Five pence plastic bag charge to be introduced in England

England is to introduce a levy to try and reduce the use of plastic bags

The plastic bag levy will apply to consumers using single-use bags from shops with 250 staff or more. Smaller shops will be exempt. The money raised will go to retailers, although the government has urged that the proceeds then be donated to environmental charities.

Plastic bag use was at its highest in four years in 2012 with 8.1 billion bags issued by UK supermarkets, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme.

England will be the last UK nation to have such a levy. Since introducing a similar scheme in 2011, Wales has seen a 76% drop in plastic bag use.

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Dying breed? Why Dartmoor hill ponies’ days may be numbered

Auction highlights gloomy outlook for ancient breed, as red tape and high running costs hit commercial market

The Dartmoor hill pony auction – an autumnal tradition and once a rip-roaring, gossipy gathering of the clans – was a less than cheerful event to attend this time round.

Pony after pony was ushered, bright-eyed and skittering, into the ring at the Tavistock livestock centre, on the edge of the Devon moor, only to be quickly led back out unsold, even though most were up for grabs for just £20. By the end of the morning, new homes had been found for only 20 out of 60 animals. The auctioneer looked gloomy, the pony owners and conservationists demoralised. “That was the worst ever,” said Mary Alford, who brought along 18 ponies but sold just six. “It’s a sad day for these animals and for hill ponies in general. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.”

The future is grim for many of the ponies that failed to sell. The majority will be slaughtered and end up as a meal for a pet or even a zoo animal; the hide of some may be used to make drums.

The problem runs deeper than this. The lack of a market for the hill ponies has led to concerns that after 3,500 years of roaming on the moors, the breed’s days could be numbered.

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Britain’s lost rivers resurrected and freed to go with the flow

Lost and found: left, the river Medlock in Philips Park, Manchester, was culverted a century ago; in south London, the Quaggy has been returned to nature.

The brick-lined culvert that runs through the centre of Manchester’s Philips Park has all the charm of an open sewer. There are no grassy banks, no fish, no reeds or other aquatic plants, no signs of life. Apart from a few broken bottles and an occasional rusting supermarket trolley, the waterway – built at the turn of the 20th century – is featureless and sterile for its entire mile-long course through the park.

The 2m-wide channel could pass for a section of the city’s sewage works. In fact, this turns out to be one of the major rivers of north-west England, the Medlock. Like dozens of other natural waterways in Britain it was channelled into culverts – others were buried in tunnels – in the wake of the country’s industrial expansion during Victorian and Edwardian times.

To the industrialists back then, rivers – apart from supplying water for dye works or taking away waste – were considered to be inconveniences and so were diverted, often underground. The end result was the creation of a network of lost rivers across the nation.

But now the Medlock is being reclaimed as part of a campaign that ecologists hope will return many of these lost waterways to their natural glory.

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England Begins Controversial Badger Cull

A European badger peeks out from behind a tree stump.

The badger cull is still underway despite many protest, threats from activists and Parliamentary debate.

A badger, for those not acquainted with the species, is a mammal about three feet long with gray fur, a mouthful of sharp teeth, and a black-and-white face striped like a zebra crossing. Meles meles, the European badger, is indigenous to the United Kingdom, lives in an underground labyrinth of tunnels called a sett, and feeds on worms and grubs. There are about 300,000 badgers in England.

The badger has been around long enough to have survived two ice ages, but thanks to a Conservative-dominated coalition government plan, some 5,000 will not survive a culling policy that aims to reduce the spread of tuberculosis (known to be carried by badgers) in cattle.

In 1971, a dead badger was discovered in a barn in Gloucester, autopsied, and found to be infected with TB. The concern—that badgers transmit the bacterium to cows, thereby putting a farm at risk of being shut down until the infection has cleared—has enmeshed scientists, politicians, government bureaucrats, and farmers ever since.

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More than 700 seals counted in Thames Estuary

Harbour seals near Whitstable, Kent.

Approximately 700 seals have been spotted in the Thames Estuary in the first survey of land, air and water. According to the Zoological Society of London,  a group of conservationist and volunteers recorded 708 grey and harbour seals along the Thames in a survey stretching up the estuary to Tilbury.

The survey involved recording seals spotted from boats, from the air or by teams on the ground investigating small creeks and rivers, with the GPS co-ordinates of sightings noted.

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A Team of UK Scientists Discover Ancient Trapped Water

A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water

A UK-Canadian team of scientists has discovered ancient pockets of water, which have been isolated deep underground for billions of years and contain abundant chemicals known to support life. The findings, published in Nature, may force us to rethink which parts of our planet are fit for life, and could reveal clues about how microbes evolve in isolation.

Greg Holland, a geochemist at in England, and his colleagues wanted to know just how long that fluid had been trapped in the rock. So they looked at the decay of radioactive atoms found in the water and calculated that it had been bottled a long time — at least 1.5 billion years.

“That is the lower limit for the age,” Holland says. It could be a billion years older. That means the water was sealed in the rock before humans evolved, before pterosaurs flew, and before multicellular life.

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A Team of UK Scientists Discover Ancient Trapped Water