Discover Top Posts Tagged with #lax regulation

Two months ago, dozens of train cars filled with ten million pounds of human shit from waste disposal plants in New York and New Jersey came to rest outside the town of Parrish, Alabama.

Where is the EPA? Oh....wait. Scott Pruitt

#epa #scott pruitt #lax regulation

Delhi is just one of the Indian cities which made the report's list of the world's most polluted.

Delhi was the most polluted capital city in the world in 2023, a Swiss-based air-quality monitoring group has found. India, of which Delhi is the capital, was also ranked as the world's third-most polluted country after neighbours Bangladesh and Pakistan, IQAir said. The country's air has worsened since 2022, when it was the eighth most polluted country, it added. Air pollution is a serious problem in several Indian cities. -Experts say that rapid industrialisation coupled with weak enforcement of environmental laws have played a role in increasing pollution in the country. India has seen a lot of development in the past few decades, but poor industrial regulation means that factories do not follow pollution-control measures. Rapid construction has also contributed to rising levels of pollution. The report by IQAir said that India's average level of PM2.5 - fine particulate matter that can clog lungs and cause a host of diseases - was 54.4 micrograms per cubic metre. Globally, air that has 12 to 15 micrograms per cubic metre of PM2.5 is considered safe to breathe, while air with values above 35 micrograms per cubic metre is considered unhealthy.

#india #delhi #air pollution #lax regulation #rapid development

Opioids and other drugs are leaking into our oceans due to lax wastewater treatment by pharmaceutical companies.

Opioids that kill an average of 115 Americans everyday have now found their way into waterways thanks to pharmaceutical companies' misdeeds and addicts flushing their drugs down the toilet.

In May 2018, came the alarming news that Oxycodone, an opioid sold under brand name OxyContin and tagged as the drug most responsible for the opioid epidemic in the United States, was found in bay mussels in Washington State's Puget Sound.

Pharmaceuticals, including antidepressants and chemotherapy and diabetes drugs, have long been detected in marine life. The study that discovered the presence of oxycodone represents the first time opioids were detected in the Puget Sound area.

The mussels tested positive for trace amounts of oxycodone, confirming this opioid is so ubiquitous it can now be found in marine life that can't tolerate it. And oxycodone wasn't the only drug found in mussels by researchers at the Puget Sound Institute.

#us #pharmaceutical industry #lax regulation #drug pollution #drug disposal #water pollution #marine life #environment

New Post has been published on The Rakyat Post

New Post has been published on http://www.therakyatpost.com/features/2014/02/11/overfishing-pollution-leave-turkish-waters-bare/

Overfishing, pollution leave Turkish waters bare

Boats selling fish sandwiches are anchored by the Golden Horn in Istanbul on Feb 2, 2014. — Reuters pic[/caption]

“BALIK ekmek! Balik ekmek!” (Fish bread! Fish bread!) yell the vendors tucked under Istanbul’s Galata Bridge, dishing out fish sandwiches to hordes of hungry locals and tourists much as they have for decades.

But frozen mackerel from Norway or imports from Morocco are more likely to fill the onion, lettuce and pickle stuffed buns than a fresh catch from the Bosphorus or Marmara Sea.

Once rich fishing grounds in seas and waterways the size of New Zealand, Turkish fish production is in sharp decline, a victim of commercial ambitions and lax regulation.

Over fishing, illegal netting and pollution threaten the industry. Anchovy production, which accounts for around two-thirds of the annual catch, fell by 28% in 2012, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.

In a bid to replenish stocks, the government has banned fishing in the summer months when fish reproduce and says it is tightening supervision. But it appears too little, too late.

“Twenty years ago, if you put your arm in the water you can pull out fish. There were so many,” said Osman Korkmaz, a 53-year-old fisherman who has fished the Bosphorus Strait and Marmara Sea for 40 years.

Aylin Ulman, a researcher with the University of British Columbia’s “Sea Around Us Project”, conducted more than 150 interviews with Turkish fishermen from May through July to determine how Turkey’s fisheries have changed.

The number of commercial species in Turkey’s fishing areas had fallen to just five or six from more than 30 in the 1960s, she said, based on her survey and catch data Turkey provided to the United Nations from 1967 to 2010.

A combination of more people, too many boats with advanced technology, weak fishing laws with even weaker enforcement and unreliable data on fish stocks — fishermen under-reporting their catch to avoid taxation and fines — were to blame, she said.

High-tech

Istanbul alone has grown from one million people in 1950 to approximately 17 million today. And in lock step, the number of fishing boats has ballooned, fuelled by government subsidies from the 1970s and 80s aimed at growing the young, unsophisticated industry into a fishing fleet competitive with its Mediterranean neighbours.

Now 450 industrial fishing vessels — boats between 40 and 60 metres in length — and over 17,000 licensed small-scale fishing vessels ply Turkey’s waters. Commanding 90% of Turkey’s total catch, sonar technology has made the industrial fishers some of the most productive in the world.

“We have three generators, two winches,” said Temel Sengun, 27, a commercial bonito, anchovy, and bluefish fishermen from Sariyer at the Bosphorus’ northern mouth, showing off sonar and electronic equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Our sonar can detect schools of fish 10km in distance and there’s no depth limit.”

But such technology alone is not enough to guarantee a livelihood in waters with too many fishermen and too few fish.

“My family brought twin trawl boats, but now we think it was a bad idea. There are too many trawlers and purse seiners and no control,” Sengun said.

“My grandfather and father built that house on the hills with their fishing income … but I do not have the opportunity to build a house with my earnings, we work five times more and the fish is worth much less.”

A lack of quota system, scant punishment for illegal fishing and falling prices all encouraged fishermen to break the rules, he said.

A senior agriculture ministry official acknowledged that poaching posed a challenge but said 65,000 inspections were carried out last year and regulations had been tightened to try to relieve the pressure on stocks and help legal fishermen.

“One of the main objectives is increasing the presence of fish in Turkey’s seas,” the official said, adding studies were underway on introducing new species into its waters.

He estimated Turkey’s fish exports reached US$475 million (RM1.5 billion) in the first 11 months of last year, the latest data available, mainly to the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain, and up from US$413 million a year earlier.

Big Business

The issue has caught the attention of one of Europe’s largest food wholesalers. German retailer Metro AG is sponsoring research by the Turkish Marine Research Foundation (TUDAV) for a second year to check on one of its most valuable products — and one of Turkey’s most popular fish — the bonito.

A silver-bellied fish with a striped back, part of the tuna family, bonito are believed to migrate between the Black Sea and Marmara Sea. Their fate is being closely watched by Metro’s Turkish Cash and Carry business, the country’s largest fish wholesaler, which sells more than 6,000 tonnes of local fish a year.

Their main threats are overfishing, pollution, habitat loss due to shipping and climate change, according to TUDAV’s president Bayram Ozturk.

“If you visit the fishermen this morning, you can see 100 fish, but 200 jellyfish. They spend extra money and labor taking out the jellyfish. Twenty years ago, there were no jellyfish. It means the ecosystem has gone bad. Jellyfish have no predators,” he said.

The aim of the study, which will see 4,500 bonitos tagged and released over three years, is to determine where the fish are migrating and estimate stock size. Without such evidence, the government was unlikely to toughen regulations or enforcement and fish stocks would continue to fall, Ozturk said.

Metro is not alone. Campaigners Slow Food Istanbul and Greenpeace have joined forces to push for the protection of the iconic bluefish, an increasingly rare favourite of the city’s top seafood restaurants, lamented for its diminishing numbers.

In an effort to shrink the national fleet of more than 20,000 fishing vessels, the government has started a programme to buy back boats from fishermen, but it has yet to gain much traction. By November, only 359 boats had been bought back.

Standing on his boat mending his nets by hand, veteran fisherman Korkmaz sees the problem in more simple terms.

“People take too much out, they don’t listen,” he said.

#lax regulation #over-fishing #pollution #Turkey

"Too Big to Fail has become Too Big for Trial"

Elizabeth Warren exposes our nation's so-called regulators of the financial system for the Wall Street partners they actually are.

Contrast this with the way minor drug offenders are prosecuted.

#justice #bank #lax regulation #Elizabeth Warren