30 water treatment works released 11bn litres of raw sewage in a year, study suggests
Every day in the UK about 347,000 kilometres of sewers collect over 11 billion litres of waste water.
The system is 364 out of 365 efficient then. And getting it the next 12 hours efficient would probably cost 50% of the total cost of the system right not. Then the next 6 hours another 50% and so on. That’s just the way that marginal costs work…..
The question is never whether there will be shit in the rivers. It’s how much shit and how much are you willing to pay to have less? Oh, not that much? Well….
I keep saying to people moaning that ‘the water companies’ should have to pay for the improvements to stop river discharges, whose sh*t is it anyway? If the public want sparkling clear rivers then they’ll have to pay for it, they are the producers of the sewage in the first place, and ultimately they are the only people who can pay for it to be disposed of correctly. They can pay as customers via bills from private companies, or by bills from a nationalised industry plus extra taxes most likely to fund investment. Either way, the public will have to pay for the disposal of its own sh*t.
Jim, you are spot on. The discharge of water containing shit – incidentally, not 11 billion litres of piss and shit, but 11 billion litres of water containing piss and shit – is partly because people now use more water than in the past, and when you empty the bath or take a shower and it mixes with the flush from your crapper, the whole lot becomes shit soup.
I’m old enough to remember when coastal communities just dumped everything in the sea via ‘long outfalls’, and presumably, inland communities dumped it all in their local river. What else do fish eat? Plastics? They’d rather have a nice turd!
Up in the Lake District, the water from the Thirlmere reservoir was so clean that it required no treatment until about 1960 when under pressure from the hiking mob, access to the catchment was granted. The water is now full of shit bacteria. It ain’t just bears (or the Pope) that shits in the wood!
Immigration. Produces more shit. QED.
Tim, that’s a sample of 30 sewage plants out of slightly more than 7000 total. If the figures are typical (there’s a lot of quibbling of course) then that’s a total of 233 days of sewage getting dumped or ~64% of the total load so they’re only 36% efficient. Certainly no CXO should be getting a bonus on those figures.
When I was but a lad it wasn’t shit we worried about it was essence of dead sheep. On the other hand in summer you’d occasionally see a goldfish in the river so presumably the water quality wasn’t too bad.
Interesting article in the Grauniad: slightly divergent from the last lot of data I saw which gave Scottish Water (Scottish government-owned) as the worst offender per million gallons of water followed by Welsh Water (not-for-profit set up by Welsh government) and Thames Water one of the least bad. Of course Thames Water will look worse in terms of absolute numbers than relative ones as it is by far the biggest water company, but the graphs shown are simply unbelievable.
Ah! this is all based on “new research” by a “visiting scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology” not actual facts…