Water Pollution Crisis
30 October 2019
Specialists believe almost 30 kilograms of microplastics has eroded from such a quantity of golf balls into the water.
Over a period of two years, two and a half tonnes of golf balls have been removed from the waters and beaches of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Marine Biologist Matthew Savoca was alerted by high-school students that the bay was full of golf balls that they discovered while snorkelling, the researcher at Stanford University wrote in online magazine Phys.org.
From May 2016 until the middle of 2018, almost 40 thousand golf balls were collected from the bay. Some bayside beaches yielded as many as ten thousand additional balls.
The material of the golf balls collected was also examined: the shell of modern golf balls is made of a castable polyurethane elastomer, with synthetic rubber inside. Manufacturers also add zinc dioxide, zinc acrylate and benzoyl peroxide for added flexibility and durability, and those materials are toxic to marine life.
Source: MTI – Hungarian News Agency
It was announced in 2010 that the Vietnamese government would like to build a water treatment plant in Central Vietnam. Hungary is famous for its water treatment technology so they decided on a Hungarian partner.
The Trappist monks of Koningshoeven Abbey have been brewing beer since 1881, and in recent years, they have also been baking bread and making chocolate, honey and cheese. The water to be treated is the wastewater from these brewing and manufacturing activities, together with the municipal wastewater from the Abbey and the visiting centre.
Over the last three decades, summer algal blooms in all large fresh-water lakes around the world have grown more severe – this is the conclusion of a global study, the longest ever of its kind, conducted by researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science and NASA.
The system created by a Dutch inventor called System 101, whose first trial run, conducted a year ago, had failed, has started collecting plastic waste on the Pacific again.
Many studies worldwide have shown that the active compounds of medications are released into the environment with wastewater and can easily be reintroduced into the human food chain from there. Filtering these residues out is an increasingly acute concern, but, thankfully, the world of science has already responded to the problem.
Researchers from Canada and Africa have found a massive amount of plastic bottles, originating form Asia, mainly from China, on Inaccessible Island, located in the South Atlantic Ocean. The bottles were probably discarded into the water and then washed up on the island from cargo ships passing the region.
In Hungary, too, the active ingredients of various medications are discharged continuously into the environment with wastewater, so they can now be detected in surface and underground waters as well as in soils.
After being introduced into human and animal organisms, some pharmaceutical compounds are secreted via urine unchanged, and then, through wastewater, those compounds may reach surface waters that serve as drinking water supplies, representing a risk for both aquatic ecosystems and for the purity of drinking water.
We’ve known for a long time that plastic food packaging, wearing car tyres and clothing made of synthetic fibres are all sources of microplastic pollution. However, a new study has identified a new source of pollution in our kitchens, or more precisely in our teacups.
Despite the continuous development of wastewater treatment technologies, the complete removal of synthetic pharmaceuticals using the three-step method currently in use is yet to be achieved. A number of researchers are working to improve the efficiency of the removal of these molecules from the present value of 10 to 30 percent.
