relatively long time to achieve, because the process rests upon the ability of a plant to thrive in an environment that is not normally ideal for plants.
Advantages and limitations of phytoremediation.
- Advantages:
- In terms of cost, phytoremediation is lower than that of traditional processes both in situ and ex situ.
- The plants can be easily monitored.
- There is the possibility of the recovery and re-use of valuable metals (by companies specializing in “phyto-mining”).
- It is potentially the least harmful method because it uses naturally occurring organisms and preserves the environment in a more natural state.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fracking Firm IGas Refuses Further Investigation into Possible Site Contamination
Fracking Firm IGas Refuses Further Investigation into Possible Site Contamination
An environmental expert has been stopped by fracking firm IGas and landowners Peel Holdings from further investigating possible chemical contamination at the company’s Barton Moss drilling plant, the Manchester Magistrates Court heard recently.
Dr Aiden Foley of EGG Consultants presented a report to the court showing “dangerously high” levels of contamination near the perimeter fence of the test drilling site in Eccles, Salford.
However, even though Foley’s report claims that the pollution was unlikely to have come from the drilling process and was probably from the equipment involved, he remains unable to obtain further evidence for his investigation.
Regardless of the pollutant’s origins, it is important that access is granted, as the contamination could spread to the wider local environment, the judge heard on 6 March.
Difficult Dilemma
But in an interesting turn of fate, IGas’s ban on entering the site could also result in many anti-fracking activists having cases against them dropped.
Foley was commissioned by Robert Lizar Solicitors to carry out his investigation in a wider effort to help defend some 60 anti-fracking protesters they are representing.
If Foley continues to be blocked from the site, the lawyer representing the protesters charged with aggravated trespass, argues that their cases should be thrown out as they would not be getting a fair trial.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
