Did you know that each year, in the UK alone, we flush more than 22,000 tonnes of glue down our loos? Each time we flush toilet paper, we are potentially adding thousands of microplastics to our waters. Joining our host, Holly, is Dave Hamlet, Managing Director of Tanki, the glue-free toilet roll , to discuss the makings of toilet roll, the impact of our daily flushes on our waters and how a simple switch by us all, on land and at sea, can help lessen our impact.
It’s easy to think that all fish belong in the sea. But not all fish belong in all parts of the sea….Threatening local ecosystems, disrupting and at times eradicating other species entirely and even disrupting economies, our boats, large and small, can transport different creatures around our waters, and at times, across whole oceans.In this episode, we’ll be looking how species spread across our planet, just what this costs us and how the warming of our oceans is likely to make this even more pronounced..Joining our host, Holly, is marine spatial ecologist and all-round conservation superstar, Dr Alexandra Davies. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and a true expert on this very matter.
'Microplastics' - we've all heard of them and over the last two years alone, have become aware of just how pervasive these tiny pieces of plastic are within our environment, and our human bodies… In this episode, we speak with Dr. Christopher Pham and Dr. Roman Lehner, two eminent scientists who study the very topic of microplastics, to help us better understand the plastic soup upon which we sail, soup we can’t see so well from above the waterline. Focusing on our recent sailing expedition mid-Atlantic, around the plastic-rich waters of the Azores, we look at how microplastics are created, just how far they have got, and Dr. Lehner’s pioneering research on how they may be interacting with our very cell structures…
For thousands of years, we've been building boats. We began, and indeed continued for centuries, with wood, but since the mass-commercialisation of plastic since the late 1940's, we've been making boats from glass or fibre-reinforced plastics.Building new boats this way is carbon-intensive plus there is little, if any, formal process in the world for these huge plastic hulls when they come to the end of their lives. In this episode, we speak with Friedrich Deimann and his Co-Managing Director, Jan Paul Schirmer, of Greenboats - a German-based team with big ambitions, building boats in a cleaner and more efficient way.
Our emission of greenhouse gases, namely significant amounts of Co2 over several hundred years, is altering our climate. We often turn to trees and replanting vegetation, Green Carbon, as the opportunity to recapture carbon from our atmosphere, but coastal ecosystems are exceptionally apt at carbon capture and storage, too - almost more effective than the Green Carbon counterpart. In this episode we speak with Lucy McMahon, Marine and Coastal Scientist and ocean optimist, about Blue Carbon; what it means, how effective our Blue ecosystems are at moderating our planetary climate, and why we need to protect them.