World Environment Day 2025: Taking Action Against Pollution — One Discharge Outlet at a Time
Each year on June 5th, World Environment Day serves as a global call to action for people, businesses, and governments to tackle pressing environmental issues. In 2025, the theme is “Putting an End to Plastic Pollution”, and comes just before an important intergovernmental negotiation on a global plastic pollution treaty. The campaign aligns with the broader #BeatPlasticPollution initiative, emphasising the urgent need to clean up aquatic ecosystems that are getting choked by plastic waste.
Why is plastic waste and plastic pollution such a problem?
Most plastics are readily recyclable; the literal name came from the Greek verb meaning “formable, deformable, and reformable” indicating the original expectation was to make products that could easily be recycled by melting and re-moulding. Celluloid, one of the first manmade plastic materials, was described in 1857 as being able to “be made plastic again and moulded into any required form” – we have a word for that now – recycled!
However, a variety of plastic materials now exist, each with different melting points and behaviours, which makes the recycling process differ by type and grade. This makes a unified recycling system challenging to set up, especially when mixed plastics are disposed of together; typical of curbside collection schemes.
And then they are single products which are made from different plastics fused or laminated together. Food and drink packaging is often made from laminated layers of different plastics – this brings multiple benefits to the product - such as food-grade hygiene, strength, UV protection, printability, etc, but hinders separation and recycling to the point where it can become unfeasible; “not currently recycled”.
According to a BBC article, it was around the 1950s that the word plastic became widely used as a noun rather than a verb. Plastic isn’t so plastic nowadays – which means that we have to reform the ways we deal with it.
Micro and Nano Plastics
Once plastic items are exposed to sunlight, weather and mechanical forces, they begin to break down into smaller molecules called microplastics (under 5mm to almost invisible to the human eye) and nanoplastics, which can only be seen through a microscope. Microplastics and nano-plastics are considerably difficult to detect and remove once they enter the environment. Unlike many other pollutants, these tiny pieces are difficult to monitor, let alone extract, particularly at scale and outside of a laboratory.
Whereas in-stream and in-pipe sensors can provide live data for monitoring pH values, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, conductivity, total suspended solids (TSS), etc there is as yet no widely deployable way to test for microplastic content outside of expensive and time-consuming laboratory processes.
Fine filtering and reverse osmosis can be used to remove microscopic contaminants from water, but these don’t work well where mixed solids and high flow volumes are involved, such as rivers and public water supplies.
As plastics (as we know them today) are relatively new to our lives, science is still studying the effects of micro-plastic pollution. There is enough evidence to make us concerned, as studies have shown fish larvae demonstrating a preference for nanoplastics over their natural nutritious food.
While plastic is in the spotlight, the message from the United Nations Environment Programme echoes across all forms of water pollution, including sedimentation, pH imbalance, and suspended solids in our rivers and groundwaters. The results of these pollutants are known to be devastating, disrupting ecosystems, and killing aquatic life, often with a rapid cause-and-effect cycle.
Thankfully, proven technology for early detection, and more importantly, prevention is readily available for long-standing pollutants. In 1992, a major pollution incident occurred after dewatering pumps were turned off at an abandoned mine in Cornwall, turning the river red with suspended metals and acidic mine water. A new mine dewatering system was installed with a treatment works to clean around 6,000,000 m³ of minewater a year, resulting in a vastly improved river quality with aquatic life quickly rebounding. While this is a large-scale project, EnviroHub is a modular treatment system that is used to prevent contaminated water from being discharged into the environment. It is popular for construction sites, factories, cement works, and other industries that have to discharge or abstract water.
In contrast to chemical and biological contamination, plastic pollution is more incremental, accumulative, and less understood. The mass production of plastics, as we know them today, is a relatively new development and scientists are still analysing the longer-term environmental effects. This, alongside the practical difficulties of removing micro and nano plastics from water, are likely factors in the silence on the subject in the Water Act 2014 and Environment Act 2021. However, there is legal scope for the Secretary of State to introduce mandatory monitoring of microplastics by Water Companies and others in the future, should it be deemed necessary.
What is industry doing to tackle plastic pollution and waste?
Prevention is always better than cure.
Nearly every one of us can take extra steps to improve our plastic recycling by segregating it better and working with plastic recycling providers to ensure it never gets released into the environment to begin with. One such recycling company is Jayplas, who have dedicated facilities for sorting and recycling plastic films, rigids, LDPE, HDPE, PP and PET.
Food and beverage companies are finding new ways to reduce the use of plastics in their packaging, while making it easier to separate different plastic grades and materials such as card stiffeners from the film.
Another development that overcomes the need for mixed plastic laminates is Enviraflex, a system that produces easily recyclable 100% PE food and beverage packaging that is uniquely printable and adhesive-free. This replaces multi-plastic films that are not easily recycled, as they have one food-safe film glued to a printable outer layer.
At Atlantic Pumps, we are dedicated to further developing our EnviroHub system. It is a proven system for live monitoring, automated control, and active removal of common pollutants and silt in wastewater and industrial effluents. As our understanding of microscopic plastics and water ‘polishing’ grows, we will reach our goal of launching the world’s first in-flow plastic pollution removal module.
