Water company Welsh Water released sewage into rivers, lakes and the sea around Wales for almost 600,000 hours last year, data shows. This accounts for more than 25% of all hours of discharges into waterways across Wales and England.
Latest figures also show more than 83,000 spills in 2022 - 77,000 of which were “significant”.
Although not illegal, campaigners and experts say releasing the sewage poses a danger to human and animal health.
More water enters the system during heavy rainfall, which can include sewage, and companies then have to release it to relieve the pressure through combined storm overflows (CSOs). When it is released in this way, the sewage contains things like human waste, toilet paper and hygiene material which pose a serious risk to local wildlife and swimmers.
But the 592,569 of release time hours in Wales - 602,988 hours across the company’s whole patch which includes areas in England around Hereford and Chester - is still lower than in 2021 by almost 25%.
The new figures come just a few days after Welsh Water revealed customers would face “significant bill increases” to pay for measures to stop sewage being released.
The rivers with the most sewage dumped into them in 2022 were the River Garw, River Tawe, River Teifi, River Usk, River Rhymney and the River Taff.
The area at the top of the list was Carmarthenshire - with more than 11,000 sewage discharges, totalling about 88,000 hours.
Vile, we’re living in our own filth, and Welsh Water isn’t alone
How the hell did we come to this? Privatising water has been a disaster. Our essential systems shouldn’t be controlled by foreign interests. Wessex water is 100% Malaysian owned
The companies have no vested interested in repairing leaks and upgrading to protect the environment, it’s cheaper just to charge the customers more, because they’ve got a monopoly
And of course the Tories voted down the amendment to stop sewage dumping. M could they have chums with shares in the water companies?
Welsh Water is slightly different because I think it’s a not for profit company
But these figures show that’s no better
The government need to make sewage dumping illegal immediately
It’s disgusting! We go on about developing nations yet we have raw sewage/poo dumped in our rivers!!
Shame on all the MPs who are not doing anything about it - it’s a very serious health risk, no wonder so many people have common bugs like the class 1 carcinogen H Pylori
You’d have thought that the lesson of London’s “Great Stink” and Joseph Bazalgette’s remarkable solutions would have been absorbed by water companies over the last 150 years but it seems not so …
Southern water regularly discharges raw sewage into the Solent.
Several days last year the beach had to be closed the smell alone was disgusting. Warnings were given to stay out of the sea all along the south coast and Isle of Wight
Southern Water has received the largest fine of any water company …for pollution
The surges in our rivers that causes the sewage to be released is also becuase under EU environmental restrictions we have been prevented from dredging our rivers. We should start dredging and the problem will reduce dramatically, plus houses being flooded will become a rarity again.
Blame the EU - but ofcourse the media will say otherwise, to them the EU is a religion and a church and can never be blamed for anything bad, only good things happen in the EU…
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Or, as Professor David Demeritt, a professor of geography at King’s College London told Countryfile last week, “There has been an awful lot of garbage, if not factual untruths about dredging… it won’t make any difference with really heavy rain. If you dredge, the water ends up in someone else’s kitchen downstream, more quickly.”
So it’s not true that EU law bans dredging, although it’s fair to say that some EU rules can affect dredging decisions. And it’s not true that dredging could have prevented much of the recent flooding—potentially, in some cases, it could have made it worse.
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Should this man be right in what he says, then your assumtions do not hold I am afraid.
However I admire our effort to blame the EU for anything,
I’m not blaming the EU for everything I’m saying that the UK has been unable to dredge rivers because of EU directives on protection of the environment. You have the same problem in Germany.
The reason rivers are bursting their banks is because of lack of dredging - we haven’t done it for decades. Its part of the EU Water Framework Directive - it doesn’t say “you’re not allowed to dredge your rivers” but it does say you must not do anything to damage habitat etc. Difficult when you drive an excavator through the river bed and dump it to make a new golf course.
