Who to report pollution to?

Elessar

Elessar

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There is repeated dumping in the river Itchen of plastic pellets. They are about the size of the pieces of paper that come out of a hole punch.
They are plastic, in multiple colours and about 2 mm thick.
There are thousands of them and they keep coming back, it's not a one off.
They block inlet strainers and stick to the flaps of the loo inlet pump, stopping it working.
More worryingly though they must look tasty to creatures of a certain size.
Who should I report this to?
 
Elessar said:
There is repeated dumping in the river Itchen of plastic pellets. They are about the size of the pieces of paper that come out of a hole punch.
They are plastic, in multiple colours and about 2 mm thick.
There are thousands of them and they keep coming back, it's not a one off.
They block inlet strainers and stick to the flaps of the loo inlet pump, stopping it working.
More worryingly though they must look tasty to creatures of a certain size.
Who should I report this to?
Click to expand...

HM & EA
 
Difficult to think why such quantities of small holes might be required in plastic. The fact that they’re different colours is curious, too. Might they be the aftermath of some kids’ paperchase-style game?

How widepread are they? Considering the power of the tide to disperse flotsam, a great quantity thereabouts might indicate they were dumped very locally.
 
lenseman said:
Where on the Itchen? Can you give a better location as it is a large bit of water?

Do you think it is being dumped from a vehicle or from the factories at waterside?
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Lakesailor, thanks for the info. I didnt think they dealt with tidal but they were very helpful. Ps on phone on boat. Googling on little screen not ideal when someone here would know.

Sailorman and medusa- thanks. Tried VTS which is the harbourmaster here. The 24hr number goes to answer machine. Tried EA before calling them on VHF and EA have dealt.

Dan there are hundreds of thousands of them and it has happened before. Dont think it was a game.

David, about 5 cables north of the Itchen bridge.

I hope it's careless flotsam rather than deliberate dumping. Either way it needs to be stopped.
 
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Worth netting a sample of a few. If there's a maufacturing site 'accidentally-on-purpose' getting rid of waste in this way, who knows what other corners they're happy to cut. Lots of factories round Northam, I see.

I wonder what the manufacturers in William Street do, with their thermoplastic offcuts?

Not to point a finger though. :rolleyes:

At school I used to carry an empty cinnamon pot containing half an hour's worth of hole-punch clippings...then open it in a windy spot and toss the lot at a suddenly-confused crowd of other boys. Very diverting. Like snow. The masters flipped their lids, too...:D
 
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dancrane said:
Worth netting a sample of a few. If there's a maufacturing site 'accidentally-on-purpose' getting rid of waste in this way, who knows what other corners they're happy to cut. Lots of factories round Northam, I see.

I wonder what these people do with offcuts of their "Thermoformed Plastic Packaging", in William Street:

http://www.phase3plastics.co.uk/

Not to point a finger though. :rolleyes:

At school I used to carry an empty cinnamon pot containing half an hour's worth of hole-punch clippings...then open it in a windy spot and toss the lot at a suddenly-confused crowd of other boys. Very diverting. Like snow. The masters flipped their lids, too...:D
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Yep I have samples. The EA said they will take them if they can't find any. You can see they are pressed out of a sheet of plastic, perfectly round, flat one side domed the other.
 
Elessar said:
Yep I have samples. The EA said they will take them if they can't find any. You can see they are pressed out of a sheet of plastic, perfectly round, flat one side domed the other.
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I guess they're like halved pellet-gun ammunition. They do sound like some sort of packing or filler. I s'pose it really can't be ruled out that they've dropped out of a shaken-up shipping container, down river, and came up on the tide.

Let's hope the Environment Agency doesn't sit around lunching while the evidence is dispersing.
 
dancrane said:
Have a look at this. Maybe you've encountered "Mermaids' Tears"...the base product manufacturers use, to melt into moulds for plastic products.
Click to expand...

Not heard that name; I know them as "nurdles". And as Elessar says, they're worse than many other kinds of plastic pollution because a lot of fish and birds see them as food.

Pete
 
Couple of weeks ago a friend ran the engine on my boat as he does every month or so while I'm away. Afterwards checked the inlet filter and found it full of these little pellets. He cleaned it out and threw them away but it was strange enough for him to mention to me. I'm just down river of Elessar but never seen them before. Could have been a problem for my engine but there are also a lot of mullett and other fish, swans, ducks etc that seem to eat anything.
I'll be interested to see the outcome of this.
 
While it's certainly a Very Bad Thing that these pesky pellets got loose, I can't help concluding that it can hardly have been deliberate. I mean, their domed shape seems to be much more suggestive of a thermoplastic-user's basic material, than of some waste off-cuts...

...and why would a variety of raw material, which must cost something to the user, be carelessly discarded? Particularly in so casual a manner as to cause so colourfully conspicuous a diaspora, as in this case?

It sounds like an unfortunate accidental loss to me. Not that that's necessarily excusable, particularly if it happened before.

Handy if we might see a photo of some of the coloured ones found in the Itchen?
 
If the colours are mixed the granules or pellets are of little use.
They are delivered in large plastic bags of a single colour to injection moulders and plastic extruders. I would guess that a number of the delivery bags burst and the colours got mixed hence they were dumped. You cannot produce red buckets (for example) from different coloured granules.

The culprit is probably a plastic injection moulder. Is there one in the surrounding area?

John
 
Retired in Crete said:
If the colours are mixed the granules or pellets are of little use.

The culprit is probably a plastic injection moulder. Is there one in the surrounding area?

John
Click to expand...

Several, from the Googlemaps overview.

...I see your point, John: if different colours of pellets are mixed, their value diminishes. Although, one sees some muddy-coloured new household hardware around. Perhaps the culprit is strictly a high-quality/prestige manufacturer.

Anyway, however useless the pellets might have become after mixing, surely the most obvious and easiest place to dump them would be in a dustbin? I can't think why anyone would wilfully use a river as a trashcan. :confused:
 
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