Is a lead weight ban on the horizon? Angling Times February 25th

[doubledonkeybronze]

Sorry to be alarmist, this is the 'report' as per the Angling Times February 25th on page 6.

The article; 'Is a lead weight ban on the horizon' uses a quote from the European Fishing Tackle Trade Association (EFTTA), "It is estimated that in the EU as much as 2,000-6,000 tonnes of lead is dispersed into the environment by fishing with lead sinkers every year".

Do they really expect people to believe this garbage?

Think of these numbers; if we take a 2oz lead weight/bomb/lead for example, then 2000 to 6000 tonnes equates to between 35 and 105 MILLION lost 2oz leads in Europe every year??

On Friday I bought a pack of three Matrix brand, 30 gram bottle bombs for £2.95 (The Preston ones were 2 for £2.75!), this means that if the Matrix prices were used across the board for example, the market for lead sinkers is worth between £65.5 and £196.6 Million per year!

It also means that at £1.45, the current lead scrap price per kilo, that there is between £2.9 and £8.7 Million pounds of lead sinkers 'lost' in the EU every year!!

What shocks me more is that Angling Times prints this rubbish and therefore supports the figures from the EFTTA, we don't need to give environmentalists ammunition do we?

 

[Aknib]

Carp tackle companies won't be pleased, just think of all those lead dumping rigs that will go unsold!

I have a personal crisis if I lose a hooklink with a no.8 attached to it

 

[103841]

Does this report include sea fishing? I assume this is where most lead is lost.

 

[tigger]

I don't get what harm the lead would do, for the majority of my life I drank water and washed in water out of lead water mains.

 

[nottskev]

Do those EFTTA figures assume none of the leads cast out are ever reeled in again?

 

[Aknib]

Do those EFTTA figures assume none of the leads cast out are ever reeled in again?

Or were they conducted in the viaduct swim?

 

[sam vimes]

I wonder when someone is going to break the news to them that lead occurs naturally in the ground, and has done so for millions of years. Lead lollipops and lead water pipes might be a bad idea, but I very much doubt that lead fishing weights are going to make a jot of difference to the wider environment unless certain creatures are eating it.

 

[no-one in particular]

It doesn't look to include sea weights however, I have collected hundreds of lost sea weights. Once when there was an exceptional spring tide I went down to the groyne area where I fish and ran a metal detector over some rocks and filled two carrier bags with lead weights. There must be about a quarter ton of lead in those rocks. And I have pulled in hundreds of others over the years. Underneath my local pier it is festooned with weights wrapped around the pylons not to mention the miles of lines and plastic bits. It cannot be good as lead is poisonous to fish and humans. And is it a similar sort of ratio in a lake per size and quantity? I wouldn't know but I would happily buy a safe non poisonous alternative if there was one but I have never seen one.
The report may not be accurate but does it matter if it was 1 or 5000 tons, if all the lead dumped by anglers in Europe every year, was weighed and an industrialist went and dumped the equivalent in your river, you would be screaming for blood. Always the self denial and hypocrisy, if anyone suggests we should clean our act up its always the same.

 

[Jim Crosskey 2]

Bang on Mark. I'm pretty sure the tackle trade would find a way round this if it wanted to. And to the OP, alarmist? How exactly? Are you suggesting that catching fish without lead is impossible? Its not like we use it for bait Having said that, I agree that the figures as mentioned here look pretty silly, I did wonder if maybe (as I believe has happened in some other past estimate on lead usage) they've managed to include the lead shot that is also used by the shooting fraternity, bundled up everything that is sold in one year and then said that this is what's being pumped out in the environment?

Either way, all that would happen if there was a lead ban would be that the tackle shops would have to stop selling it. 98% of anglers would go on using what they have in their box, the tackle trade would have to spend a bit on R&D for alternatives, lets say that doubles the price of what a typical carp lead is... gradually you'd end up buying a few when what's in your tackle box runs out and within a couple of years, the angling world will have reset itself to the idea of a lead (and they will still be called that!) costing £2.50 a pop as opposed to £1-something. The only other thing that will happen is that Korda will develop an even more efficient way of making the lead release!

 

[theartist]

There's a guy on the Severn who uses a metal detector to collect lost weights from the beachy areas in summer, I think the misconception that the bottom of the river is full of lead is so wrong as it often gets washed up and in many cases recycled.

 

[Ray Roberts]

Lead is a fairly inert substance unless you actually ingest it. A lost sea weight on its own wouldn’t cause a problem. Though if several metres of line were attached it could do, ditto for carp weights I would have thought. Not that I’m personally if favour of dropping carp leads, in fact I think it’s mostly both costly and unnecessary.


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[theartist]

Some sea anglers in snaggy areas use cheaper alternatives than lead that's for sure. Surely lead is less harmful than spark plugs?

 

[sam vimes]

Lead has to be ingested to be harmful. In normal conditions, lead is inert when totally submerged in water and does not dissolve. It would not normally pose any danger to anything unless it hits them at high velocity. Lead in paint and petrol was an issue because it ended up as microscopic particles that could be ingested. Lead water pipes were a problem because they oxidised and the oxides could be dissolved in water, especially water with other chemicals added.

Mainly because it's bloody wasteful, it probably isn't the greatest idea to deliberately dump leads when fishing, but inadvertent losses are not a great threat to anything.

Personally, I couldn't care less if lead is banned in angling. Though I have some lurking in bags I never take, I can't actually remember the last time I used any lead. However, if they intend to ban something, it would be nice if they could come up with some sound reasoning for doing so.

 

[nottskev]

It seems a bit premature to be flagellating ourselves, accusing each other or even swallowing any of this. The unexplained figures in the OP (who made that estimate, based on what?) are bizarre. And I'd like to know a bit more about how discarded leads, normally inert, become a toxin in water as opposed to a kind of litter or, with line etc attached, a hazard to wildlife. The latter two would continue to be the case with an alternative material.

I shared a city with the mad swan lady whose campaigning - full of sentiment and exaggerated claims about anglers discarding shot and short on reasoning - was instrumental in prompting the ban. This turned on the issue of creatures ingesting the lead, but the onus was placed on anglers dropping the occasional shot fumbling with a dispenser, rather than on the deliberate blasting of vast amounts of lead pellets into the environment via shooting.

I don't like the idea of deliberately discarding leads - something about it offends theology and geometry. But I'm not keen to be bums-rushed into another ban based on smoke and mirrors evidence.

 

[no-one in particular]

Lead has to be ingested to be harmful. In normal conditions, lead is inert when totally submerged in water and does not dissolve. It would not normally pose any danger to anything unless it hits them at high velocity. Lead in paint and petrol was an issue because it ended up as microscopic particles that could be ingested. Lead water pipes were a problem because they oxidised and the oxides could be dissolved in water, especially water with other chemicals added.

Mainly because it's bloody wasteful, it probably isn't the greatest idea to deliberately dump leads when fishing, but inadvertent losses are not a great threat to anything.

Personally, I couldn't care less if lead is banned in angling. Though I have some lurking in bags I never take, I can't actually remember the last time I used any lead. However, if they intend to ban something, it would be nice if they could come up with some sound reasoning for doing so.

Every weight I have ever collected has been eroded by current, sand, gravel salt etc; the older they are the more markedly this is. It must leach into water given enough time. Whether there is enough anglers weights to raise the parts per million to unacceptable levels I don't know, but it must raise those levels to some extent. Is lead like plastic, never actually degrades? If so, should we just ignore it and leave it to build up like we have plastics? Should we just for once try and anticipate a problem instead of wait for it to happen.

 

[sam vimes]

Every weight I have ever collected has been eroded by current, sand, salt etc. It must leach into water given enough time. Whether there is enough anglers weights to raise the parts per million to unacceptable levels I don't know, but it must raise those levels to some extent. Is lead like plastic, never actually degrades? If so, should we just ignore it and leave it to build up like we have plastics? Should we just for once try and anticipate a problem instead of wait for it to happen.

Lead may become abraded, but it doesn't miraculously dissolve in water unless it oxidises. Your assertion that "it must leach into water given enough time" is an assumption, not reality. Even the tiniest particles of lead are more dense than water so don't stay suspended to be ingested by anything. Lead occurs perfectly naturally, if it were the problem you are suggesting, mammalian life would have ceased aeons ago. It's a problem that doesn't really exist. There are old lead mines by the score through the Yorkshire Dales. No one is rushing to remove all the remaining lead, nor are they sealing the mines (beyond stopping idiots getting into them). There's simply no point. Water flows out of them, through them and over them and no one bats an eyelid.

As I said before, I don't really care if lead is banned in angling. It will barely affect me at all. However, logical scientific reasoning for any ban might be a nice idea. There are any number of things, that have far greater impact on the environment, that no one even hints at doing anything about, let alone banning.

 

[mikench]

The corrosion behaviour of lead and its alloys in sea‐water is of great commercial interest in view of the considerable use of submerged telecommunications cables and the growing use of lead anodes for cathodic protection of marine structures.

Lead in drinking water potentially can cause liver disfunction and high blood pressure in humans. I don’t know about fish but the true total of lead weights is nothing compared to the amounts used in cables under land and sea which circumnavigate the globe.

The figures reported in the comics say more about their journalistic integrity and reasoning than the veracity of the figures . The contribution made by anglers, sea or coarse to water pollution is literally and metaphorically imo, the véritable drop in the ocean.

If one is concerned about this then don’t fish in fact don’t do anything.

 

[nottskev]

The issue might not run - we're only speculating because someone posted a report with some figures from who knows where.

But then again, it may be the start of a process whereby the public, largely oblivious to all the many and various toxins and pollutants in our waters, come to hear that anglers' weights are the real problem, and we find we're being scapegoated while all the other contaminations continue.

Immediately deciding we should support a ban on lead based on one anomalous report is a quixotic gesture. We need environmental protections based in evidence and fact, not rumour, and asking what exactly the case against discarded lead weights is does not make anyone a hypocrite.

 

[mikench]

The stuff we discard into our oceans, flytip, and generally dump is the cause of many of the worlds ills. One cannot blame anglers and the use of lead weights. As Einstein said you cannot blame gravity for falling in love.

The EU and other entities should look at drugs, crime, causes of crime, poverty, climate change, war, nuclear waste, overuse of chemicals, plastics, pesticides, eating stuff like bats which we shouldn’t,, inequality and so on for the problems we face and not anglers using and sometimes losing lead weights.

An old German proverb says if you don’t want to be hung yourself blame the dog for stealing the sausage.

 

[steve2]

I seem to remember that when the figures were first used back in the 70's anglers were accused of throwing away more lead than was actually produced for fishing.
There are "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"