Revealed: the ‘black box’ wastewater trade that rakes in millions for UK utility companies

Firms made more than £340m last year from processing industrial and commercial wastewater at sewage works that are unable to remove many chemical pollutants

Water companies in the UK made more than £340m in revenue last year by pouring billions of litres of industrial and commercial wastewater into sewage treatment works that experts say are not designed to remove most chemicals, leaving pollutants to pass into rivers, seas and farmland.

Water companies are required by law to take industrial wastewater and issue permits called “trade-effluent consents” that allow businesses to send it to sewage works, though water companies can refuse applications.

However, no independent regulator oversees the trade-effluent process and there is no central register, so Watershed Investigations, the Guardian and the campaign group River Action compiled a database of 26,000 consents, providing the first ever national picture of the system.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/oct/09/uk-water-companies-industrial-commercial-wastewater-sewage-treatment

Blood toxins at record levels in residents near chemicals plant

Residents living near a a chemical factory linked to historic forever chemicals emissions have hugely elevated levels of banned carcinogencs in their blood. Watershed teamed up with Manchester Metropolitan University and Leigh Day to offer blood testing to people living near the site following Watershed’s discovery that the site was discharging high levels of the banned PFOA forever chemical into the river Wyre.

“Nobody trusts the water, not with all the cancers,” Chief Tuccaro.

Canada’s oil companies want permission to treat and release toxic waste from Alberta’s tar sands into the Athabasca River — the same river that flows into the drinking water supplies of First Nations communities. But many First Nations leaders say they’re already carrying an unbearable burden from the world’s fourth‑largest oil reserve, with health impacts that continue to mount.

The Forever Lobbying Papers

The Forever Lobbying Project exposes the lobbying and disinformation campaign orchestrated by the chemical and plastic lobbies to prevent the ban of these “forever chemicals” in the European Union. Working with experts, the project calculated the cost of decontaminating Europe if nothing is done to combat PFAS emissions.

Click on the links below to read the full articles.

Plastic recycling’s dirty secrets

Recycling has long been promoted as the solution to plastic pollution. Plastic waste exports to non-OECD countries for that purpose are on the rise at over four million tonnes annually, mostly from ten high-income countries.  Malaysia has become a top destination and global exports have increased by over 30% from 2022-2023, according to UN trade data.  But how clean and safe is the recycling trade and how much plastic can actually be recycled?

Click on the link below to listen to the full documentary podcast, or listen on your own podcast app by searching ‘Plastic Recycling’s Dirty Secrets’ on the BBC.

Also click on the below links to watch the BBC TV news report and to listen back to The Climate Question, also on the BBC.

Sri Lanka to probe ‘corruption’ in handling of 2021 cargo ship disaster

Sri Lanka’s new government, led by left-leaning President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, will launch a fresh investigation into the handling of the MV X-Press Pearl cargo ship disaster that devastated marine life along swaths of the island nation’s coastline three years ago, a senior minister has told Al Jazeera.

The announcement came amid allegations of corruption, delay tactics and mismanagement in dealing with the aftermath of the disaster, and a lack of compensation for the affected fishermen.

Click on the link below to read the full article.

Cost of dealing with PFAS problem sites ‘frightening’, says Environment Agency

Exclusive: The Environment Agency warns it lacks budget to tackle England’s rising number of potential ‘forever chemicals’ locations. The number of sites identified as potentially having been polluted with banned cancer-causing “forever chemicals” in England is on the rise, and the Environment Agency (EA) says it does not have the budget to deal with them.

Residents near Lancashire chemicals plant told to peel homegrown produce

Residents around a chemicals plant have been told to wash and peel homegrown vegetables before eating while an investigation into potential soil contamination with a cancer-causing chemical PFOA gets under way.

Watershed has uncovered docs that show that 115 tonnes of PFOA has been emitted since the 1950s. Being a ‘forever chemical’ that doesn’t break down, it is likely to still be in the environment somewhere.

Experts say they are shocked that action wasn’t taken sooner, that kms around the plant could be affected, and that the investigation into contam is too limited and should be looking for more than just one PFAS.

The Environment Agency, the UK Health Security Agency and Wyre Council are working together to see whether the area has been affected. They are testing public land in the first instance and may cast the net wider if contamination is found.

A former worker told Watershed that the plant has improved its processes but that “settling tanks and effluent pits used to overflow in heavy rain and everything would get into the river … we had to use anti-foam to stop the river frothing up.”

‘Dirty secret’: insiders say UK water firms knowingly break sewage laws

Whistleblowers say UK water companies are knowingly failing to treat legally required amounts of sewage, and that some treatment works are manipulating wastewater systems to divert raw sewage away from the works and into rivers and seas.

It is well known that water companies are dumping large volumes of raw sewage into rivers and seas from storm overflows but an investigation by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations reveals that the industry’s “dirty secret” is bigger, broader and deeply systemic.

By law, every wastewater treatment works must treat a minimum amount of sewage as stipulated in their environmental permits. Four whistleblowers have told Watershed that a large proportion regularly fail to do so and are not reporting it to the environmental regulator.

Watershed releases new documentary ‘TOXIC’

Watershed has worked with the ENDS Report to produce a new film ‘TOXIC: Britain’s forever poisoned rivers and seas’. The film can be viewed at endsreport.com/toxic and reveals PFAS pollution hotspots across England, particularly in the Mersey and Wyre. Featuring Feargal Sharkey, Dame Natalie Bennett, Clare Cavers, Dr Patrick Byrne, Dr Tom Miller and Lizzie Carr, it tells the worrying story of widespread carcinogen contamination.