Environmental officials in Australia have yet to fully solve the mystery of black balls found littering popular beaches on the country’s east coast, but they are getting close. The New South Wales Environmental Protection Authority said on Wednesday that the formation of the mysterious globes has been determined – and it’s not good – but their origin remains unclear.
Golf-to-baseball-sized balls – the appearance of hundreds of which forced the closure of two beaches near Sydney last month – are missing, the agency said. tar balls as originally suspected. Or at least the non-lightweight tar balls that come from oil in the ocean.
They may be balls of debris.
According to the EPA’s analysis, “balls include fatty acids, petroleum hydrocarbons, and other organic and inorganic substances.” In plain English, that means a mixture of cooking oil and grease, cleaning and skin care products, hair, food waste, oil and gas and any other things that people tend to blow up, throw away or wash down drains and storm drains.
DAVID Gray/AFP/Getty
“Investigation revealed that the balls contained hundreds to thousands of different materials, including human hair and various fibers, indicating that they may have come from a mixed waste source,” the agency concluded.
But officials have yet to say where the mix-up is coming from.
The EPA said it looked at “many possible causes, such as ship spills or sewage discharges,” but due to the “complex composition of the balls and the time they spent in the water, tests could not confirm the exact origin.”
It says the regional water company, Sydney Water, reported “no operational or maintenance issues” at two nearby treatment plants when asked shortly after the balls appeared. A review of data by the state maritime meteorological agency did not reveal “anything solid” about where they might have washed up from.
While the EPA says it is awaiting the final results of its tests on the mysterious balls, the agency has separately pursued major efforts to clean up Sydney’s environment, which it has warned is quickly filling up with residents’ rubbish.
“Greater Sydney is on the brink of a landfill crisis, with landfill expected to run out by 2030 unless urgent action is taken,” the EPA said in a November 1 social media post, announcing the Regional Economic Conference of government, industry and industry. environmental officials to “discuss the challenges and opportunities facing NSW’s waste industry.”
Officials explained that the concept of a circular economy is to keep “products and materials in use as long as possible and reduce the need for new materials,” in order to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills – waste that, if it overwhelms an available landfill, can be washed into the water and taken to the sea.
Black balls first appeared on the beaches of Coogee and Gordon’s Bay near Sydney in mid-October, the local mayor said at the time, suggesting they could be tar balls, which often form in the sea after oil spills or leaks.
Authorities closed those beaches, along with Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach and several others in the area, while clean-up operations continued. All beaches were reopened a few days later, based on authorities saying few or no more balls washed up, and determining they were “not highly toxic to humans.”
Source link