In 1986, Danish national news broadcast (DR), showed a fishing boat docking in the port of Gilleleje with a box of dead lobsters. The lobsters had died from oxygen depletion. Oxygen depletion in the polluted Danish waters – a result of inadequate environmental legislation and limited treatment of our wastewater.

The dead lobsters on TV started a huge nationwide debate about oxygen depletion in the Danish waters. And the lobsters were the indirect cause of the launch of Denmark’s most ambitious environmental plan to date, Water Environment Plan I. A plan that put Denmark on the world map. And for a short time Denmark became a pioneer in the field of wastewater treatment.

Today, many years later, Danish television is back with images of desert landscapes on the seabed, and the state of the aquatic environment is now again so critical that there aren’t even dead lobsters to show anymore – just a dead seabed with oxygen depletion, oxygen odor and “Fedtemøg” (“fatty muck”) – voted word of the year in Denmark in 2024.

Discharging clean and treated wastewater from our cities and industries is mandatory to save and protect the biodiversity in our precious aquatic environment. A water environment which unfortunately in most places is unacceptably poor. And we need to act now as our future most probably includes mores intensive challenges with larger cities and more extreme weather events created by climate change.

We need to get lobsters back in the waters! Lobster means lobster – hence the name.
Lobster was founded in 2017 with the aim of providing specialist knowledge for wastewater management and treatment.

Lobster = Peter Tychsen