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5 months agoIt’s the UK. It’s a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one’s broken any laws they haven’t already nominally been punished for, there aren’t any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.
The UK only has one type of sewer, so the storm drains flow into the same waste processing plants as the toilets. However, those waste processing plants then declare an emergency due to unexpected high volumes and just dump everything into open waterways if it’s rained within the past week, which, as it’s the UK, it almost always has. There are multiple issues at play here, and they’re all dumb and foreseeable if you assume companies will do whatever is most profitable without breaking the law, and none of them are this person’s fault.