The use of Reed Bed Treatment Systems in the UK

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 57-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. F. Cooper ◽  
J. A. Hobson ◽  
Carol Findlater

This paper summarises the British experience of Reed Bed Treatment Systems (RBTS) for sewage treatment over the past three years. It includes a list of the 26 systems which have been built together with their design details including, length, width, slope, media and the loading that they are designed for. Comment is made about the use of soil and gravel growth media. Different inlet and outlet arrangements are described. The alternative propagation and planting methods are reviewed. The paper closes with the performance data from a number of the UK systems. The performance of the British beds indicates that RBT Systems may be adequate for BOD and SS removal but the removal of phosphorus and nitrogen is not as high as predicted elsewhere.

1995 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Cooper ◽  
B. Green

The UK Water Industry first became interested in Reed Bed Treatment Systems for sewage in 1985. Early problems were experienced with soil-based horizontal-flow systems of the Root Zone type. The problems were overcome by national co-ordination of a development programme and international co-operation by an EC Expert Contact Group. A number of different types of systems have now been developed and the systems are now being accepted. The paper reviews the development of these systems for secondary and tertiary treatment and nitrification and mentions development of systems for other forms of treatment. The design changes made to overcome the problems are described. These include the gradual move to the use of gravel-based systems because of the difficulty experienced with over-land flow in the soil systems. The sizing of the systems is described together with performance data for the original horizontal-flow and the more recently developed vertical-flow systems. Treatment at secondary and tertiary levels is illustrated and the potential for nitrification. Early problems with reed growth have been overcome by planting with port-grown seedlings. After 10 years the process is generally accepted by the Water Industry as an appropriate treatment for villages and there are now between 200 and 300 systems in operation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-24
Author(s):  
Yusup Hari Setyawan

This study aims to determine: 1) the background of Raffles in implementing the landrent system, 2) how the implementation of landrents 3) the impact after the implementation of landrents in Java in 1811-1816. This study uses a literature research method, in approaching events in the past so that historical events can be explained chronologically. The steps in this research are collecting data sources, criticizing both external and internal sources, continued with interpretation, and historiography. The results showed (1) the background of landrents replacing the forced cultivation system in Java was implemented inspired by the British experience in India. (2) The landrent system can be implemented if it can control the territory, either through diplomacy or a ceasefire to control the territory so that the system works, the landrent system was initially implemented per village, in 1814 it was changed to an individual tax system which actually made it worse, especially for farmers. (3) For the UK, the landrent system was implemented without responsibility, inconsistency in implementing the rules. For the island of Java, the implementation of the traffic rules running on the left, adopted from England, the crime rate decreased, paying attention to culture, Javanese literature, historical heritage. When the Dutch returned, the landrent system continued until 1830.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.


1996 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. M. Johnstone ◽  
N. J. Horan

From the middle ages until the early part of the nineteenth century the streets of European cities were foul with excrement and filth to the extent that aristocrats often held a clove-studded orange to their nostrils in order to tolerate the atmosphere. The introduction in about 1800 of water-carriage systems of sewage disposal merely transferred the filth from the streets to the rivers. The problem was intensified in Britain by the coming of the Industrial Revolution and establishment of factories on the banks of the rivers where water was freely available for power, process manufacturing and the disposal of effluents. As a consequence the quality of most rivers deteriorated to the extent that they were unable to support fish life and in many cases were little more than open sewers. This was followed by a period of slow recovery, such that today most of these rivers have been cleaned with many having good fish stocks and some even supporting salmon. This recovery has not been easy nor has it been cheap. It has been based on the application of good engineering supported by the passing and enforcement of necessary legislation and the development of suitable institutional capacity to finance, design, construct, maintain and operate the required sewerage and sewage treatment systems. Such institutional and technical systems not only include the disposal of domestic sewage but also provisions for the treatment and disposal of industrial wastewaters and for the integrated management of river systems. Over the years a number of institutional arrangements and models have been tried, some successful other less so. Although there is no universally applicable approach to improving the aquatic environment, many of the experiences encountered by the so-called developed world can be learned by developing nations currently attempting to rectify their own aquatic pollution problems. Some of these lessons have already been discussed by the authors including some dangers of copying standards from the developed world. The objective of this paper is to trace the steps taken over many years in the UK to develop methods and systems to protect and preserve the aquatic environment and from the lessons learned to highlight what is considered to be an appropriate and sustainable approach for industrialising nations. Such an approach involves setting of realistic and attainable standards, providing appropriate and affordable treatment to meet these standards, establishment of the necessary regulatory framework to ensure enforcement of the standards and provision of the necessary financial capabilities to guarantee successful and continued operation of treatment facilities.


1995 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. B. Green ◽  
J. Upton

Reed bed treatment is put in the context of a major water company’s need to provide reliable, high quality, effluents from small sewage treatment works whilst seeking to minimise running costs. Design and operational information is given for reed bed applications in Severn Trent Water. Performance details are provided for application to secondary, tertiary and storm overflow treatment. The results give particular confidence in the system’s ability to deliver very high quality effluents when used for tertiary treatment, the company’s biggest application. Reed beds work well against less demanding criteria for secondary treatment at small sites and show great promise for storm overflow treatment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Perkins ◽  
Martin Whitehead ◽  
Dave Goulson

AbstractAnthe et al. (Environ Sci Eur 32:147, 2020. 10.1186/s12302-020-00424-4) develop a mathematical model to calculate the contribution of veterinary medicinal products (VMPs) to the levels of imidacloprid observed in the UK water monitoring programme. They find that VMPs make only a very small contribution to measured pollution levels, and that the estimated concentrations do not exceed ecotoxicological thresholds. However, shortcomings in methodology—including the implicit assumption that imidacloprid applied to pets is available for release to the environment for 24 h only and failure to incorporate site-specific sewage effluent data relating to measured levels—raise questions about their conclusions. Adjusting for these and other deficiencies, we find that their model appears consistent with the conclusion that emissions from VMPs may greatly exceed ecotoxicological thresholds and contribute substantially to imidacloprid waterway pollution in the UK. However, the model utilises imidacloprid emissions fractions for animals undergoing the different scenarios (for example, bathing) that are extrapolated from unpublished studies that do not clearly resemble the modelled scenarios, with insufficient evidence provided to support their derivation. As a result, we find that the model presented by Anthe et al. provides no reliable conclusions about the contribution of veterinary medicinal products to the levels of imidacloprid in UK waterways.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199215
Author(s):  
Charlotte Taylor

This paper aims to cast light on contemporary migration rhetoric by integrating historical discourse analysis. I focus on continuity and change in conventionalised metaphorical framings of emigration and immigration in the UK-based Times newspaper from 1800 to 2018. The findings show that some metaphors persist throughout the 200-year time period (liquid, object), some are more recent in conventionalised form (animals, invader, weight) while others dropped out of conventionalised use before returning (commodity, guest). Furthermore, we see that the spread of metaphor use goes beyond correlation with migrant naming choices with both emigrants and immigrants occupying similar metaphorical frames historically. However, the analysis also shows that continuity in metaphor use cannot be assumed to correspond to stasis in framing and evaluation as the liquid metaphor is shown to have been more favourable in the past. A dominant frame throughout the period is migrants as an economic resource and the evaluation is determined by the speaker’s perception of control of this resource.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Sujit Sivasundaram

AbstractThe Pacific has often been invisible in global histories written in the UK. Yet it has consistently been a site for contemplating the past and the future, even among Britons cast on its shores. In this lecture, I reconsider a critical moment of globalisation and empire, the ‘age of revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, by journeying with European voyagers to the Pacific Ocean. The lecture will point to what this age meant for Pacific islanders, in social, political and cultural terms. It works with a definition of the Pacific's age of revolutions as a surge of indigeneity met by a counter-revolutionary imperialism. What was involved in undertaking a European voyage changed in this era, even as one important expedition was interrupted by news from revolutionary Europe. Yet more fundamentally vocabularies and practices of monarchy were consolidated by islanders across the Pacific. This was followed by the outworkings of counter-revolutionary imperialism through agreements of alliance and alleged cessation. Such an argument allows me, for instance, to place the 1806 wreck of the Port-au-Prince within the Pacific's age of revolutions. This was an English ship used to raid French and Spanish targets in the Pacific, but which was stripped of its guns, iron, gunpowder and carronades by Tongans. To chart the trajectory from revolution and islander agency on to violence and empire is to appreciate the unsettled paths that gave rise to our modern world. This view foregrounds people who inhabited and travelled through the earth's oceanic frontiers. It is a global history from a specific place in the oceanic south, on the opposite side of the planet to Europe.


Author(s):  
Ellen Gordon-Bouvier

The restrained state has always sought to devalue socially reproductive work, often consigning it to the private family unit, where it is viewed as a natural part of female relational roles. This marginalisation of social reproduction adversely affects those performing it and reduces their resilience to vulnerability. The pandemic has largely shattered the liberal illusions of autonomous personhood and state restraint. The reality of our universal embodied vulnerability has now become impossible to ignore, and society’s reliance on socially reproductive work has therefore been pushed into public view. However, the pandemic has also exacerbated harms and pressures for those performing paid and unpaid social reproduction, creating a crisis that demands an urgent state response. As it is argued in this paper, the UK response to date has been inadequate, illustrating an unwillingness to abandon familiar principles of liberal individualism. However, the pandemic has also created a climate of exceptionality, which has prompted even the most neoliberal of states to consider measures that in the past would have been dismissed. In this paper, it is imagined how the state can use this opportunity to become more responsive and improve the resilience of social reproduction workers, both inside and outside the home.


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