Case Study – Toxic road runoff polluting England’s rivers (Topic 4&5)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/05/potentially-toxic-road-runoff-outfalls-polluting-england-rivers

This works with both soil and water 9 markers. You can talk about nitrate levels and pollutants in soil and then speak about runoff into water then causing eutrophication and harm to wildlife.

Important Quotes from the article:

  • “It’s an incredibly complicated cocktail of 300 or so chemicals,” said Joe Pecorelli, of the Zoological Society of London. “In the summer you get an accumulation of chemicals on the road surfaces … and when the rain comes, all that material – tyre wear, all the metals from brake pads – gets flushed directly into rivers … which causes the reduction of oxygen. In urban areas this is a perennial problem. Every summer we experience fish kills in those rivers where there are fish remaining.”
  • Stephen Elderkin, the director of environmental sustainability at National Highways, said: “We are committed to addressing all of our high-risk water outfalls by 2030 and our water quality plan 2030 sets out a high-level programme of work to achieve this … National Highways has also invested in a programme of research to understand the risk of pollution from microplastics in road runoff.”

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