Stormwater Shepherds UK were really pleased to be featured in a BBC Article about pollution from road runoff in the UK today. Our Director of Operations, Jo Bradley, appeared in the article, having spent a couple of hours out with the journalist at a highway outfall in Lancashire. The outfall that we visited is located behind the M6 motorway services at Charnock Richard, near Chorley. Jo went out the day before her visit with the BBC to get a sample of the outfall when it was raining and to get some photos. The results of analysis of the sample showed that it contained Anthracene, Benzo(a)pyrene, Benzo(b)fluoranthene, Benzo(g,h,i)perylene, Chrysene and Fluoranthene in levels way above the Environmental Quality Standard. For Benzo(g,h,i)perylene, that level was 140 times greater than the Standard.
But why do we care about pollution with these chemicals? After all, we hadn’t even heard of them before.
These chemicals are Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons. They come from your tyres as they wear away on the road; they come from fuel leaks and spillages, and they come from unspent-fuel and exhaust emissions from the exhaust pipe of your car. They are recognised as priority hazardous substances in rivers because they are extremely harmful to aquatic life. They cause changes in the behaviour of the insects that live in the river, so that they can’t feed properly, or hide from predators. They cause deformities and mutations in the aquatic creatures so they can’t grow or live properly. They affect the reproductive success of some creatures, and stop eggs from hatching properly. They cause cancerous tumours to develop, and some of them can kill fish and insects outright.
Because they are so toxic and cause such terrible harm, the legislation says that the Environment Agency must monitor discharges that are known to contain them, and then use the regulatory framework to control the discharges. This is not happening in the UK and the Environment Agency in England do no monitoring of pollution from road runoff at all. Without any data, the scale of this problem is overlooked and there isn’t any pressure on the regulators to do anything about it.
If you have a motorway crossing over a river near you, or a busy arterial road crossing over a river close to your home, have a look when it is raining to see if you can see a dark grey discharge near the crossing. If you can, consider reporting that pollution to the Environment Agency, or write to your local MP asking them to investigate it. If we all start to ask questions about the failure to properly control this pollution, perhaps we can get some proper pollution control devices installed and our rivers will be cleaner.
