<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/26/england-water-companies-shareholders-dividends-river-sea>
"So that’s how they do it. I’d been wondering how, when more sewage has been
entering our rivers than ever before, some of the water companies have managed
to improve the ratio of the sewage they treat v the sewage that pours untreated
from their storm overflows into our rivers and the sea. Now we know.
It’s called “flow trimming”. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? What it means is
that sewage is diverted into rivers and ditches upstream of the water treatment
works. By reducing the amount of sewage entering the works, the companies can
claim to be dealing responsibly with a higher proportion of it.
It’s a lucrative scam, revealed as a result of digging by Watershed
Investigations and the
Guardian. Improving “regulatory performance” is
expensive. Faking it is cheap, in fact better than cheap, as diverting sewage
before it reaches the treatment plant cuts costs. It’s yet another of the
perverse incentives baked into privatisation.
Flow trimming is one of the reasons for the disgraceful state of our rivers,
not one of which, in England or Northern Ireland, is now in “good overall
status”, according to the latest census by the Rivers Trust. It also helps to
explain why homes, gardens and streets are being flooded with raw sewage,
recreating, in theme-park Britain, the 18th-century experience.
Cutting costs, reaping bonuses and dividends: everyone’s happy, except anyone
who believes our rivers and the sea should not be used as open sewers, which is
almost the entire population. We confront the central paradox of a system we
bizarrely call democracy: to achieve what almost everyone wants, we have to
fight almost everyone in power. The Conservatives who privatised water and the
Labour governments that failed to renationalise it were not responding to the
demands of the people, but to the interests of predatory capital.
The water companies’ business strategy has worked as follows: load themselves
with debt to finance dividend payouts; load the future with costs as they fail
to build the infrastructure – such as new reservoirs and pipes – required to
meet our growing needs; and load the rivers with excrement to avoid the expense
of upgrading their plants."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
