The latest Great Barrier Reef report shows some improvements to water quality over the past five years, but there’s still a lot to do on one particular problem: nitrogen.
More than thirty chemicals can go down the drain from products we use everyday.
Soap image from www.shutterstock.com
The simple act of shampooing and conditioning our hair, even with green products, results in more than 30 chemicals being washed into our sewers.
Lots of these: settling ponds precipitate iron oxide and other suspended materials from the Red and Bonita mines near the Gold King Mine.
Eric Vance/EPA
The coast alongside the Great Barrier Reef is home to ports, farms, holiday resorts, and more than a million people. It all puts pressure on the Reef, and it’s time for some firms plans to manage it.
Rainwater + hard urban surfaces = lots of runoff.
KOMUnews
Built-up urban environments transform the resource of rainwater into wasted runoff. Low Impact Development mimics nature to help get stormwater into the natural water system.
Antibiotics from both human and animal use end up in our waterways.
Alex/Flickr
We are only beginning to recognise the growing problem of antibiotics polluting our environment, and the serious repercussions it has for health.
One Nation’s Pauline Hanson says landholders’ constitutional water rights have been undermined by government changes – but is that true?
AAP Image/Tertius Pickard
The Australian Constitution says residents have the right to water from the rivers for irrigation and conservation purposes but governments have brought in laws that are restricting this – One Nation’s…
Rubbish strewn on beaches eventually ends up in one of the world’s giant ocean garbage patches.
Vberger/Wikimedia Commons
Most of us have littered at one time or another, and in the process we probably contributed to the enormous of amounts of plastic that enter the ocean every year, eventually ending up in one of the five…
Hormone-disrupting pollutants in the urban rivers of South Wales are having adverse effects on the health and development of wild birds such as dippers. Research we’ve undertaken in collaboration with…
I was in the middle of giving a talk on the marine debris problem at a notable Californian marine research institute, when I drank the last of my water bottle, threw it onto the hall floor from the podium…
Debris or not debris? Floating rubbish could hamper the search for MH370.
AAP Image/AP Pool, Kim Christian
Frustratingly, the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has turned up many floating objects, but none of them are from the plane. That’s largely because the latest search area is likely to…
A large proportion of India’s Yamuna River is effluent.
Ajay Tallam
Images of the typhoon-ravaged Philippines were terribly confronting, vividly conveying what an angry planet can dish up. But amid the destruction and death, an important point was largely missed: the world’s…
Much of Australia’s waste plastic is ending up in the ocean, and in fish.
John Schneider
Each square kilometre of Australian sea surface water is contaminated by around 4,000 pieces of tiny plastics, according to our study published today in journal PLOS ONE and data repository Figshare. These…
How do you get to know one of Earth’s most mysterious creatures? By looking at its earwax, according to a group of US researchers. Analysing the contents of blue whales’ ears, through a process similar…
Contaminated during the surrounding area’s history of mining, the River Hayle in Cornwall contains metals including copper, zinc, nickel and cadmium at levels that can kill brown trout, a particularly…