Water & Wastewater Treatment

www.wwtonline.co.uk | WWT | MAY 2015 | 5 Polluters pay Yorkshire Water guilty of Naburn sewage spill Yorkshire Water has pleaded guilty to polluting the River Ouse with 10,000 cubic metres of raw sewage after a pump failure at Naburn Sewage Treatment Works in August 2013. The Environment Agency, prosecuting, said that the company had failed to provide a working stand-by pump and that this was the cause of the spill; the situation also reoccurred in 2014, although without causing a pollution incident. York Magistrates Court referred the case to the Crown Court for sentence. Sembcorp Bournemouth fined for cryptosporidium Sembcorp Bournemouth Water has been fined just over £130,000 for supplying contaminated water which led to residents of four households in the city becoming seriously ill. The supply company pleaded guilty to four counts of supplying water unfit for human consumption, and one count of failure to adequately operate a treatment process, in relation to an outbreak of gastroenteritis caused by the parasite cryptosporidium in May 2013. Just 17% of England's rivers in 'good' health Only 17% of England's rivers are rated as having 'good' ecological status, down from 24% in 2014, according to new figures from the Environment Agency. The statistics reveal that 62.4% are rated 'moderate', while 20.4% are 'poor' or worse. However, the EA says that the EU assessment criteria have tightened since last year, with a waterway needing to pass all three tests - chemical, wildlife or flow – in order to achieve the 'good' rating. CIWEM criticised coalition over SuDS and metering Wessex Water makes zero-waste pledge Wessex Water has set itself an ambitious target to ensure that none of its waste is sent to landfill by 2020. The company already diverts 97% of its waste from landfill, including all of its office waste, but wants to make this 100% across the whole business over the next five years. The goal is made more challenging by the fact that around 1% of waste is The coalition government has come up short in a number of water policy areas over the last five years, with progress on SuDS particularly disappointing, according to the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM). A report released by the organisation measured the performance of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition against CIWEM's 2010 manifesto 'Fitting the Bill' which laid out priorities for the Government on water and environmental policy. The report praised the progress made in water company regulation, in particular the imposition of a duty of resilience on Ofwat in the Water Act 2014; it gave a mixed verdict on the Flood and Water Management Act and the energy efficiency measures contained in the 'Green Deal'. However it was critical of progress on sustainable drainage. "Progress on delivering sustainable drainage systems has VOX POP "This Government may technically have been the greenest ever, but the bar has been set exceptionally low." Dr Simon Festing, Chief Executive, CIWEM (see story, le ) "A lot of pumps already provide us with real- time data, but what's going to be interesting over the next few years is the way in which we as an industry use that data," Mike Rush, United Utilities "Yorkshire Water is committed to being a responsible business and our new social tariff is an important step in ensuring we do everything we can to support our customers." Richard Flint, CEO, Yorkshire Water accounted for by items such as contaminated soil and construction wastes that are difficult to reuse or recycle. James Peacock, waste management adviser at Wessex Water, said: "As a utility company, we must ensure we're doing our best for the environment and with landfill tax now at £80 a tonne, it now makes economic sense to aim for these high recycling rates. "It takes a bit more work and thinking about upfront, but results in us saving money and reducing our impact on the environment." been poor. Guidance, maintenance, adoption and how they are dealt with in the planning system need resolving," the report reads. It also said that the Water White Paper "lacked ambition" on metering, and that while water metering had increased across the country since 2010, this was driven by individual water company action rather than through a collaborative approach supported by government. CIWEM also gave the government the thumbs down for failing to heed its call to make water companies statutory consultees in the planning process for homes being built in water stressed areas. Overall, the Institution said that the coalition had placed the environment a firm second to economic growth and called on the next government to ensure that its policies place a healthy environment at the heart of a sustainable economy rather than viewing it as a brake on economic growth.

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