{"id":744493,"date":"2026-08-20T22:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T22:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/744493\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T22:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T22:36:08","slug":"pollution-behind-coracle-fishing-in-carmarthenshire-rivers-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/744493\/","title":{"rendered":"Pollution behind coracle fishing in Carmarthenshire river&#8217;s decline"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Keith Elias&#8217;s family have been fishing on the river for 300 years &#8211; he said he only caught one fish this season.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s been in my family for so long, I love carrying the tradition on but it&#8217;s getting to the point where you get to the end of the season and you&#8217;re not hitting fish. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;You just don&#8217;t want to go.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Last year, the nearby River Teifi was noted as one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c15v08gdne2o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">UK&#8217;s most polluted rivers<\/a>, with 2,232 spills lasting more than 22,000 hours recorded in 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It has been reported that some incidents of pollution were made by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c2e4l9k9yd1o\" class=\"ssrcss-1e0jzsh-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Welsh Water<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The company said it was investing \u00a3889m on storm overflows between 2025 and 2030, including six projects to reduce their impact on the Tywi.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It added: &#8220;We are determined to play our part to improve river water quality on the Tywi, but this isn&#8217;t just an issue for water companies, collaboration is needed across sectors, including industry and agriculture, to ensure improvements.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Local people have also shared videos online of discharge across the river, which they claim appear to be from a nearby electronics recycling company Mekatek.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The company has a discharge licence from NRW.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Mekatek said it shared concerns about the drop in sewin and had spent more than &#8220;40 years developing and improving our processes to ensure we are not a factor in that reduction&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It added: &#8220;Anyone wishing to understand what we do and how well we do it is more than welcome to arrange to visit the site and view our operations for themselves.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keith Elias&#8217;s family have been fishing on the river for 300 years &#8211; he said he only caught&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":744494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-744493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=744493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/744494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=744493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=744493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=744493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}