Fifteen thousand British behaviors pour into the sea, rejecting large quantities of wastewater. Several beaches of the United Kingdom have been prohibited for swimming due to the health risk, and French elected officials have alerted to the induced pollution.
Le Monde with AFP
The British government wants to reduce untreated wastewater to zero wastewater by 2050, the Minister of the Environment announced on Saturday 27 August. It is a question of “revolutionizing our sewer networks”, underlined George Eustice, interviewed by BBC 4.
radio
The Minister assured that the current British government – which has only a few days of existence before him before the appointment of a successor to Boris Johnson at the head of the Conservative Party – was “the first to S ‘ seriously attack this file “. “The reason why this decision was postponed by successive governments, both employees and conservatives, for decades, is that we have wanted water bills to remain low, and we can understand it,” pleaded M. Eustice.
colossal investments required
Water distribution companies will have to invest 56 billion pounds (66 billion euros) to renovate sewer systems, according to a government plan presented on Friday. They will have to have renovated the pipes pouring near the designated areas of swimming by 2035, and at the latest in 2050 for the others. The additional cost for consumers by 2030 will be around 12 pounds (14 euros) per year and per household, and 42 pounds (49.50 euros) by 2050.
George Eustice recalled that the 15,000 wastewater pipes pouring out today in the sea constituted “a heritage of the Victorian infrastructure” of the 19th e century. Untreated wastewater can thus be poured into large quantities; Particularly when the evacuation systems are saturated by violent rains, as happened last week. In the midst of summer season, many beaches in the United Kingdom have been prohibited for swimming due to the health risk. The Liberal Democratic opposition described the government’s plan as “cruel jokes” and estimated that there would always be 325,000 waste of wastewater per year in 2030, in the sea, in lakes or rivers.
Friday, the president of the Hauts-de-France region, Xavier Bertrand, alerted the French government to these wastewater discharges, evoking an “ecological disaster” which aggravates from Brexit. The European Commission also said on Thursday that it would soon respond to complaints issued by European deputies on the subject.