Three questions about the controversial discharge of British sewage into the English Channel

by time news August 28, 2022

August 28, 2022

“The English Channel and the North Sea are not dumping grounds!” On Wednesday August 24, on Twitter, French MEP Stéphanie Yon-Courtin did not hide her deep annoyance at the UK’s dumping of untreated sewage into the sea. With her colleagues Pierre Karleskind and Nathalie Loiseau, she then announced that she had seized the European Commission. Also offended by this practice, and worried about the disastrous consequences it could have on the French coasts, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, denounced the laxity shown by the British authorities in pollution control since Brexit.

Why does the UK dump its sewage into the sea?

It is a British legislative standard out of step with the current attention paid to the environmental cause, but which remains in force. In the event of heavy rains, the water companies are exempted from treating the wastewater and have the possibility of discharging it into the sea. risk of flooding when a major water ingress occurs. However, in recent days, heavy rainfall has been falling on the dry ground of the United Kingdom, causing strong flows and a risk of saturation of the pipes. According to Britain’s Environment Minister George Eulice, around 15,000 sewage pipes flow into the sea, ‘a legacy of 19th century Victorian infrastructure’, which no government has until now. there considered modernizing.

Why is this rejection causing a scandal?

The UK practice of dumping at sea is not new, but it appears to have increased since the UK left the European Union, with the Environment Agency counting 400,000 such spills in 2021 However, the island remains a signatory to the United Nations conventions on the protection of shared waters. Inside the country, these spills are therefore scandalous, and the Liberal Democrats have deplored “a lack of control” in the treatment of wastewater, leading to pollution dangerous for marine biodiversity and human beings. The Environment Agency currently advises against swimming at around 50 beaches in England and Wales, and the UK government advises on its website that sewage-borne viruses can cause diarrhoea, infections and gastric diseases.

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In addition to being health, this scandal is also political. The daily The Guardian reveals, in fact, that Liz Truss, candidate to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, cut, when she was head of the Department for the Environment, between 2014 and 2016, certain funding from the Agency for the environment, part of which was used precisely to monitor companies discharging wastewater into the sea.

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What is the UK planning to do about it?

While Xavier Bertrand asks the United Kingdom to respect “the environmental requirements of the European Union in terms of the discharge of untreated wastewater”, the British government announced on Saturday that it wanted to reduce this type of discharge to zero in the sea. To do this, it provides for major investments to “revolutionize our sewer systems”, in the words of the Minister of the Environment. Thus, by 2035, water distribution companies will have to renovate the pipes discharging near bathing areas and, by 2050, do the same for the others. Black point, the works will be financed by an increase in the cost of water of 12 pounds per year and per household by 2030. An announcement which should not calm the anger of the British people, who are currently leading an almost general strike against dear life.