I’m knee-deep in the river Tame in Stalybridge, 15 miles east of Manchester. Beside me is Woz Andrew, a local fly-fishing guide. After climbing down a flight of stone steps from road level – hollowed by a century of boots and a remnant of this river’s industrial past – we have made our way slowly across, careful not to trap our ankles between the slippery boulders of the riverbed.
This river has been in the news a lot recently. Research by Manchester University’s department of geography revealed last month that it has the highest recorded concentration of microplastic waste not only in the UK, but in the entire world. With 517,000 particles per square metre, the Tame outscored the Incheon-Gyeonggi beaches in South Korea, Lake Chiusi in Italy and the Pearl river estuary in Hong Kong. The story went everywhere…
As any urban angler knows, pollution problems in city streams are nothing new, but there’s been a more-than-usually-horrible kind of can’t-look-away-from-a-car-crash fascination about the microplastics crisis on Manchester’s magical little River Tame – part of the mighty Mersey system that’s very dear to the hearts of many readers of Urbantrout.
Andrew Griffiths is one of these, and his follow-up investigation with local river restorationists Woz Andrew and Mike Duddy is a hugely valuable contribution to this still-unfolding global story. Click here to read it in full.
(Photo: Paul Cooper, the Telegraph)
[…] and I both knew how the lovely little River Tame had been the subject of intense media scrutiny as the most heavily microplastic-polluted … (at least among those tested so far). But we wanted to see this notorious stretch of the lower […]
[…] talk to us at the Wild Trout Trust. You might even want to put your shoulder to the wheel with Woz Andrew to fight for the River […]