A decade inside England’s sewage scandal.
By Rachel Salvidge, Watershed Investigations.
Around a decade ago, when I learned water companies were using rivers as open sewers, I couldn’t believe it. It seemed like something from Pepys’ London, not 21st century England.
“The largest source of phosphorus entering rivers is sewage effluent”, I wrote in 2015 for the ENDS Report, at the time unaware of the scale of the problem. Then in 2016 I revealed that “water companies were refusing to disclose sewage discharge data” and a shocking picture began to emerge. I have since lost count of the number of stories I’ve written about sewage pollution and the Environment Agency’s failure to tackle it.
