What are the Different Types of Light Pollution?

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What are the Different Types of Light Pollution?

There are a number of different types of light pollution, each one is slightly different and in term sof the negative effect it has on the environment.:

1 – Light Spill

Light spill is quite a generic term, and is usually used in the context of artificial light that “spills” from a light source in to an area where it is not wanted.

This might include say a new flood light on the side of the building shining in to someone bedroom window.

Light spill can come from external lights, or it can been spilt out of windows.

Flood Light Mounted on a Brick Wall

2 – Glare

This is more to do with the intensity of the light source. Modern LED lights can give off a lot of glare, because the emitters are very small and very bright.

So for example, the glare from lights in a petrol filling station, if not designed correctly may emit a glare that is troublesome to nearby road users.

Glare can also be caused by reflected sunlight off a reflective build facade.

Glare from a street lamp

3 – Sky Glow (Dark Skies)

Light can spill upwards into the sky causing a phenomenon known as sky glow. This creates a glow in the sky, reducing the contrast between stars and the sky. In “dark sky areas” often there is a requirement for specific lighting design.

Flood Lights Facing Up Lots of Sky GLow Created

4 – Ecological

Light can influence the behaviour of insects. Other creatures feed on insects, and so there is an indirect impact. For example in areas where bats eat insects, lighting design should spill no more than 0.2 lux on to trees or the ground.

Insects are Attracted to Light, Modifying Behaviour of Predators

Services we Offer

We can provide:

  • Light Spill Assessment for Bats
  • Lighting Assessments for Adequate Lighting
  • Dark Skies Assessment
  • Sunlight & Daylight Assessments

 

What are Blowing Sands?

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Where I First Heard the Term “Blowing Sands”

This page is written by Will. I am am Geologist (amongst other things) and I also worked on Land Based Drilling Rigs for about a year in my 20’s. Some of the rigs I worked on were shell and auger rigs, and it was working with this sort of equipment that I first heard the term “blowing sands”.

What do Blowing Sands Look Like

Blowing sands do not look overly different to any other sand although if you were to pick up some in your hand there would they would be wet.  In order to blow sands need to be in a mixture with water or other fluid (should also bear in mind that is entirely possible for Sands to blow as a result of gases although this is much more rare) but in short they look similar to the wet sand which you might scoop up along the shoreline at a beach.

How do Blowing Sands Behave

In order to understand why blowing sands are named as such we must first have a little bit of an understanding of how a shell auger drilling rig works.

When drilling through sand it is typical to drill or bore an initial hole. After a while the sides of the hole will start to collapse, and it is then that you hammer in some casing. This casing is a steel tube which is a slightly larger diameter than the cutting tool that you might be using.

As you drill (or bore) the hole deeper and deeper and hammer further casing down further and further you will eventually reach the water table and this is where you are most likely to encounter blowing sands.

Sands mixed with water when exposed to vibrations will very often behave as a liquid, the sand water mixture combined with the vibration of the cutting tool will become liquid and it will “blow” back up inside the casing. One minute you’re at 10 meters depth and the next minute you’ll hole is only 6 meters deep, because the sand and water mix is flowed up (blown) inside the casing and then set solid again so this is why drillers call blowing sands as such: because they blow back up inside the casing when given a certain set of conditions.

The liquefaction process is caused by water or air being forced in between the grains of the sand (from vibrations or pumped water) and reducing the friction between them, to the point where it can flow.

Search Terms

When the vibration is added and the solid becomes a liquid this in geological terms is a process known as liquefaction it can happen on a very large scale during an earthquake when buildings or other heavy loads, that our built on sandy soils. The wet soils and the shaking of the ground can cause the sands to liquefact and the buildings literally starts sinking to the ground so it’s quite an interesting topic . It can also cause less dense items in float, as shown in the below video.

In the context of geo hazards you will also see the term running sands. “Some rocks can contain loosely packed, sandy layers that can become fluidised by water flowing through them. Such sands can ‘run’, removing support from overlying buildings and causing potential damage.”.

So if you were advancing a borehole through either of the above “soils”, it would quite likely “blow”. Drillers find this very annoying as it can undo a couple of hours work, and many drillers get paid for the depth of the hole they are drilling, you might find that they add on additional words at the beginning of the phrase such as “f***ing blowing sands” etc etc.

Extended Producer Responsibility – Packaging Reporting

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Extended Producer Responsibility – Packaging Reporting

EPR – Enormous Paperwork Route 🙂

As of around now (April 2024) Companies in the UK above a certain size (turnover) and handling more than 25 tons of packaging will need to start reporting this to the Government.

If you are over the thresholds for turnover / size then after that it becomes quite difficult to decide what does and doesn’t apply to your organisation!

Some of Easier Checks

“You must collect data about the packaging you’ve supplied within the UK market or imported into the UK for 2023 and from 2024 onward.”

So you have to count packaging you import or supplied to UK market. But what does that mean.

piles of plastic drums and film

This picture shows a large pile of 25 litre plastic drums piled up in the heap.

Example of Extended Producer Responsibility

A fruit distributor imports reusable wooden crates full of apples to the UK, and then packs them in to small plastic crates, lined with disposable plastic film. So of the crates are new, and other reused. The reusable crates are sent back to france, and some of the plastic crates are returned to the distributor for refilling.

What do you keep a record of?

  • You do not record the wooden crate as they are sent back to france so they do not “end up” in the UK.
  • You do not record the used crates, because they are reusable.
  • You do record the new crates as they are new packaging introduced into UK market.
  • You do record the plastic film as this was created and ends it life in UK.

Download Spreadsheet for EPR Records 

Confused?

Yes so are we. But hopefully less confused than you are? 😉 So please contact us for help, and we will assist if we can.

All the best.

Nutrient Credit & BNG Credits – Lessons Learned

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Nutrient Credit & BNG Credits – Lessons Learned

This is a dictated blog post so please excuse the poor punctuation although I expect the speech to text algorithm I’m using probably does a better job at a spelling than I do so at least that’s something! I also tried to write this as informally as possible and also put some very slight humour in it. . . .  this isn’t a reflection of my lack of sincerity with regards this topic but apparently if I am to keep ahead of AI then I need to inject humor and humans sensibility into my written content . . .  so there we go Brave New World. . . .

We’ve finally come to a point with nutrient neutrality where we have a complete system for measuring the inputs & outputs (which has been the case for a few years), and we also now (as of just a few weeks ago) have a complete legal system (in some areas at least) for the delivery of nutrient credits from off-site sources.

This took around two years to arrange and I’m a bit apprehensive about the same thing happening with biodiversity net gain will planning authorities and natural England learn from the lessons of the past four years and the laborious drag that has been nutrient neutrality all will they reinvent the wheel and keep his waiting another four years for biodiversity credits.

Baselines and Loads

In nutrient neutrality we talk about baselines and loads as in the before and after nutrient balance of a particular site and this is the same to some extent for biodiversity because we have a baseline and we also have post-development figure which has to be higher than the pre-development figure.

This is all very well set out in natural England’s biodiversity net gain matrices and we have accrued considerable in-house experience in filling these tables out as well as conducting various baseline surveys that are involved such as hepatak condition surveys so this sound so this part of biodiversity net gain sounds quite promising and certainly progressing as well or perhaps better than nutrient neutrality calculations of the same type.

It’s worth noting as well that since they’re release the BNG calculator have not been updated time and time again like many of the phosphorus calculators around the country Somerset Council and Cornwall Council have both been very bad and doing this with several updates since the initial calculator released.

Mitigation Projects

So this all sounds pretty good so far we’ve got to where working things out for BNG, and with nutrient neutrality we have some legal precedence which might apply to biodiversity net gain.

But this is where the good luck starts to be slightly eroded by some rather poorly planned schemes around land use.

So biodiversity net gain can be a profitable land use although it does lock the land up for around 80 years each credit is worth around 25,000 push and one hectare planted to mix broadly woodland can create five appetite habitat credits which is about 125,000 pounds so that sounds quite good.

The problem is that biodiversity netgame credits are not the only thing that farmers can do with underproductive land in fact there’s a very recent scheme under the sustainable farming initiative which sees underprotective areas of land set aside for around five years being very attractive option at present and in the number of cases where we visited farms and advised farmers on what they can expect to gain from implementation of net gain projects on the land we have found that they cite sustainable farming initiative as a reason not for doing it because it will pay better in the short term, and they don’t have to lock up their land for a huge period which may affect their children or possibly even grandchildren.

So there is a clash there between two conflicting schemes that surely won’t help it least in the short term.

Legal Smeagols

So lastly but definitely not leastly (you see AI would not do quirky spelling like that) we have the legal stuff, and I have to admit that we haven’t really dealt with very much of this with regards to biodiversity net gain or the creation of biodiversity credit schemes but one could suppose that it will encounter the same barriers as the legal elements of off-site credit schemes that have been faced by nutrient credit schemes.

In these cases we have seen a variety of legal implements being used one example of which might be an overarching section 106 agreement which can be used by a credit scheme provider to prove to the Council that they will take responsibility for the scheme in the long run the people accepting the credit also have to fill out various pieces of paperwork which may involve contracts or supply which are between the credit user and the credit seller or perhaps the unilateral undertaking that can also be used in some instances some after worse examples that we have heard of come from caulmore Cornwall where local councils have flared to the idea of putting notes on landowners title deeds which has gone down very badly.

You should definitely contact us if you want to run a credit scheme for biodiversity net gain. It will be complicated and for your own sanity, you should pay us to do it for you.

Waste Audit Statement for Devon Planning Application 

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Waste Audit Statement for Devon Planning Application

We have recently been commissioned to undertake a Waste Audit Statement for Devon Planning Application. The project is for a residential institution (similar to a care home or sheltered housing).

Picture showing various piles of waste in concrete yard being sorted by an excavator

Sorting of Waste at a Site in the UK

The requirements from the Devon County Council planning officer is as follows:

D.C.C. Waste commented that ‘in order to meet the requirements of Policy W4 of the Devon Waste Plan, we request the following information:

The amount of construction, demolition, and excavation waste in tonnes, set out by the type of material.

 Identify targets for the re-use, recycling and recovery for each waste type from during construction, demolition and excavation, along with the methodology for auditing this waste including a monitoring scheme and corrective measures if failure to meet targets occurs.

o The predicted annual amount of waste, in tonnes, that will be generated once the development is occupied.

o Identify the main types of waste generated when development is occupied.

The details of the waste disposal methods likely to be used.’

Need Some Help?

If you need Waste Audit Statement for Devon Planning Application then we can write one for you, we have been writing waste reports for over decade, and as these reports contain very similar information to site waste management plans, that we have been writing for years, you can expect an efficient service.

Please contact us to discuss you requirements. The quickest way to enable us to quote is to email us some plans, and any comments received from the planning officer.

Phosphorus Embargo Update – Somerset

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Phosphorus Embargo Update – Somerset

It has been around three and a half years since the start of the phosphorus Embargo on the Somerset levels this issue affects settlements far as part as with a liscom Wells and Sherborne quite a large area!

Progress?

But what about the progress being made to get people building again, well there are a few things which do work and a few things which don’t, and I will describe those here.

Ultimately it can be said that for certain sites we can now almost guarantee success but the nature of these sites means that not many people will be in this favourable position for other sites in towns and particularly those in small rules settlements which are on main service the phosphorus situation remains a very thorny and stubborn issue in as part of the planning process.

This is a picture of stodmarsh Nature Reserve as the name suggests this is a marshy nature reserve in Southeast of England in the photograph there is rough grass in the foreground with dried long grass perhaps from some four they're also around a third of the area visible in the photograph is covered with reads there are various field enclosures shown which are have main grass again with tufts of dry grass showing that the dry grass is a yellowy brown color but also areas are open water showing which take up about 10% of the image the area is very flat and in the very rear of the picture you can see a line of mature trees in the distance sky is blue there are various pleasant looking white fluffy clouds

Things We Could Be Getting On With

The Good

So what does work well if you are building something in the middle of nowhere and intending to use private drainage and our sufficiently far away from main strainage to avoid having to connect to it then you’re in a good position provided you have about 0.6 of a hectare for trees in the early days we were quite often recommend a small wetland for these sorts of projects but in most areas these are now rendered impossible to approve owing to natural England’s wetland assessment Matrix which is extremely overbearing assessment tool that renders wetland mitigation all but useless by the time you’ve worked out all of the uncertainties.

However woodland remains very good option and 0.6 hectares of woodland will offset a house provided it is on a very efficient private drainage system this is quite a neat little rapport which we have written quite a few of and they seem to do the trick.

The Bad

For those situated within major settlements within the Parrett, Tone and Brue catchments you can expect to have a local sewage works which treats wastewater to a reasonably high level with regards to phosphorus so for example Taunton sewage works at present treats water down to 0.9 milligrams per liter which is pretty good and some other areas of lower still following recent upgrades which is helping greatly in the amount of credit that people have to buy.

So provided you can find some credit which is not very easy you can in fact move projects forward in large towns at a reasonable cost which is not overbearing as I say finding a credit is tricky but the financial side of this is generally acceptable and feasible for standard construction sites.

Face Palmus Maximus

The Ugly

For those people in moderately sized towns and small villages which are served by mains drainage the phosphorus embargo has left them in a real pickle for example Wellington Sewage Works has a treatment efficiency of five milligrams which means that house builders in Wellington are having to buy quite considerable amounts of credit just to offset one house in fact probably around half a kilo per dwelling which if bought from a commercial scheme can cost around £20,000 pounds which is not feasible given the price of houses in the area. Of course for prestige homes with five or six bedrooms and high specifications this Twenty Thousand pound overage becomes less important, but for affordable homes and other smaller dwellings it’s a complete disaster in terms of feasibility. The only option here is to try and build your own credit scheme which is difficult and I will expand on this below.

The Diabolical

When Sergi Leoni made The Good The Bad and The Ugly he stopped at ugly. But we have one further category here which is diabolical and that relates to the legal morass around the issuing of phosphorus credits.

The furthest advanced schemes that we have pursued I’ve been in the Taunton and West Somerset area and although we had some early access early successes with upgrading septic tanks and using those credits to support specific planning applications for credit schemes to be used in a similar way to carbon credits (i.e. run as an account) they have to be registered registered with Taunton and West Somerset as an “official scheme” however, this is a tricky thing to accomplish, as whilst the scientific basis for creating credits whether it be from ecosystem services or drainage upgrades is well established and supported by both Natural England and the various consultees involved in the planning process, the legal system for tying donor sites to receiver a site is not very well developed.

In fact the council have been very reluctant to provide any guidance on this legal framework having run around 16 or so solicitors and lawyers in the Somerset and Devon area some of which I know personally I cannot find any information on the form of this legal agreement and as such it remains Out of Reach in fact recently we abandon the £200,000 pound phosphate phosphate credit scheme which obviously we would have been very pleased to have completed on owing to a complete lack of guidance and support with regards to the legal paperwork that is required in order to register it as an official scheme with Taunton and West Somerset now publishing the fact that they are in financial district trouble we are not overly optimistic of receiving any good advice soon.

Services Relating to Nutrient Neutrality

Equivalent First Zone – Right to Light

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Equivalent First Zone – Daylight Assessment

For many years we have been using the old paper and pen method to calculate VSC (Vertical Sky Component) and APSH (Annual Probable Sunlight Hours) and for many sites it is still possible to use this method.

However, the new BRE 209 guide has migrated from ADF values to far more complex calculation requirements, which are now only possible to do with a computer model.

Equivalent First Zone

For a long term client we have also offered to calculate Equivalent First Zone values for Existing vs Proposed Site Layout. This has been a steep learning curve for us, but we have managed to produce several sets of Equivalent First Zone calculations that indicate the maximum building possible to achieve, without compromising right to light.

So time moves on we miss our pens and our paper, but it is plain to see that the computer model does an extortionary volume of calculations in no time at all, and can derive values for very complex layouts where we mat have struggled in the past, and Equivalent First Zone Calculations they can carry out a days worth of calculations in just a few seconds.

 

Soakaway Testing Warminster – Wiltshire

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Soakaway Testing Warminster  – Wiltshire

Another day. . . another hole in the ground with water in it.

soakaway testing in wiltshire in chalk

Today we have been in sunny Wiltshire, doing some soakaway tests on a residential development site. As is obvious from the pictures above, the site is on chalk. The chalk in this instance was weather and with patience could be excavated using an. . . . excavator.

We dug the hole very closed to the location ear-marked on drawings for the actually planned crate soakaway system. The results were not too bad, as the water infiltrated at a reasonable rates.

If you require BRE 365 soakaway testing for a planning application or for design purposes we can arrange on a quick turnaround. Please contact us for a quotation.