Environment Agency insider alleges ‘cover-up’ over sewage sludge on farmland
Environment Agency insider alleges ‘cover-up’ over sewage sludge on farmland
Environment Agency insider alleges ‘cover-up’ over sewage sludge on farmland
An Environment Agency (EA) insider has broken ranks to expose what they describe as a “deliberate and ongoing cover-up” of the public health and environmental dangers of spreading sewage sludge on farmland.
They accuse the regulator and government of colluding with water companies for years to facilitate the dumping of waste under the guise of soil enrichment – without oversight, transparency or testing.
“This has been going on for decades,” they said. “The sludge regime is still being run under guidance created by the water companies. And when the Environment Agency finally funded research that uncovered real dangers, they buried it.”
They started trialling this around where I lived when I was a late teen, and my dad, who’d worked for a water company, was pretty convinced that the water companies knew this wasn’t safe right from the word go. He had worked designing and building sewage treatment systems, and even before microplastics were seen as an issue he was convinced that there would be no way to make this stuff clean or safe enough to go on farmland