AN OVERVIEW OF THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN SEWAGE POLLUTION

SOLVING THE WATER AND SEWAGE CRISIS
Introduction

Water is an absolute necessity for human life, along with food, shelter, energy and effective waste recycling, yet water management is failing badly in the UK at present. Every time it rains heavily, there is a risk of discharge of untreated sewage into streams and rivers with consequent ecological damage and risk to human health, due to the combination of surface water and sewage. 
The management of our water infrastructure must be completely restructured and modernised, to separate sewage from surface water and industrial waste.
This paper aims to provide an overview of the whole field so that we can maintain our orientation and not become lost in a maze of competing technical details.

These are the factors affecting our water and sewage:

Climate change
Our planet’s climate is changing due to the burning of coal, oil and gas and other human activities. Surface temperatures are rising, and warm air can hold about 7% more moisture for every degree Centigrade of warming, which will mean more frequent and more intense precipitation of rain, and therefore more frequent and more intense floods. Warming also means that droughts may become more frequent in some parts of the country. In the longer term, sea level rise will threaten coastal flooding. Observations recorded by the Meteorological Office confirm that our climate is becoming wetter: “UK winters for the most recent decade (2014–2023) have been 9% wetter than 1991–2020 and 24% wetter than 1961–1990, with smaller increases in summer and autumn and none in spring”.

These changes are imposing stresses on our water systems, and the stresses will become more intense in coming years.

To avoid increasing episodes of flooding, we must therefore:

1.1 Plant trees on the tops of hills - Which greatly slows down the rate of water coming from the hills
1.2 Provide fields that can be deliberately flooded (polders) in the event of heavy rainfall
1.3 Provide flood protection for settlements vulnerable to flooding
1.4 Abandon some settlements that cannot be protected
1.5 Engineer some bottlenecks e.g. bridges, with flumes and other technologies
1.6 Dredge some river channels
1.7 Protect some estuaries with tidal barrages
1.8 Ensure that the rainwater run-off from all new build housing and hard surfacing is unable to get in to the sewers, and is used or returned to the environment as close as possible to the place that it falls.

Sewage
We are poisoning the environment by throwing away a substance that has value as a fertiliser and an energy source. Human excrement is a valuable resource when properly treated, but an ecocidal agent if released into water ways in its raw state. Proper treatment of sewage entails keeping it strictly separated from surface water running off from things like roofs and roads, and strictly separated from industrial waste.

We therefore need to
2.1 Create many new channels for surface water to run back to waterways without mixing with sewage.
2.2 Treat sewage (uncontaminated by industrial waste) by anaerobic digestion to produce valuable soil conditioner and biogas that can be fed into the gas grid.
2.4 Enable sewage to be recycled safely by identifying all forms of industrial and chemical waste, separate them from sewage, and find ways of managing them in a scientific way by combining them with other wastes, sometimes creating value for what was previously a waste industrial product.

3. Agricultural waste Slurry from cattle sheds often overflows into local ditches and streams, especially in times of heavy rainfall, just as happens with human sewage. Cattle and poultry effluents should therefore be digested to produce soil conditioner (fertiliser) and usable biogas. Inevitably, corporations that manufacture artificial fertiliser will work hard to prevent this outcome, and we must be prepared to meet all their push-back talking points.

This brief overview shows that there is a huge amount of work to be done, which will require a serious amount of money that cannot be generated by just putting up water bills.



See Paying for water services