STORM Arwen has come and mostly gone, leaving piles of seaweed, rubbish and plastic bottles on some of our beaches. Dig around amongst the mounds of weed and it’s often the case that you will find more biological waste – the grey strands of old wet wipes, tampon applicators, sodden sanitary pads.
A storm is always a time of caution for sea swimmers like myself, not just because of the huge waves it can bring but because, if it comes with heavy rain, we know that sewage is more likely to end up in the water, and with it harmful bacteria.
Recent news items have made me ponder, again, the waste we put into our waters and how it ends up there. A Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) report, for instance, revealed that sewage discharges into UK coastal waters have increased by 87.6 per cent in the last 12 months and that one small Scottish waterway, the Figgate Burn, whose outlet is close to where I swim on Portobello beach, had E.coli levels that were continuously at a level that poses an “extreme risk to public health”.
There isn’t a great deal more about Scotland in the report, since neither Scottish Water nor SEPA provided the relevant information for Scotland. Read it and you might think, given the relative rareness of mentions of Scottish locations, that Scotland is not so bad. You might even – having heard the recent fuss around the UK Environment Bill amendments and sewage discharges in England by private water companies – be feeling relieved that at least we’re in Scotland and have Scottish Water, a publicly owned quango.
But the truth is that it’s worse here.
A recent joint article by The Herald and The Ferret showed that combined sewage overflows, which are designed to release untreated sewage in times of extreme rain, are less monitored in Scotland than in England, with only 10%of them monitored here, compared to 80% in England.
The article stated that The Ferret had seen internal emails in which Scottish Government officials “criticised the public company, Scottish Water, for allowing an “unacceptably high” number of leaks from its sewerage systems.
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That’s one of the reasons I’m behind a letter to the Scottish Environmenal Protection Agency, along with fellow swimmers, backing an application for bathing waters status for Wardie Bay, one of my local swimming spots. The bid was initially made by swimmers along with Wardie Bay Beachwatch in 2019 but appears caught in bureaucratic issues.
As a swimmer, I’m keen, for health reasons, to know when faecal waste might be in the water. But, also, I see monitoring of the type that comes with bathing waters status as one of the ways we can keep track of what our sewers are releasing into our rivers and seas; a means of calling out the problem. Awareness is growing of the scale of the issue, and of the way in which our sewage now comes contaminated with plastic – twin wastes together, both impacting the life in our waters.
Bathing waters status (which is also currently being pursued for a stretch of the River Almond) is just one of many ways we can create pressure around the issue.
One recent report that gives some indication of the untreated waste from our sewers that is arriving, via our rivers, at the sea, is the Marine Conservation Society’s 2021 Great British Beach Clean results. You only have to look at their litter breakdown list and see that the second most collected form of litter is wet wipes, to know that sewage is part of that story.
Such data suggests the time for nudging people not to put wet wipes down their loos is over – a ban on the products themselves is sorely needed. We know, after all, such bans work. There are now fewer cotton buds – six per hundred metres of beach, according to the MCS’s report, rather than the 15 found in 2020 – and one of the chief reasons is that plastic cotton buds were, following campaigning by MCS, banned – first in Scotland in 2019, then later in England in 2020.
But it also suggests we need greater monitoring and control of our combined sewage overflows. We need the kind of “electronic monitoring” of all combined sewage overflows that the Marine Conservation Society calls for in a recent Scottish parliamentary briefing. And we need, as the society also asks, for this data “to be published on an annual basis, along with performance targets, by 2024”.
As I look at the waste on our beaches, I think of a few lines from the devastating and beautiful poem, What The Clyde Said After COP26, by our Makar, Kathleen Jamie. Writing in the voice of the Clyde, she declares, “But how can I stomach any more/ of these storm rains? How can I/ slip quietly away to meet my lover,/ the wide-armed Ocean, knowing/ I’m a poisoned chalice/ she must drain, drinking/ everything you chuck away…”
Let’s not stomach it any longer.
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