• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    It’s the UK. It’s a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one’s broken any laws they haven’t already nominally been punished for, there aren’t any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Well thats fucking outrageous. That means the UK is constantly flooding the ocean with tire rubber, oil and gasoline, dropped trash, fecal matter from animals, etc

      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Even if nationalised, our water infrastructure still needs hundreds of billions of pounds investing in it to bring it up to an acceptable standard, and the government doesn’t have the money and has other priorities to spend it on if they magically got a surprise pile of cash. The only financially viable way to fix the problem in a hurry would be to seize past dividends from water company shareholders to cover the cost of doing the things the water companies were supposed to be doing (which would conveniently tank the share prices and make nationalising the water much cheaper), but lots of pensions are propped up mostly by water shares, so doing that would plunge lots of pensioners into poverty, which isn’t politically viable as the government’s already in enough trouble for perceived being mean to pensioners, and they can’t afford to support more impoverished pensioners.