Sydney Water revealed as nation's biggest dumper of mercury
Thats disgusting, it really makes you wonder what gets put down our drains!
I feel happier being apart from the normal society where the shit I put down my drains goes to a biocycle and is filtered onto my land as clean usable water for our Banana trees or similar.
I hated living in Sydney too many people for such a small place and the infrastructure is back in time.
Anyways I suppose you have to be careful with what fosh 'n' chip shop you buy from.
Mercury is a nasty element ingested thats for sure.
I said to my company a while back, that I don't want to help out with tank inspections again offshore, mercury, benzenes and all the other nasties are not good for us at all.
All the companies have a set time level exposure with parts per million (ppm), haha they have to be kidding themselves. I have gone back to some places and have seen the same blokes doing the same job 4-5 years later and they look like they have aged 10 fold....?
Heavy metals.......................Ouch?
Is that the same Sydney Water that was paying Arthur Sinodinos, the disgraced former federal Assistant Treasurer in Abbott's government, $200,000 a year for less than a week's work (including travel time)?
Good post Welly, agree 100%.
Pumping mercury into the ocean isn't exactly smart but it is probably not a serious risk to our health and the amounts involved are not necessarily significant in the overall environmental mercury budget. To accumulate in fish, seafood or humans metallic mercury must be metabolised into methyl mercury. This is done by a range of bacteria that are not necessarily present in all marine environments. Other bacteria also perform the opposite reaction. The risk to health therefore depends on how much methyl mercury is accumulating in the food chain. There is regular testing for this at the fish markets. I haven't looked into the results for a few years but they are much more important both environmentally and for human health than a raw statistic for how much is actually being discharged. I will have a hunt around for the latest test results from Sydney.
Cheers BB;)
Again great research.Thanks.
I can't find the raw data, it should be available so I might make a nuisance of myself with the Dept Of Health on Tuesday until they provide a link.
I contacted NSW Food Authority today and they have told me they will pass my request for the data on to their Science section. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. I'll give them a couple of days.
Good work BB;)
Cheers
I am still on this. I have been told that the NSW Food Authority should respond within 10 working days so next Tuesday is the day. I will call again if I do not hear from them. I am a suspicious bastard and dislike being bureaucratically stuffed around so I will get whatever data they have......though it may take a while if they are trying to prevent it becoming public.
Without looking into it....
The main factor is the approved allowable mercury discharge limit mg/L as per their operating licence
If the 'allowable' limit is only a minuscule value slightly above a non-detect value, times that by 500 gazillion million litres or whatever they discharge and 40kg is nothing
Not Sydney Waters problem, its the regulatory agence who approves their discharge license, DEC, marine branch or similar
Dilution is not the solution though
cant they filter it out and re use it- surely there is a molecule that it will attract to and they can re capture it and re use it?
The real issue is how much is ending up in the food chain. That's why I am still pursuing the fish market data. I am still getting the PR run around......the report is still "......in review." Which I suspect means it has more incidents of the limits being exceeded than they would like to publicly admit. I will give them a bit longer before I go the full FOI route.
davetherave wrote:cant they filter it out and re use it- surely there is a molecule that it will attract to and they can re capture it and re use it?
There are methods such as flotation, however these just add more chemical regents to the mix, e.g. xanthates, sulphides, frothers and more.
Article in the SMH yesterday:
"Sydney Water has been revealed as the nation's biggest dumper of mercury into Australian waters, pumping 40 kilograms of the toxic metal out of its deep ocean outfall pipes at Manly and Malabar in the past financial year, according to figures released by the federal government last week."