Facing a summer of algae

Our lakes and lochs may be choked by a surge of algae but it could also prove beneficial.

By Clive Aslet

7:30AM BST 06 Aug 2011

How children grow up. Not so long ago, my eldest son William would have associated slime with Fungus the Bogeyman. Now, having just sat his GCSEs, he says “eutrophication”. This is the process by which water becomes choked by algae, and it has been happening a lot recently.


A blue-green scum has overmantled the Norfolk Broads. Oxygen is being pumped into the Serpentine, in an effort to keep the lake in London’s Hyde Park fit for swimmers. In Scotland, Stirling Council has put up hazard notices around Loch Coulter. Some kinds of algae can be pretty nasty.


Fish are obviously the most vulnerable to it, but wild mammals and dogs have also been known to die. Blue-green algae can cause humans to suffer skin rashes, fever, dizziness, diarrhoea and vomiting. According to research from Plymouth University, even common algae appear to reduce fertility in fish – on account of the oestrogen they release – and could have the same effect on people.


At the beginning of our history, we emerged from the primordial slime, and now it looks as though it is coming back to get us.


It’s not only Britain that is affected. From Lake Eire in North America to Disko Bay in Greenland, they are fighting the green peril. Nor is it just an issue for fresh water.

Remember the Beijing Olympics? The organisers nearly had to call off the sailing events because of the world’s biggest algae bloom, off the coast of Qingdao, which was visible from space. A seaweed farm that had enriched the waters and led to the growth of algae was to blame.

So be afraid. We are now in the prime season for algae, and have probably seen nothing yet. Last year, the Environmental Agency received 225 reports of algal blooms killing fish on English and Welsh rivers, lakes and reservoirs. So far this year, the tally has been 83. It’s early days. The summer months are the worst.

Algae love sunny weather; they reproduce like crazy when it is accompanied by pollution. The latter can take many forms. Around Llanberis, Environmental Agency Wales is asking local people to reduce their use of washing machines and dishwashers: the phosphates that they discharge send the algae wild.

“We know that around 25 per cent of nutrients in sewage effluent come from modern detergents, which we use in washing machines and dishwashers,” says Meic Davies of Environment Agency Wales.

Farmers are doing better than they were. There are now stringent regulations to control the use of fertilisers in some areas, to stop nitrates entering drinking water; spreaders are only allowed out in wet seasons, when the fertiliser will be absorbed by the land.

These restrictions have coincided with a spike in the cost of fertiliser, which has in any case discouraged overuse. One of the many woes of dairy farmers is the demand that they should build expensive slurry tanks to store waste and reduce pollution.

But despite these measures, agriculture isn’t off the hook. Sudden torrential downpours, of the kind we seem to be experiencing more often these days, wash valuable soil off fields and into water courses: algae thrive on the nutrients that were intended to benefit the crops.

But in a world of hunger and rising food prices, it is difficult to balance the demand for increased productivity with the need to reduce fertiliser use – without, that is, licensing GM crops.

And so, instead of cruising through gin-clear waters, holidaymakers, who have booked into the Norfolk Broads, are forced to contemplate a repellent, scummy scene. It must seem as though a green mutant has invaded from outer space. To the people suffering this horror, it may be little comfort to reflect that the circumstances that cause algal blooms, and other infestations, tend to be localised.

Last year, the beach that I like outside Ramsgate in Kent was ankle deep in rotting seaweed; the council employed a man to scoop it up in a digger and dump it out to sea (from which it would wash back again, if the tides were right.) This year, the problem has either gone away or moved elsewhere. Algae, too, move in mysterious ways. Last August, fish were dying in two lakes in south-east London; those same lakes are now fine.

Lakes, particularly when the streams feeding them are sluggish, do have a tendency to mantel over – ask the numerous country-house owners who struggle to keep the sheet of water in their parks as Capability Brown intended.

But in general, Britain’s waterways are in far better condition than they have been since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The other day, I took a boat trip from Westminster to Kew: throughout its length, the Thames is now haunted by cormorants and herons, which would not be there if it weren’t full of fish.

Besides, while few of us would feel instinctively drawn to slime, it may be time to view it in a more friendly light. One of the most basic building blocks of life, sometimes single-celled, could possibly come to the rescue of the most sophisticated species on earth.

Scientists are hoping that algae, which absorb carbon dioxide, might be useful in trapping the gas from the atmosphere and burying it on the seabed, where it cannot contribute to global warming. Several years ago, there was an expedition to pour iron into the Southern Ocean, a vast area that encircles Antarctica, to stimulate a giant bloom of phytoplankton. The theory was that by stimulating the growth of more phytoplankton, more CO₂ might be sent to the bottom of the ocean.

But the experiment, conducted by India’s National Institute of Oceanography and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, proved disappointing when it was found that blooms of the wrong sort of algae had been induced (the algae were eaten by other tiny organisms, not dispatching the carbon dioxide to the bottom of the ocean, as intended). Scientists are still on the case.

Meanwhile, Richard Branson believes that algae could provide a climate-friendly fuel for aircraft, and even the American Navy – hardly the most obviously green of consumers – began trials of an algae-based biofuel earlier this summer. Solazyme, the company which supplied the fuel, has used algae to make a kind of “flour”. Yum, slime sponge.

Algae are also being made to produce the stuff that partly causes the bloom problem in the first place: fertiliser. Alas, algal fertilisers won’t reduce the amount of algal bloom that ends up disfiguring our watercourses, but, given the large volume of fossil fuel used in making conventional fertiliser, it will help the environment in other ways.

So cheer up. Algae are a part of nature and thrive on the very thing that holidaymakers most like. If we’d had a wet summer, the scum problem would have solved itself – only not many holidaymakers would have been out and about to see it.

Clive Aslet is Editor at Large of Country Life.

Bayer threatens to quit Germany over nuclear shutdown

German companies may relocate production to countries with lower energy costs

Ruby Russell
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 7 August 2011 18.36 BST

Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan could lead to some of the country's major companies relocating elsewhere in search of cheaper energy.

Marijn Dekkers, head of Bayer, the pharmaceuticals group, said: "It is important that we remain competitive compared with other countries. Otherwise, a global company like Bayer will have to consider relocating its production to countries with lower energy costs."

Under a package of energy bills passed last month by the German government, all nuclear power facilities in the country will be taken offline by 2022. Analysts say that the move will hit energy companies hard and contribute to an increase in electricity prices.

Dekkers told the business magazine WirtschaftsWoche that Germany's electricity costs were already the highest in the EU, making the country "unattractive" for the chemicals industry.

Bayer, which developed the first aspirin in 1897, employs more than 35,000 people in Germany. Dekkers said that his company was planning 4,500 job cuts worldwide – including 1,700 in Germany – but that it was already investing in emerging markets.

"Overall, we will create over 2,500 new jobs in countries like Brazil, India, Russia or China," he told WirtschaftsWoche.

The report also quoted Robert Hoffmann, head of the communications company 1&1, saying that taxes to subsidise renewable energy sources were too high in Germany. Hoffmann said that his company drew energy from Norwegian hydropower plants, but that it still had to pay a contribution to German renewable energy costs.

"Essentially, we're subsidising the construction of solar-powered roofs... So we end up paying double," he said. Hoffmann said that his company was looking at locations where "green electricity exists without the extra costs".

In a report released last week, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall attributed a fall of 10.2bn Swedish krona (£1bn) in operating profit for the second quarter of 2011 to "a one-off effect of the German parliament's decision to phase out the country's nuclear power".

The move has also prompted concerns about disrupted power supplies. German transmission systems operators have warned there could be a risk of power outages this winter, and have questioned the reliability of renewable energy sources, saying there is still a need for base power sources to ensure the stability of the grid.