50 signatures reached
To: Government
End Sewage Dumping Into Rivers and Seas
Sign, share, and tell your MP: stop sewage dumping and protect our waterways!”
- Let’s make a difference: pressure the government to ban sewage dumping, reinvest profits, and bring water back into public ownership!
Why is this important?
This is important because sewage pollution directly harms people, wildlife, and the environment.
- Protect Public Health – Sewage carries bacteria, viruses, and chemicals that can make people sick if it enters rivers, seas, or drinking water.
- Save Wildlife – Rivers, lakes, and oceans are home to fish, birds, and plants that are killed or damaged by untreated sewage.
- Preserve Ecosystems – Clean water is essential for healthy ecosystems. Sewage disrupts the balance, leading to long-term environmental damage.
- Prevent Climate & Environmental Damage – Polluted water contributes to wider environmental issues, including harming the oceans, coastal areas, and local communities.
- Uphold Human Rights – Water is a basic human need. Everyone deserves safe, clean water, not water treated as a profit-making commodity.
In essence: clean water is life — we can’t let profit destroy it.
Privatised water companies have been allowed to prioritise shareholder dividends over environmental protection and infrastructure investment. The result has been widespread sewage dumping into our rivers and seas, damaging wildlife, harming public health, and polluting our natural environment.
We call on the Government to:
• End the system that allows water companies to effectively self-regulate.
• Legislate to remove the routine use of sewage overflow discharges into rivers and coastal waters.
• Introduce a clear and time-bound plan to return water services to public ownership.
• Require mandatory reinvestment of profits into infrastructure and environmental protection.
Clean water and healthy ecosystems must come before corporate profit.
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Sewage spill scale
- In 2023, water companies discharged untreated sewage into rivers and seas for around 3.6 million hours — the worst on record. That’s more than 410 years’ worth of raw sewage dumped in one year.
- There were approximately 464,056 sewage spill events reported in 2023 — up about 54 % from the previous year.
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How frequent and long
- On average, each monitored storm overflow spilled around 31.8 times during 2023 — far above the government’s target of less than 10 per year.
- Untreated sewage spills often lasted around 8 hours each time they occurred.
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Coastal pollution
- Analysis shows over 68,000 incidents of sewage released directly into the seas and estuaries in 2023, lasting more than 440,000 hours near coastal waters.
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Environmental impact
- Sewage discharges contribute to widespread water quality failures — with many waterbodies not meeting ecological health targets because of sewage and wastewater pollution.
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Health & Recreation
- High sewage spill rates have been linked with increased illness reports after swimming in bathing waters, with thousands of people falling sick in recent seasons.
