Sewage Spills in Special Areas of Conservation: A Growing Concern

One thing that's great about Marine Protected Areas is that it protects the habitats that are in that area. So whether they be sponge reefs or coral reefs or maybe they're seagrass beds or mangrove areas or whatever they might be, the benefit of having these imaginary boundaries that are implemented is that they protect the areas from fishing damage from trawling or something like that, and it really helps. The problem with marine protected areas is that they are imaginary boundaries,

right? They don't have physical boundaries. They're just boundaries that are put on a map, and they're enforced by, you know, the authorities, the people who manage them. They may be local authorities. They might be a coast guard. They might just be a local area, local village. But regardless, those boundaries do not stop bad water quality from getting in. So it could be like anything from nutrients to sewage to sediment

can get into those marine protected areas. It's important that those are protected from land-based sources. But unfortunately, the article that we're going to cover today shows that there have been a ton of hours, like tens of thousands of hours, actually even hundreds of thousands of hours, where sewage was directly released into waterways in the UK. And we're going to talk about why that needs to stop and why that can't go into these area conservation zones for the UK. We're going to

talk about that on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. And this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. Now, in today's episode, we're going to be talking about sewage. Yes, the poop water.

The water that once you flush down the toilet, you're like, I don't even care what happens to it. I don't want to know about it. I can't believe that went down the toilet. Whatever you might think. That's what we're going to be talking about today. because it's news day today.

It's finding out what's happening in the ocean and we're going to find out what's happening in the UK amidst of sewage that's going directly into waterways, which gets into these areas, these special areas of conservation, otherwise known as marine protected areas. Obviously not something that we wanted to talk about in terms of the degradation that could happen, but the amount of hours, we're looking at over 100,000 hours across the UK of sewage that was released into

it. That's how many hours sewage was released directly into those areas. Not a good thing. But before we get into all of that, I want to talk to you a little bit about getting news to your inbox Mondays to Fridays from me to you as a gift for free. All you have to do is just put in your email at the link that I'm about to give you and then you get access to three news articles a day

that you can easily look through. You get access to knowing what happens when we release an episode or what kind of episodes we're going to be releasing on the podcast. You also get access to all the other podcasts that are friends of mine, you know, a little bit of a network we have going on, Loose Network, but these are friends that are doing some great work in wildlife, in veterinary science, and conservation, and communications, and

so forth. Really great episodes, so you can check that out just in the link in the show notes, or you can just go to speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter. That's speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter. All right, let's get back to the poop. That's right, the BS. So actually it's more of the HS, the human you know what. Sewers dumped for more than 100,000 hours in England's protected marine areas. Now this is a company called iNews. So it's inews.co.uk. I'll

put the link in the show notes for the actual article. It's really interesting because it looks like they did a bit of a study. or did a bit of an investigation. They said that there had been sewage discharges in marine special areas. And it looks like one, two, three, four, five areas. Humber Estuary up in the northeast of the UK, down in the south, Solent Maritime in the southern waters, Plymouth Sound and estuaries in southwest waters, Severn Estuary

over in the west, and then Moore Canby Bay. in the East, and all of them are over 10,000 hours. Some of them are 15, some of them are 18. Solent Maritime in the South, 18,000 hours of sewage spill in that time. Now, I know for a fact that sewage spills every once in a while. We have in many different countries, including Canada, the US, and the UK that I

know for sure. I'm sure Australia as well and other countries. We have these sewage treatment plants, and those treatment plants are there to capture all of our sewage and treat it before it goes back into our waterways, which is our rivers, our lakes, our streams, and eventually getting into

the ocean. But we want them to be clean. And there are specific regulations in each of these countries where there are numbers at the end of the pipe, so where the discharge actually happens from the sewage treatment plants. not from your homes, not from the businesses, not from the restaurants. Those restaurants all go into one plant, or the crap from the restaurants, the sewage from the houses, the sewage from the businesses, all go to a plant, a specific plant that captures

all of that. It gets treated, and then it goes back out into a stream or a river, usually a fairly large river that can handle this area. And based on the properties of that river, the flow, the height of the water, and so forth, and the water properties, it will have a number. The engineers will create a number, a wastewater number, to say, hey, your nitrates, your ammonia, your phosphates have to be a specific number in order to

release this. If they're not, then you can be fine. The region, the county, the council, wherever you are and wherever area you live in and whoever's in charge of that from a political standpoint will be in charge of making sure that number is there. And if that number is not there, you're in deep poopy water, literally. And that's something nobody wants, right? We want clean waters. We want to make sure our sewage works well. Now, there are different

levels of sewage. The secondary sewage is what we have normally have, which takes care of a lot of the major sewage. I know the tertiary sewage takes care of nutrients like nitrates and phosphates better. But these are point sources. So these are sources where the sewage gets treated, it goes out into a discharge into a pipe, and that pipe goes out either into a river or stream or a lake. Like for

instance, I live in Burlington. Burlington has a sewage treatment plant near the beach, which is kind of gross because when you're on the beach, all you're doing is smelling that sewage treatment plant. But we know the pipe goes out two kilometers out underneath the water, two kilometers out, and it gets discharged out there as treated water. Unfortunately, sometimes, not just that plant, but other plants, when it gets rainy and it rains too much and it overflows, then they have

to release the sewage into the water. It's not supposed to happen a lot of times, but it does happen, and as there are more More catastrophic events, like rain events where flooding would happen, more of that's going to happen. That's a climate change thing and a weather thing. That's not something that's going to be good in the future and has to be accounted for in the future. And that's a lot of design, a lot of wastewater engineering design and so forth to be able to ensure that we

properly treat those. Now, I've went on a little bit of a tangent, but I want to give you the basics of what's happening here. When we are seeing that nearly 18,000 hours of sewage is dumped in the Solent Maritime Special Area of Concern on the southern coast of England, which includes a major estuary that's home to the rare sponges and reefs, that obviously is not a good thing. That's something that there

needs to be better management of that area. Now, the southern area, the southern water, which was responsible for wastewater services in the region. So the company said that it will be investing more than 3 billion pounds between 2020 and 2025 to improve its network and reduce storm overflows. Now, this is something that happens all the time. We see companies that are managing these wastewater areas if they're privatized. Most places that I

know are usually government regulated, but it depends on the government. But because they could privatize it, they're regulated. So there has to be investment. So either it's public money or it's private money that has to be invested. But if it's private, it should be held to even more account to be like, hey, you know what? We can't do this anymore. You know, like we can't handle people putting this together where it's like we're overflowing this. But there

has to be investment. There has to be money investment to constantly update, continually update this area. Because if we don't, then boom. It's going to get flooded with nastiness. Literally, nastiness. And so like the company also plans to invest another 7.8 billion between 2025 and 2030 to upgrade its wastewater treatment works and reduce environmental damage. That's always nice, but that's a lot. It takes a long time. Why is

it taking so long? The Plymouth Sound and estuaries as a special area of concern located in the south coast of England, west of the Solent Maritime Southern area of Sac. Southern, ah. special area of conservation, had sewage dumped into it for over 15,400 hours last year. And there's more and more and more, and I'll link to the article so that you can see. And so this iNewsplace developed a manifesto of just being like, hey, you know what? We need to fix these things. And

obviously, this is a growing problem. Sewage should not happen in a country like the UK. or countries like the UK, and this has to be solved and needs to get buy-in from the government. And obviously the UK just went through a major election where there was a huge overturning of the government, not overturning in terms of a coup, but an overturn in terms of it's a new government. It's not the Conservative Party anymore. The

Labour won over the Conservatives. Unfortunately, the Labour hasn't really backed it in full. So, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party have signed up to the manifesto, but the Labour and the Conservatives are yet to back it in full. So, they probably back certain parts, but not full. So, there are certain people who have been stepping out. I don't know the people, Sir Kair Starmer, who I believe is actually, might be the Prime Minister now. I think if I

recognize the, maybe not, I don't know. I'll have to look that up, sorry. Don't believe me on that. But he basically stops short of fully committing to its five pledges, although he prays the manifesto. And there's a link to this manifesto in the article, which I'll link to. More than 20 environmental organizations have endorsed the manifesto, including the National Trust, Britain's biggest conservation charity. So that's a

plus. And it says that the National Trust spokesman said, It is appalling, our spokesperson said, it is appalling to hear about the number of sewage spills that were made into or along the borders of special areas of conservation. Just 14% of English rivers are in good ecological health and 1 in 10 freshwater and wetland species in the UK are threatened with extinction. That's not a good record to have. That is not a good record to

have. And here's the problem when you have special area of concerns or you have a marine protected area, you have some kind of protected area that doesn't have physical boundaries, is that the water can seep in and get in. So if it's bad water quality, the protection is not really great. It might be protected from extractive processes like fishing, mining, or habitat destruction like coastal development, but it doesn't necessarily stop any bad water quality from coming in. That

has to be managed from land. That has to be managed from people. And if you have the treatment facilities, upgrade them. Now, I know Canada and Ontario, especially because I live in Ontario, went through something like this over the last two decades, where they realized that the populations in certain areas were increasing dramatically. And they need, especially in Southern Ontario, they needed to upgrade their

facilities to accommodate those future concerns. So looking at population modeling for people, looking at how people will be using the area, that's going to change over time as there are more and more people on this planet. We have to house more and more people. There have to be the proper sewage treatment plants, facilities, upgrades and designs that need to go into place, especially if there's an area that's booming or there's an

area that just needs updating. It's old and it needs updating. That should be happening on an annual basis. These risk assessments, these evaluations have to go into play. If they don't, We get problems like smelly problems and sewage problems. It's not nice. It is not nice at all. And trust me, from a person who worked as one of his first jobs as a wetland technician in the Toronto region, you know, the Toronto has some very interesting things

that go into their rivers and stuff and the Don River. which can be a beautiful river at times. There are some shady parts that I didn't even want to walk into when I was working there because it looked really nasty and it was heavily polluted and needs to change. You just never know what you're going to get into. We know the problem, we know what's needed to fix it, more investment, more

political buy-in. It'll be really interesting to see now that the Labour Party is in power at a majority, from what I hear, and I don't know that political system very well. It's very similar to Canada's, but I don't know the full. It's got a lot of seats compared to Canada. So it'll be very interesting to see how that's done, regardless of the fact that the Labour Party should be more environmentally aware. hopefully will be. My understanding is they're a

little bit more left-leaning, a lot more left-leaning than the conservatives. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes and how the environment is treated in the future. We are at a crucial point in human history where governments need to focus on the environment. Governments need to be aware that the economy and the environment are tied together at this

point. Whether we thought about it before or not, it doesn't matter. At this point now, If we have a bad environment, we are going to be spending more money. It's going to be taking away money from the economy. It's going to be costing us more. Whether it's a carbon tax or some other type of tax, we're going to have to start paying for a lot of these natural disasters that are happening. And if we can't control things like sewage treatment plants ahead of time and be proactive

instead of reactive, we're going to be in trouble. So this is a heads up to all those my listeners in the UK. Make sure now the Labour Party is in power that you are putting their their feet to the fire on saying, hey, you know what? Like we need to make sure that these rivers are treated fairly. This is our lifeblood. This is our water. This is what we need to survive. We are an island. We need to make sure that our freshwater is in good condition, not only for the environment and

for the animals that are around, but also for human health. We need this to make sure that this goes well. And so investment's going to have to be made, spending's going to have to be made, and that's going to have to be foresight on the government. And so it's up to you as citizens to

make sure the government is looking forward. So my listeners here who are from the UK who are very environmentally focused, because you're listening to this podcast, so you want to learn about the environment, it is time to put this government to the test and say, hey, let's make sure our sewage doesn't go directly into our waterways anymore. Can we do that? That'd be great. All

right, that's it for today's episode. If you have a question or comment, or you're from the UK and you want to comment and you have more information on this, I would love to hear it. You can hit me up on Instagram, at howtoprotecttheocean. Just DM me, at howtoprotecttheocean. Other than that, and if you want to sign up for the newsletter, speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter. That's speakupforblue.com forward slash newsletter. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love for you to sign up to

the newsletter. And I want to thank you so much for sharing this episode for the people that you know will really enjoy it and listening. It is so, so nice to have an audience that listens and engages with me. I really, really love it. So thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew