Why Britain Stinks
Whenever I was in a bad mood as a child, my parents would toss me into the sea. It was the one thing, they said, that snapped me out of a temper. I grew up a 10-minute walk from the ocean in Wembury, a picture-postcard village in the southwest of England—an area popular for surfing, swimming, and rockpooling.
My father still lives in Wembury, and I still love to get in the water when I’m back home (I now live in London). One day in June 2021, however, I learned from a community Facebook page that going for a swim would not be possible. A blackboard had been erected at the beach with a message scrawled across it in white letters: BEACH CLOSED DUE TO POLLUTION INCIDENT.
In England, such warnings are a common sight: Human waste is routinely dumped into its rivers and seas. Surfers Against Sewage, a campaign group, runs an app that warns users nationwide, via green ticks and red crosses on a map, where it is and isn’t advisable to enter the water. Very commonly, the red crosses are caused by water companies discharging diluted but untreated sewage into the sea.
The practice is designed to be a legal, last-ditch safety measure in the event of a heavy rainstorm, to prevent the sewage from backing up into homes and businesses. This is supposed to be a rare occurrence, but recent data from England’s Environment Agency showed that untreated sewage more than 300,000 times nationally last year, for a total of more than 1.7 million hours. did not, in fact, follow storms. As bad as the figures for 2022 sound, they are actually an improvement on 2021. The Environment Agency attributed the reduction than to any action on the part of water companies.
