Around 2,000 penguins wash up dead on Uruguay coast
Envorem MD, Mark Batt-Rawden takes time out on holiday to comment on major conservation concerns he has about the needless loss of wild life and points to technology as an important part of the answer to protecting helpless species including penguins.
According to news reports, including The Guardian (Nigeria) these cute little creatures were on their annual migration from South Argentina and died in transit. Autopsies found their fat reserves exhausted and their little bellies empty; it seems they starved to death.
I guess no-one can conclusively say their fate was attributable to overfishing but surely it has to be a factor? As humans irresponsibly consume this planet’s resources, it is defenceless creatures like penguins that suffer. Who can ever forget that traumatic video of an orangutan trying to fight an excavator tearing down the trees of its home?
The 2,000 penguins that died on this occasion made international news. Yet, Wikipedia, observes that “oil spills kill 20,000 adult penguins and 22,000 juveniles every year off the coast of Argentina”. Chronic pollution by unreported oil discharges made at sea by international shipping is a persistent problem, particularly in the Strait of Magellan.”
With regard to the oil discharges at sea, it seems preposterous that we seemingly cannot control this. Ships are already tracked by satellite and GPS – and yet the initiative still falls largely to Environmental Groups. According to SkyTruth, an environmental organisation using satellite to track pollution from ships, the amount of oil dumped into the oceans is roughly five times the equivalent of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska – one of the worst ever maritime environmental disasters. See Cargo ships dumping oil into the sea go unpunished.
Envorem and Oil waste Recycling at Sea
Envorem is trying to do its bit, developing onboard systems that can recycle oil wastes from ships, decreasing fuel consumption and providing an incentive to recycle rather than dump. In February 2023, together with the University of Brighton, Liverpool John Moore’s University and partial funding from IUK, Envorem completed a feasibility study producing a lab prototype. The next stage of the research is to build and test a system for live trials. This marine oil waste recycling technology is a variation of our revolutionary Greentech system for treating oil production byproducts.
Envorem can perhaps provide the carrot, but the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and the governments of the world need to provide the stick. Unless transgressors are frequently identified and punished, change will be slow and, creatures that have no means to help themselves, will continue to suffer the consequences.