Weekly Blog - 11 September 2023 - Sewage Spills
Sewage spills
Hardly a week goes by in the UK without another headline about water companies dumping untreated sewage into Britain’s rivers and seas. Now a new report by the Office for Environmental Protection is damning, saying the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the Environment Agency and the water regulator Ofwat have all failed to hold water companies to account for breaking the law. Water companies are allowed to pump untreated sewage into the sea and rivers to prevent sewage from overflowing, but only in very exceptional circumstances. However, this is happening far too often, at least 301,091 times in 2022, an average of 824 times a day.[1] Every time this happens it causes untold damage to rivers, lakes, streams, the seas, wildlife, plant life, fish, and the people who swim in these waters and live near them. Sky News reports just one incident where dozens of swimmers fell ill with diarrhoea and vomiting after swimming through untreated sewage near Sunderland. One swimmer posted “I have been feeling pretty rubbish since the race, but I guess that's what you get when you swim in s***.” Another added, “That now explains why I spent Monday night with my head in the toilet after racing Sunday morning!” [2]
How should Christians respond?
It is hard to imagine that there could be a Christian position or response to something as base as sewage spills. But, the Bible is incredibly clear how much God loves and cares for his creation, and how we are called to look after it, as the book of Deuteronomy says, “To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.” (Deut 10: 14) By any measure, pumping raw untreated sewage into rivers and seas is despoiling God’s creation. It seems to stem from private water companies, making significant profits, failing to put sufficient investment into sewage infrastructure, and taking the easier and cheaper option of simply dumping it as someone else’s problem, and regulators failing to hold those companies sufficiently to account. Such spills should not be permitted under any circumstances, no matter how ‘exceptional’.
Pollution
Pumping untreated sewage into rivers and seas is essentially pollution of the worst kind. It contributes to a wider global problem of pollution. A major study in 2017 by the UN Environment Programme, Towards a Pollution Free Planet, concluded “Pollution today is pervasive and persistent. While the world has achieved significant economic growth over the past few decades, it has been accompanied by large amounts of pollution, with significant impacts on human health and ecosystems and the ways in which some of the major Earth system processes, such as the climate, are functioning. Though some forms of pollution have been reduced as technologies and management strategies have advanced, approximately 19 million premature deaths are estimated to occur annually as a result of the way societies use natural resources and impact the environment to support production and consumption.” The report went on to find that “Pollution can have negative impacts and disproportionate burdens on women and men, and particularly on the poor and the vulnerable such as the elderly, children and the disabled, affecting their rights to health, water, food, life, housing and development. Many toxic dumpsites are located in poor areas, leading to environmental injustice. Pollution has significant economic costs from the point of view of health, productivity losses, health-care costs and ecosystem damages. These costs, already substantial, are expected to rise over time, not only because of the direct effect of pollution on health, but also the impact of weakened livelihoods, as well as the longer-term impact on ecosystem services, that in turn affect local communities, societies and economies … Pollution poses a direct threat to respecting, protecting and promoting human rights and gender equality, international human rights obligations related to health, life, food and water, safeguarding a healthy and sustainable environment for present and future generations”.[3]
What can we do about it?
The widespread pumping of untreated sewage into rivers and seas around the UK is a classic symptom of our current linear economic model, which uses polluting methods to extract, consume, and then discard natural resources and waste, including human waste. We must shift to what experts call a circular economy. Just as God designed his creation so nothing is wasted in nature but gets broken down and reused in the biosphere, a circular economy would eliminate all pollution and overconsumption and push resources back around the economy in a circular fashion, moving us back into balance with creation as God intended. It would also end all waste, including human waste. Arise’s 4 Shifts Campaign calls for a shift to a circular economy as a key part of rewiring of our global economy to be green and fair, so it still creates the jobs and wealth that lift people out of poverty, but does so without relying on fossil fuels and overconsumption which is wrecking our planet.
To trigger this shift the governments of the world should negotiate a new global circular economy law. This new global treaty should revise, strengthen and incorporate the existing global agreements on the environment into a single global agreement on the circular economy. Specifically this law should ban all polluting activity, further human expansion into wild lands, the production of natural resources that takes out more than it puts back in, and all waste. This would include completely banning the dumping of untreated sewage into rivers and seas, and instead require all human waste to be treated and safely returned to the biosphere. It should also prevent invasive species, and invest in conservation, re-wilding and reforestation programmes. This law should be implemented in every nation (4 Shifts Report, pg 112 – 117). Christians should be at the forefront of the campaign to keep our rivers and our seas free of waste, so they can be enjoyed by all. We can all get involved by signing up to support the 4 Shifts Campaign today.
Find out more
Find out more about why the world needs 4 Shifts to transition to a fair and green global economy in Arise’s 4 Shifts Report.
And for the bigger picture of how God is at work in the world, and the role we all have to play in that work, check out the Arise Manifesto. This is Arise’s big picture, researched, Biblical, holistic and practical vision for a better world. It looks at what the Bible says, and what we can learn from the best data and the world’s leading experts on the five major areas of evangelism, discipleship, social justice, development and the environment. It then draws these lessons together into a practical road map for the changes we need to see in our world, which the Arise movement campaigns to achieve.
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[1] Watchdog finds sewage overflow failures may have broken environmental law, Sky News, (12 Sep 2023), https://news.sky.com/story/watchdog-finds-sewage-overflow-failures-may-have-broken-environmental-law-12959537
[2] Dozens of swimmers fall ill and get diarrhea at Sunderland race, prompting questions over sewage discharges, Sky News, (7 Aug 2023), https://news.sky.com/story/dozens-of-swimmers-fall-ill-and-get-diarrhoea-at-sunderland-race-prompting-questions-over-sewage-discharges-12935329
[3] Towards a Pollution Free Planet, UNEP, (2017), pg 6 – 7, http://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/21800/UNEA_towardspollution_long%20version_Web.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y