election and any of those seats lost could go to the far right a.f.d. here we saw and parliament for the first time back in september kate brady correspondent thanks so much welcome. and a reminder of the top story we're following for you a first round of talks to form a new coalition government interim he has ended chancellor angela merkel and her conservative party are negotiating with the center left social democrats as the talks fail germany could face fresh elections. more news coming up at the top of the hour in the meantime head to our website d.w. dot com i'm still here in berlin see you again soon. stories that people also for information they provide opinions they

want to express g.w. on facebook and twitter up to date and in touch follow us. made it's created and it is everything that's spiritual it's where i find peace it

feeds my passions my own what i think it's just me in a. pod not just another arm of the elements of nature not just a holes blown. bacteria it's also. things like rocks it's going to the atmosphere obviously to see. the wave to me is like another living living thing moves it's gone mind of the sun. and he. was there for the energy that's there it flows. so you feel as if you're a plant rooted to the sea. and so this is momentous one of those moments that can really change your way of thinking to find this out.

for the first few years maybe the first fifteen years to take me before i decided i'd like to go waves i just thought that you surfing was going out and doing maneuvers and even right the very beginning it was very competitive and i thought surf was like a sport where surf if there isn't a competition surfing still exists i can remember some days well i've just been out in the ocean in big waves and you have this connection with the ways it's almost like the waves are it's another person you build up the relationship with the wave itself.

i'd already been here a lot when i lived in england we did some really good trips to calif here and it was a sort of all known thing we didn't really can find any other surface it served very much along the coast of our story a struggle if you're. always to see this wave and we wondered how we could get down to surf it and when i eventually found how to get down the cliff and get into the water from another angle then i suddenly look back then you just see this great big pile of rubbish. then you had. more looking for where hughes was tony boarded it as we began to find real rubbish don't listen to see that. no one looks out to the beaches from september you may or june when you're only surfers operators because they're always on the beach most of those get the most to expose him and it's sad to go somewhere

every day and see more rubbish every time. the us when you see lots of bags here is what was there for full of rubbish. so you have to be careful there may contain glass is then eunice. you know the reason i get that is you can see how much rubbish there is if it's all full of stuff like this one thousand bottles corks. full is there you know they there's masses of is a year. i want. us all washed out during a storm you know this. i grew up on the south case is quite different i used to spend my time cycling to

because i wanted to surf better. obviously living i'm paying them to take leave this winter the rubbish elevates has just been unbelievable basically the sea sort of always wanted back up what was on the nation fill to sundays breaking down and all the grass is kind of intermingled with the plastics this sunday's always became bully with this stuff loads of reds going yeah i think just from bits of broken boxes masses of fishing net the storms really did project to the whole public how much rubbish was in the sea i was utterly shocked i couldn't believe it was like a carpet being put on to the sound. it seems like the more you read and the more you research on these problems the worse the problem gets so now if i've just finished a big report on marine plastics the problem to me now is

a lot worse than it was before before i thought that somehow it degraded or somehow just got absorbed back into the surface of the planet but it doesn't it just stays just stays plastic we don't really be mass producing plastic long enough to to fully understand it's right to take radiation we know that in the environment a large plastic item starts to become brittle as a consequence of exposures to the sun to hate and mechanical action in the city and it starts to fragment into very small pieces even microscopic pieces that we describe as micro plastic if i told polymer chemists they tell me that all of the plastic that we've ever produced is still with us on the planet in a form is too large to be biodegraded. for our first expedition was to sail from. the bahamas to bermuda number muta across today's orders and this was to understand what was happening on the eastern side of the

north atlantic and that was our first big expedition from there. weather around the world went to the south the south the lead tick then the the south pacific the indian ocean and then we knew it was it was global so with a very big data set and some of the best ocean modelers within made the first estimate of how much trash how much plastic all plastics all sizes and all oceans and that number is two hundred sixty nine thousand tons from five point two five trillion pieces of plastic we know at the moment that around about seven hundred species of marine organism and count deborah of some kind and most of those reports relate to encounters with plastic deborah we know that those creatures will ingest that their brain and some of them become entangled in it we know for many of those instances that it can be home for even faithful makes me feel quite guilty because i can't do enough about it and i feel that this is kind of it's all wrong. that the

whole world is backwards. going to do this that's when you like a place you try to keep that environment and task is immediate and the sea gives me so much the way it was there when i saw it as i have to give something back it was to me i feel obliged to. i think the connection to the same being a want to use that surfing ingesting immersing that's half the fun. and when you l. first time when you when you walk out of high tide line for the tracks and makes you angry and i'm not the person who can turn a blind eye to that so i can i've got angry and frustrated or i can get angry and i can get active.

so afraid of one thousand nine hundred ninety i joined them in one thousand nine hundred five and white happened because we were surfing. in the water on the beaches and all year long. sure enough the beaches at that time were clean in spring so good coming in summer and everything was nice everything was not nice everything was clean before they arrived we were there all year long surfing into waste and polluted water as we could see this and where not not only. being the witness of it by the time victims i mean with your troubles or gastric troubles and what the heck am i doing to. yourself and so this is why i guess we will try to do something in fact as some say the only. level of.

which. out of the water of the ocean and telling. about what we saw that.

i remember finding the small plastic wheels had to be. essential i brush you always see all sorts of plastic objects on the beach so i didn't think much of it. but as more and more of these wheels appeared i started wondering what they were because because it is was actually. asked around but no one knew anything about the sea. but once i started asking as you see i found out that they want just appearing in her shop and streets it wasn't real people were also finding them in spain spines it was general in no. other places. there was all sorts of speculation about what they were for what they were used to. packaging and boxes to keep things from moving around. and that they were from submarines things like that . but no one really knew what they were so. surfrider is an organization with chapters in a lot of locations. so we sent an email to all the chapters around europe.

last summer it is on then and as it happened there were no jocks you know on the island of corsica. had just received an invitation from a company called dan c. to take a look at its new modern sewage treatment plant. two or imprisoned it's really process you're. going to capital city they've got to cross sure. i've got it here somewhere they send it to me all you. got this is it. going where you saw the photos we sent them and compare them with the picture and they said this is in france why was there so i mean do. you want kids so now that we know what they were and what they were poorly just really want to draw this we were able to start investigating. you know when we knew they were used in water treatment plants and we visited sewage plants that used to be. you water treatment is done in several

stages. in the first stage grids are used to retain the larger floating material using. monkeys if you see the treif limits you only get the grids get smaller and smaller. and when they're no longer small enough a different process is employed. which involves using bacteria that eat or destroy organic material in the water. they realize that if the bacteria was attached to something like a barnacle to iraq it was more effective and it worked better. so volcanic rocks were then used to give the bacteria something to adhere to the dry lava has holes the bacteria can inhabit. and this part of the process became increasingly important and more rock was needed but it's a problem to get. to see so these plastic objects were made to use instead millions of them are placed in a tank and the bacteria adhere to them to do their job and clean the water. i do

need to eat and we set up a web page and we started to publish what we knew on the internet and we saw that other people were investigating as well and coming up with the same sort of information for example from two thousand and twelve until now there have been several cases of pollution in switzerland from switzerland to lay claim on both sides of this with side and the french side. to see this really do could do with this research but it's also. a lot of time i do serious that i work for the valet district environmental protection service. i take charge of ensuring that the sewage plants observed federal requirements in this matter. the plant. najma informed me that had been a spill of bio media filters. and i asked them why you know where it came from what . you said but it wasn't until

a few months later that we knew how it happened and the quantity that had been lost . it's what we calculated about five cubic meters to commit that it sank. oh yeah. what happened was that there was an excess of water there was a thaw which led to a lot of water there was no separate so what system then to separate the waste water from the surface water it was all in the same point. so the water level in the tank rose until it overflowed the last the wheels that came to the surface and overflowed they went down the drain. but. it ended up in their own large river which passes through lake geneva and into france descending to leo then flowing into the mediterranean it's

a relatively new treatment process i'd say about fifteen years old and this process is used when the capacity of a sewage plant becomes limited that's what it it's quite an easy system to set up. well you have to do is add the bio media filters to the tank and it. doesn't cost much as opposed to building a new tank. that's much more expensive. and many districts use this system so you can see keep you know there's another planet by the way and the same thing happened they had a bio media spill i think it was the same problem and they did the same thing we did to prevent it from happening again. well as through this. surely is going to be in switzerland there's been a lot of pollution the authorities have cooperated a lot. they've given us documents to help us understand the problem so the solution is quite simple like putting

a grid on top of it or use and we've visited many water treatment plants and we've seen that the pollution was often caused by extremely silly and simple things. the problem is that in a tank like this there are ten or one hundred millions of. media filters and when they spill out millions of them end up in the sea. you've got to go on there were . no course even or odd and this is what i would class as a toxin explains to extra mario notepaper annette. there are the kinds of plastic objects you always find along the beach. we found these shotgun shells. they must i mean then we have i think they're called by a mediocre it's a kind of. when we later found out that they're from the sewage treatment plants.

and there are talks in it's objects par excellence are tampon applicators. they come in all kinds of shapes and colors. anyway. and they're all over the place . you know. and all this in the kampala pointed secured additionally that he's trying to understand the problem of rubbish in reverse since the only data we have up to now is that eighty percent of the litter in the sea comes from the rivers or it's called the study began just over a year ago to find out the quantity and the type of glitter which comes from rivers to find its origin its movement now it ends up in the city like this it's really like old minissha. the main conclusion we can draw from this study is that of the fifty thousand to waste products collected during these twelve months that are eight collection points is about seventy percent was plastic. behind the sewage plants we found waste products which are usually in the sewage plants and

a large quantity of medical waste is found just behind the sewage plants. i find all the stuff when combined so it overflow i find the ocean i find the air buds i find the tampon applicators little little little pink little tubes i find cigar tips i find all these things you find just in sewage are still floating out to sea you know a thousand miles i know the ocean. or they simply don't we don't really there are two main reasons why we find a large quantities on the beaches the first is that there are people out there who clean their ears with cotton buds and then throw them down the toilet here they go into the sewage i mean since about the only one they should throw them into the bin . and see the problem is that in many towns there is only one grain pipe which carries the rainwater and the sewage together. all men don't use them in the

climate is mild it goes to the sewage plant but when it rains have a light so much water goes into the sewage plants that they can't create a let me know. so they have no other options. open to open the watergate and let uncreated water flow directly into the environment like the one you're on the sense that. this is the part we see. the plastic which has been thrown away the part we don't see or detergents chemicals and all the bacteria which come from the toilet. two of them of you know like you said it got sometimes resurface big wave near here and you come out of the water smelling of feces but your web suit smells like crap because you've been surfing near the sewage plant and this does not only happen here it happens everywhere.

is against surges set up in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight in this village in st agnes by a group of guys who were repeatedly going surfing and becoming sick and they were putting two and two together the u.k. used to discharge all of its sewage untreated for a long sea out folks and that basically meant when when i was on show winds and swell all of the sewage pollution was going straight back onto the beach is. i when i first started surfing in the early nineties he would quite often be surfing amongst sanitary towels and faces and it was it is all in the sea as i go surfing in and out and so.

when i was a kid we used to come down to cornwall every holiday we spent many weeks down here and my dad told me surfing way back in the early seventy's is really passion about water love the thing about it was terrible and he used to lend me his boat and used to go out into the water from about the age of sort of four five years old and yeah being totally hooked on it since then there was always this thing about me getting sick i was always sick in summer holidays in comal it became a bit of a job related. would have to end up going to the doctors getting antibiotics these kind of things always with their infections upper respiratory tract infections and really bad conjunct of isis and we hadn't made i mean it was only actually probably fifteen years ago that was talking through my parents and i sleep with us for a second you were the one that was in the water the whole time you bathing with bathing in in the sort of area where the effluent was coming out and i was just

ingesting rule sewage at the time and then you know within two days of the holiday you know bright red eyes you know streaming control to isis and left left is just constantly getting infections and it set up a weakness that and sadly went on to me just getting more and more infections and to the point when there were pretty bad hearing loss in the left ear from it in the early ninety's when s.s. was born it was born on a single issue pressure group so it was a group who were campaigning against untreated sewage going into the se and it was a big problem then because it was continues to charges of sewage all around the u.k. so with the help of the don't waste water treatment directive we've seen billions of pounds spent on u.k. sirrah to infrastructure to stop untreated sewage going into the say day in day out so that's a major step forward now the trouble now is instead of discharging sewage one point

eight kilometers out to say you have these things called sewer overflows combines or overflow can discharge untreated sewage during periods of rain or parents or malfunction stray out onto the beach or into the river very very close to debate. this combined. so you've got these four grills when the. infrastructure is in a depression this is an emergency exit you'll have human sewage as you can see all in the great. you have human sewage completely stone walls are coming out of these grates. and out since you want to call most most premier. the most beaches.

referred to cases for this year especially where you know the overflow. of. people. know to speak to your infections you know i mean for one you know on our to notice of our sort of you know in the hives being severely brain for you know. looking for the bit of. antibiotic resistant bacteria it's dissemination in the environment as we understudied it could be a potential to millions of people in the way anyway and come into contact with the system of terror because we know that. close to water is all contaminated with sewage on occasion and at the same which can contain a system of terror and it means that it's difficult street with antibiotics so what

we did is we collected sea water holes tap for the for the presence of water a particular type of terry hadn't called the code i. had a tough time for resistance to one group of antibiotics and we found that even though that present and small number die. it was just and i was here all present and coastal waters and people he'd enjoy recreational activities and to see disability bacterias we don't really know what happens when someone swallows a resistant bacteria we don't know what they it survives in the body or whether it goes on to develop. to calls a subsequent infection we don't know that is something that we're investigating for close to the potential by simply. a bathing after rainfall event. what's happening in a country and it's also happening in many of the teachers around the country is the

regulators deciding to take was called the sample from some way down the beach far away from where the source of pollution is entering the say just like many beaches around the country a good treaty there will be children there will be thousands of people who will use sea right in front of the river a country which is where the sewer overflow discharges so those people are being told the water quality is excellent because the environment agency will take a sample many hundreds of meters away from where they using the sea what what we do is we look at where the most babies are on the bathing water and we draw an imaginary line right turn to the bottom of the tide to the top of the tide and we always take the sample on that particular point what i can say is that after a really heavy rain the combined sewer overflows are likely to operate to save people's houses being flooded with sewage and that sewage will end up going down

the red river and into quickly and i don't hate it will it will happen and it will flow with the tide depending on where the tide is back out to sea and across the front of the page we do know that and that's true but where people are most of the people they it will be classed as excellent when you look at all of the data that we've got. the u.k. is given a choice as every member state is you can take the world's call to sample from where the worst source of pollution is or where the major source of by the sun so by the environment agency deciding to ignore that source of pollution knowing full well over the course of the bathing season many thousands of people will use that body of water right in front of the river then they are not supporting their community i haven't any environment agency i have liked his people and i understand they're there because they're there because they want to protect the environment so they're good people in

a good organization war i feel and this is just my opinion sir might be completely wrong but when the was called say results get released at the end of the beginning in november the environment agency hauled before the press to say why are these beaches passing question paid to pollute is that again held to account should be water companies that should be fun and so it should be industry they're getting perks of our camera to say the speech has failed again why why ammeter nor you should have been hearing about this.

case where they the private water companies this is. an industry that makes billions of pounds of profit year on year on year now that profit needs to be taken back from the shelters and it needs to be invested in the protecting the environment because that's what these water companies should do they should give us clean and safe drinking water and they should take away our search and treat it responsibly without jumping into the environment that should be a bottom line that the company works from and it can still make money we did a lot of undercover work we filmed the c.s.i. shows discharging into rivers and into ses around the u.k. and we worked with a national t.v.

company b.b.c.'s panorama programs watched by millions of people hello. tonight caught on camera the type spilling sewage on to some of the britain's most popular place the beaches this is disgusting that's why. we'll be as a direct result of that law being referred to the b.b.c. and also working with national newspapers. we were called in for a meeting with the environment minister and those surface against sewage and all of the stakeholders in the water industry with the environment minister and he set down the challenge and he said it's not good enough he doesn't want to say so is overflowing on national t.v. so what can we do to stop it and the first voice he came to in that meeting was surface against sewage for a solution and that gave us the opportunity to say. whilst we're not able to reduce

the sewer overflows right now without investment what we want is information so tell us when a sewer is overflowing and we'll tell the public and then they can make that informed decision and leave we've been informed of over three thousand so overflow incidents that can cause serious impact on your health in the last few years and we've passed on to thousands and thousands of paid. into look. at the price of being late. and having discovered or even taken the problems he was he twenty fifteen ten years ago one of the biggest

improvement we've seen is awareness from everybody from the citizen to people leaders in brussels in european parliament for instance like twenty years ago. if they had if we had trouble with water treatment with sewage water as people would say where there's no problem and who asked us to believe this then we said no no no it's not it's not ok and no these it's the opposite it's now an argument which is no from our politicians look at what we should bent to improve water quality and this is wrong a long term. improvement. and i think for me the most important. is to really feel how how long the process how difficult the process and how fault you are from. when you off i to need to from the beginning to.

stay home from all the water make sure we don't get cold. just for the surf side just for you know going to contaminate much is having a shower on for forty five minutes at home. on the saturday the water this great come out vigorously. ready for launch. start having pieces that we came out on the water is really warm. at least compared to where you

come from. several degrees warmer that's wonderful. i just went for a swim in the river had a shower. the way i justify my. guilty. being part of the problem because i mean you know where this is plastic and ok it's recycled but it's probably it would be better if it was. didn't exist in the first place is the best that we can do but you know it's still not perfect. you know i travel i've got a car. hydro carbons. you know i'm using up resources. quicker than that being renewed. my justification for that is that i can be happy with less less resources than most people and i haven't got this thing this addiction to. buying new stuff all time and throwing away which is

a big problem i like to keep things you know i don't drink water out of those plastic bottles because i just have a metal bottle and i just refill it every time from the top i mean it's important to recognize there's no single solution to this problem and it is about things that are familiar to it's about reducing reusing and recycling now if it's a drink of water fresh water bottled water in most parts of the developed world we have very good drinking water coming out of the town so absolutely it's a case of having a refillable bottle that we can fill from the top every time of course we could start to try and clean up the mess in the oceans but my view on that is that we're putting mr into the oceans far faster than we can ever take it out and really the thing we need to do is to stop it going in in the first place. blading the theory is we seem to know the basic idea is very simple. if you go to the beach second you

pick up three pieces of litter so if you take a photo and you put it on the social networks i mean if we're on the right track. it'll take time but i think we're on the right track. obviously the answer isn't to clean a beach because we can clean it today and that will have more later tomorrow but the point is to make people aware that there is an extremely serious problem in the solution is right here and i think there was and i you know not a yeah i think what's been happening and we cleaner nester very once a year i think we carry out periodic clean ups with kogo three and other groups. you can clean it one day and it's clean and you go back the next day and you see the same mess again and yes it hurts it hurts and it is something that hurts when he has no second lady and i don't know. i suppose it's because of a lack of education among the population. and an insane lineup and i'm not sitting on the most correct guy in the world. but when i was young my parents taught me not

to drop litter and to keep it as not and put it no later ban. and then i can fly hope everyone will end up doing that one day. off way out and i have learned that it will be less quite a lot in the process of setting up the club and school and working with children. i saw that it was my duty to transmit this to the children. i thought that if we managed to get the youngsters to grow up with the idea of not leaving litter and making them aware that we have this problem. in later years when they're grown up they'll pass it on to their children. especially for thinking that in the future things will be better for us and essentially passing it on to children i think that . they're the future. therefore. you've got it we all got here they have every time i go to a school and i've visited fifty five of them last year. parents come up to me and

say. you really get your message across to the kids. it's essential to reach kids because as i always say it's too late for our generation. i mean how do you convince people my age we have two kids a mortgage and stress. but if we change the behavior of their kids we will have achieved something. they. bottles. can styrofoam sconce some throw. pieces of plastic i can't even identify. not nice to be on the beach and find plastic objects everywhere. people don't know how to dispose of bottles. they toss them into the ocean as if it were a trash bin. it's not the sea but at school i often tell of a children not to drop their candy wrappers on the floor. and. they don't seem to

care. as i often pick up after them because they don't seem to know what happens when they drop litter it's wrong it isn't right nature isn't meant for that we're changing it into something it isn't and one day will destroy it if we go on like this. feelings are hurt. she. told me just like you know this has to be done because. it was really amazing. for me it was worth it to the students is to raise awareness of this really we just said to the students when i need to pick up three three objects a and see what you can give him. also they might have color coded red orange is if they. work as well it's. fantastic i mean for me it's

a case of collecting that bridge and making something with it in rather than going into a big big trash bin i do think they knew the facts and figures they want to help finance the passionate about being involved and i was i think. they want the. association with protecting the environment and the maze and that's what it's all about. is much more attractive for people to try to modify the environment and then they don't have to modify their own behavior that enough to sort of. train them minds or train themselves to react in sequence with nature uncertain is surfing in real waves in the ocean the whole thing of anticipating the swell that's going to be coming. from the gas the wind direction the speed where to put yourself and all that is trained over years and years and sometimes decades and it all focuses down to the one point where you turn

your board around you touch away and what you've done is you've trained yourself to fit in with the rhythms of nature. of. your own mounts this week's timelines. how about a trip back in time or live in the roaring twenty's. drawings. how

about a change of scenery bulgaria's capital sofia whites to be explored. for just a change of scene one paper boat to two from. your romex and thirty minutes to deliver. crime fighters the new season of radio crime thrillers begins. domestic violence cyber click and human trafficking for investigative cases that will keep you on the toes of crime fighters series at the base idea so everyone present needs to listen to crime fighter and share tell a friend tell a friend to a friend client fighters don't miss it. they make a commitment. they find solutions. they conspire.

africa on the list stories of both people making a difference shaping their nation lives and their continent. w.'s new multimedia series for africa live. dot com africa on the move. place . this is deja vu news live from berlin could a new coalition government for germany within reach chancellor angela merkel and her conservatives have been holding to.