The sun was shining, the water was calm and I was sitting in a tourist boat. “Please don’t put your hands in the water” said the boatman “as it’s polluted with poisonous algae”. It was August and we were crossing Loch Leven to visit the castle where Mary Queen of Scots had been imprisoned.
But I might have heard exactly the same comment in Kingsbridge. Whilst much of the Harbour has been enjoying pretty good water quality this year, Kingsbridge has been experiencing a cloudy, pink-ish fungal bloom which, like Loch Leven’s, is most probably the result of phosphates.
We have a funny attitude to pollution: we generally see it as someone else’s fault and a matter for someone else to do something about it. But phosphate pollution is locally-produced, the result of local people flushing phosphates down their drains. When the phosphates get stuck in a body of water – the ends of creeks, the basin at Kingsbridge or the shallow expanses of Loch Leven – they give rise to poisonous fungal blooms which starve the water of oxygen. Lock Leven is host to 35,000 migrating water birds and Kingsbridge is within an SSSI, so this is a disaster.
Since the EU banned phosphates from clothes washing products, the main source of phosphates in waste water is likely to be dishwashing. Up until now perfectly serviceable phosphate-free dishwashing products – like Ecover and Tesco or Morrisons’ own brand phosphate-free – may not have given quite such a sparkly result as something containing phosphates.
That has changed. This summer Persil has introduced top-of-the-range phosphate-free dishwashing tablets – Persil PowerPro, with Hydro-Brite action, in both “Original” and Lemon. This may be in anticipation of the EU-wide ban coming into force by January 2017: but they work, so the future is here now and perhaps other brands will follow.
This gives fresh impetus to getting the Harbour free of phosphates as quickly as possible. I have been talking with Tesco in Kingsbridge to try to persuade them to promote phosphate-free dishwasher products and I have even agreed to speak to Kingsbridge WI about phosphates in November. The message is that you can easily switch to a dishwashing product that is as good as any other and won’t pollute the Harbour.
It has taken 15 years to clean Loch Leven and the job is not yet done. If we can start now keeping phosphates down, cleaning up Kingsbridge and the creeks should not take so long.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.