The keywords seems to bring an anomalous amount of trolls in the comments. But maybe I am in the wrong, and there's a positive side into leaking plastic pellets in the ocean. Like turtles can now build their own platic industry and we'll make business with them soon or something.
The previous Secretary for DEFRA (Steve Reed) saw passage of the Water (Special Measures) Act which allows the government to bring criminal charges against water company executives for persistent lawbreaking.
So to say, "uk gov does nothing" is simply not true. The Labour government has started doing things. However, it's starting from a place where the previous Conservative government functionally removed all legal requirements. In particular, Liz Truss in the same role issued instruction that water companies no longer need to monitor sewage outflows and can just self-report.
The water companies are too busy lobbying for price rises/manufacturing consent in the media (of which these stories are a part of. The water companies will again claim they are a victim of low bills meaning they can't invest which is what causes these events...)
It's all so insidious
UK gov will permit bills to rise and nothing will fundamentally change when it comes to water in the UK except how much we pay
UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
It's really quite sad. I just wish people would work together to compromise but it seems all over the world there's this intense tribal effect. I guess evolution is to blame, we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now and as individuals modern life is far too complicated to have enough attention span to worry about every little thing, especially when governments and corporations often purposefully make it very difficult.
The amount of damage done in the 15 years of successively worse leaders requires not only time to fix but also incredible political bravery.
That in the backdrop of a press who are actively working against the best interests of the country (they serve their often foreign billionaire owners).
I would give us a chance if we had an extremely charismatic and rational progressive in charge but we don't. Starmer is an admirable person but he doesn't have the charisma or the vision needed to get us out of this mess. Thirty years ago he would have been a "One Britain" Tory.
The UK progressives - the Lib Dems and the Greens - have absolutely no chance electorally and the media is pushing the far-right Russian-funded Reform Party as a "solution" and I'm worried that enough low-information voters will fall for it.
"we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now"
Then maybe this is the problem? And the solution to build smaller societies again where the individual can have meaningful impact and not give up from the start to even try to move the buerocratic leviathan even a little bit in the right direction?
> UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
I really don't see any major western democracy being exempt from this.
Especially now that demographics have shifted and our populations get older it's hard to be elected unless you cater about what older folks care and don't care about. This makes long-term planning very difficult, as older folks couldn't care less with spend gargantuan money today so situation is improved decades from now.
But what needs to be fixed? Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:
- too many immigrants
- too many small boat arrivals
- the existence of billionaires
- too much tax
- too little tax
- UK membership in NATO
- UK being too weak in NATO
- too much smut online that kids can see
- too many attempts to control the web
Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.
The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).
This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.
> Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:
Honestly I think all of them need to be fixed. You might think they are contradicting, but I think that is only a way to make people be angry at each other, and not starting to demand really fixing things.
They're just engaged in managed decline but selling it as fundamentally improving the UK.
Trains - they decreased rail subsidies. They just pushed through National Rail Terms without any consultation which are anti-customer and pro-railway/pro-revenue. They want to increase the prices of the busiest routes. They also caved in immediately last year to the demands of the railway, yet performance in many parts of the network is just as terrible, staff are miserable. Delay Repay is getting harder to claim.
NHS - online appointments means less real treatment. It's another fob-off, along with the messaging systems the GPs already have. The latest battle people have is that GPs won't even refer you saying "no point, it'll get rejected". So people can't even get into a 2 yr waiting list. I wonder if this is how they have "improved" waiting times recently...?
Welfare - they've failed miserably to decrease welfare spending, instead carrying on buying votes.
Renters Reform Bill - they've introduced rent control through the backdoor. Every single intervention the Government does regarding housing achieves the opposite of its stated goal.
"Get building again" - what does this refer to...?
They are absolutely all over the place with budget ideas. They delayed it continue the barrage of trial balloons of testing ideas via the media.
They're the party of pensioners and welfare claimants. They are not interested in making the UK an economic power house (recent evidence of this: latest trial balloon is that pension contributions to be penalised, but interest-fee pension drawdown won't be touched [0])
They will sell this budget as the "harsh but necessary one-time action" but this will be just another lie as they continue to need to fund their handouts [1]
The UK has a clear path to overcome the failure of democracy when people vote along purely tribal lines; the King should retake power and rule benevolently for the good of the UK.
> no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
It seems like you and the rest of the people disagree on what the issues are.
I agree with smaller governable societies - Brexit was a good first step.
Not really. The UK having a forum in the EU or not really doesn't change the size of the British society and the complexities of its governance. It only made a million small and medium and large things more complicated, for no benefit at all.
It will go down in history as one of the biggest debacles ever. The fact that the people who pushed for it like Farage are still listened to is bone chilling. He was wrong about everything before, why does anyone still believe him?
Well, I guess you could say that the government is doing something if a single member of parliament chooses to do some volunteer work on her free time.
On the one hand, I'm happy that something is being done about this, because it's clearly a problem (completely basing this assumption on this one article).
But I'm very annoyed that this needs to be done in the first place. There's a lot of annoying regulation in place that shouldn't have to be there, but I feel like some profit-driven dicks will always find a way to mess things up for everyone
This is slowly happening for various types of plastic. We have discovered some PLA-eating bacteria in Asian forests (PLA is "biodegradable", but usually not meaningfully at room temperature), PET-eating bacteria in the ocean, and apparently some bacteria that can degrade polystyrene and polyethylene
But each of them only works in certain environments. Just like wood is very biodegradable, but if you keep it dry you can build wooden structures that last centuries
I have spent a huge amount of time walking and hiking shore lines, and there is a huge problem with plastic in the ocean.
The long term impacts to our food chain are going to be bad for us.
Plastic is a cheat, and has no place in a sustainable economy or ecosystem, though as it has become embeded as the prime material in consumerism, effecting a switch to biologicaly benign alternatives is essentialy impossible and the catestrophic outcomes of a worldwide layer of plastic, are inevitable.
The very hard part for people here to imagine is that it is China is the only one that can take complete controll and institute a switch to a bio inert alternative, the EU, will of course, build out another whole new regulatory beurocracy to puff and thump on cue.
They’re marketed that way, but there’s a giant asterisk. They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.
There is a new manufacturer called Terra that has apparently made “true” biodegradable Airsoft pellets
> They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature.
Thinking of PLA, for me at least, it's fine if it takes years instead of weeks, as long as it's fundamentally vulnerable to common bio-chemical attack and the monomers aren't toxic. That's not the stuff that's causing issues, I think.
I would accept "Can be depolymerized, and absorbed by the biosphere or water table or bonded to alkaline rock, when suspended in normal soil in a temperate climate in less than 100 years" as a victory here.
> They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.
Just like every plastic marketed as biodegradable. I feel like most of the "biodegradable"/"eco-friendly" products rushed to the markets in the wake of stricter regulations are worse for the environment since they either require significantly more resources (especially water) to produce, extremely complicated special setups to dispose of, or even both.
Would think it's trivial to make those from cellulose or something, but I guess it's always about money. Most "biodegradable" plastics are just turned into smaller pieces of plastic by UV.
The keywords seems to bring an anomalous amount of trolls in the comments. But maybe I am in the wrong, and there's a positive side into leaking plastic pellets in the ocean. Like turtles can now build their own platic industry and we'll make business with them soon or something.
https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/european-security-...
Relevant recent incident:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/08/environmenta...
Obvs, uk gov does nothing
The previous Secretary for DEFRA (Steve Reed) saw passage of the Water (Special Measures) Act which allows the government to bring criminal charges against water company executives for persistent lawbreaking.
So to say, "uk gov does nothing" is simply not true. The Labour government has started doing things. However, it's starting from a place where the previous Conservative government functionally removed all legal requirements. In particular, Liz Truss in the same role issued instruction that water companies no longer need to monitor sewage outflows and can just self-report.
EDIT: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-special-mea...
The water companies are too busy lobbying for price rises/manufacturing consent in the media (of which these stories are a part of. The water companies will again claim they are a victim of low bills meaning they can't invest which is what causes these events...)
It's all so insidious
UK gov will permit bills to rise and nothing will fundamentally change when it comes to water in the UK except how much we pay
UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
It's really quite sad. I just wish people would work together to compromise but it seems all over the world there's this intense tribal effect. I guess evolution is to blame, we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now and as individuals modern life is far too complicated to have enough attention span to worry about every little thing, especially when governments and corporations often purposefully make it very difficult.
The amount of damage done in the 15 years of successively worse leaders requires not only time to fix but also incredible political bravery.
That in the backdrop of a press who are actively working against the best interests of the country (they serve their often foreign billionaire owners).
I would give us a chance if we had an extremely charismatic and rational progressive in charge but we don't. Starmer is an admirable person but he doesn't have the charisma or the vision needed to get us out of this mess. Thirty years ago he would have been a "One Britain" Tory.
The UK progressives - the Lib Dems and the Greens - have absolutely no chance electorally and the media is pushing the far-right Russian-funded Reform Party as a "solution" and I'm worried that enough low-information voters will fall for it.
"we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now"
Then maybe this is the problem? And the solution to build smaller societies again where the individual can have meaningful impact and not give up from the start to even try to move the buerocratic leviathan even a little bit in the right direction?
> UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
I really don't see any major western democracy being exempt from this.
Especially now that demographics have shifted and our populations get older it's hard to be elected unless you cater about what older folks care and don't care about. This makes long-term planning very difficult, as older folks couldn't care less with spend gargantuan money today so situation is improved decades from now.
But what needs to be fixed? Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:
- too many immigrants
- too many small boat arrivals
- the existence of billionaires
- too much tax
- too little tax
- UK membership in NATO
- UK being too weak in NATO
- too much smut online that kids can see
- too many attempts to control the web
Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.
The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).
This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.
> Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:
Honestly I think all of them need to be fixed. You might think they are contradicting, but I think that is only a way to make people be angry at each other, and not starting to demand really fixing things.
They're just engaged in managed decline but selling it as fundamentally improving the UK.
Trains - they decreased rail subsidies. They just pushed through National Rail Terms without any consultation which are anti-customer and pro-railway/pro-revenue. They want to increase the prices of the busiest routes. They also caved in immediately last year to the demands of the railway, yet performance in many parts of the network is just as terrible, staff are miserable. Delay Repay is getting harder to claim.
NHS - online appointments means less real treatment. It's another fob-off, along with the messaging systems the GPs already have. The latest battle people have is that GPs won't even refer you saying "no point, it'll get rejected". So people can't even get into a 2 yr waiting list. I wonder if this is how they have "improved" waiting times recently...?
Welfare - they've failed miserably to decrease welfare spending, instead carrying on buying votes.
Renters Reform Bill - they've introduced rent control through the backdoor. Every single intervention the Government does regarding housing achieves the opposite of its stated goal.
"Get building again" - what does this refer to...?
They are absolutely all over the place with budget ideas. They delayed it continue the barrage of trial balloons of testing ideas via the media.
They're the party of pensioners and welfare claimants. They are not interested in making the UK an economic power house (recent evidence of this: latest trial balloon is that pension contributions to be penalised, but interest-fee pension drawdown won't be touched [0])
They will sell this budget as the "harsh but necessary one-time action" but this will be just another lie as they continue to need to fund their handouts [1]
[0] https://www.professionalpensions.com/news/4521564/rachel-ree...
[1] "30 times Reeves said she won't raise taxes" https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/thirty-times-rachel-reeves-sa...
The UK has a clear path to overcome the failure of democracy when people vote along purely tribal lines; the King should retake power and rule benevolently for the good of the UK.
> no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.
It seems like you and the rest of the people disagree on what the issues are.
I agree with smaller governable societies - Brexit was a good first step.
> Brexit was a good first step.
Not really. The UK having a forum in the EU or not really doesn't change the size of the British society and the complexities of its governance. It only made a million small and medium and large things more complicated, for no benefit at all.
It will go down in history as one of the biggest debacles ever. The fact that the people who pushed for it like Farage are still listened to is bone chilling. He was wrong about everything before, why does anyone still believe him?
From a wastewater treatment plant no less.
"This is the one thing we didn't want to happen"
"Dollimore, the Labour and Cooperative MP who joined the clean-up efforts,"
Well, I guess you could say that the government is doing something if a single member of parliament chooses to do some volunteer work on her free time.
On the one hand, I'm happy that something is being done about this, because it's clearly a problem (completely basing this assumption on this one article).
But I'm very annoyed that this needs to be done in the first place. There's a lot of annoying regulation in place that shouldn't have to be there, but I feel like some profit-driven dicks will always find a way to mess things up for everyone
One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic. Then it will take over the world.
This is slowly happening for various types of plastic. We have discovered some PLA-eating bacteria in Asian forests (PLA is "biodegradable", but usually not meaningfully at room temperature), PET-eating bacteria in the ocean, and apparently some bacteria that can degrade polystyrene and polyethylene
But each of them only works in certain environments. Just like wood is very biodegradable, but if you keep it dry you can build wooden structures that last centuries
It's about non-tax barriers on pellets import :)
I have spent a huge amount of time walking and hiking shore lines, and there is a huge problem with plastic in the ocean. The long term impacts to our food chain are going to be bad for us. Plastic is a cheat, and has no place in a sustainable economy or ecosystem, though as it has become embeded as the prime material in consumerism, effecting a switch to biologicaly benign alternatives is essentialy impossible and the catestrophic outcomes of a worldwide layer of plastic, are inevitable. The very hard part for people here to imagine is that it is China is the only one that can take complete controll and institute a switch to a bio inert alternative, the EU, will of course, build out another whole new regulatory beurocracy to puff and thump on cue.
Does loose LEGO have the same polluting effects? Does it even float?
Thought they’re talking about airsoft lol
Are those biodegradable?
They’re marketed that way, but there’s a giant asterisk. They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.
There is a new manufacturer called Terra that has apparently made “true” biodegradable Airsoft pellets
> They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature.
Thinking of PLA, for me at least, it's fine if it takes years instead of weeks, as long as it's fundamentally vulnerable to common bio-chemical attack and the monomers aren't toxic. That's not the stuff that's causing issues, I think.
I would accept "Can be depolymerized, and absorbed by the biosphere or water table or bonded to alkaline rock, when suspended in normal soil in a temperate climate in less than 100 years" as a victory here.
Lactic acid is in milk/yogurt/etc.
> They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.
Just like every plastic marketed as biodegradable. I feel like most of the "biodegradable"/"eco-friendly" products rushed to the markets in the wake of stricter regulations are worse for the environment since they either require significantly more resources (especially water) to produce, extremely complicated special setups to dispose of, or even both.
Kinda. I think that modern airsoft balls degrade in a couple of years. Which shouldn't be an issue in a dedicated venue.
Would think it's trivial to make those from cellulose or something, but I guess it's always about money. Most "biodegradable" plastics are just turned into smaller pieces of plastic by UV.
The ISO 14855-1 standard for biodegradability:
https://www.iso.org/standard/57902.html
"Bio" BBs are made out of PLA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polylactic_acid
And typically made out of corn or manioc starch, or even cane sugar.
Precise weight is controlled via barium sulfate.
There's a small coating of varnish to make it smooth as well as a bit more resistant to external conditions, otherwise they would degrade too quickly.