sewage pollution is at a crisis point in the UK

Water firms admit pumping raw sewage into UK rivers and seashores 1,000 times a day

We wish that this was the only scandal in the United Kingdom, a potentially even bigger problem is the fact that in 2020, water companies produced 807,882 tonnes of sludge. 94% of sludge was reused for soil and agriculture, 3% was incinerated, and 3% was reused through a variety of ‘other’ uses according to the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs.

This includes:

land reclamation and restoration
composting
forestry

Besides PFAS, there are also other toxic matters in the sewage and science has proven that both PFAS and toxins find their way to our food. with more than 750,000 tons ending up on British soil annually, the island is polluting its population for generations to come. Looking at how Europe and the European Union are looking at PFAS, it’s quite clear that they are trying to phase out PFAS from the industry. They use a phrase to only keep PFAS where it’s shown to be irreplaceable. Being an innovating organization, we can’t see that there are no such things as irreplaceable. There are areas that for sure are harder than others but, irreplaceable no.

What is the Great Britain doing?

Water chiefs blame UK government for failure to stop sewage pollution

There seems to be a “blame game” going on in the UK. This is the problem you end up with when you don’t have a sustainable business model. As soon as there’s just a cost and no real income, then the maintenance. To have a model that only is a purely financial model, where somebody acts as a bank won’t solve the British problem.

According to the Guardian

According to data from the Environment Agency, sewage has been dumped into the seas and rivers around the UK more than 770,000 times over the course of 2020 and 2021 – the equivalent of almost 6m hours.

During his short stint as environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena demanded that every water company boss write to him with plans to reduce storm overflows, where human waste is pumped into rivers and onto beaches.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs did not publicly release these letters until months later when obliged to under the Freedom of Information Act.

The problem
Even if the environmental secretary Ranil demands plans from the wastewater bosses, he won’t receive more than potentially a huge engineering bill, or an offer for an oxidation project costing on average 150,000 pounds for a small city of 100,000 in population. This will solve the PFAS and partly the sewage problem but, Great Britain has to sit down and look at the problem from a broader perspective, to see that energy, water, and food all are connected.

Now there seems to be a shift in power in Great Britain looking at the polls for the upcoming election. For the sewage problem, it doesn’t matter who wins since there are solutions that don’t require drastically increased water bills for society. What it does require is a broader collaboration, solutions like the Oaktree offer.

There are solutions

The Oaktree will be in the UK in July to meet the wastewater authorities, and others to present how we can be of help cleaning up the mess, generate healthy jobs and green energy.