Hawker News

'The eels were climbing out of the water to die'

theguardian.com

108 pointsby speckx68 comments

SoftTalker[30 comments hidden]
The one sentence in that long article that identifies the heart of the problem:

"It’s so expensive to dispose of waste legally that many people attempt to do it illegally."

This is one of those things where we just have to collectively bite the bullet and make it easy and cheap to dispose of things properly. Otherwise you get people dumping toxic waste in storm drains, throwing old tires and appliances in ravines, mixing dangerous contaminants into regular trash, or just putting their trash in other people's bins.

Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint. It costs about the same to dispose of any electronic item that has a screen. Even regular household garbage has to be put in special bags that cost about $2/each. All of this is a counterincentive to people disposing of their waste properly. And every few years the local waste manangement bureaucracy raises the rates.

Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays. Make it "free" and easy for people to do the right thing.

kalleboo[10 comments hidden]
> Just build it into the base taxes that everyone pays

You can also put the cost of disposal into the cost of the item at sale. Either through a deposit (like cans/bottles) or just a flat fee/tax.

Then you encourage people to buy less toxic, easier-to-dispose-of alternatives.

simonbarker87[3 comments hidden]
That’s exactly what the WEEE directive is in the UK/EU. I ran a company that manufactured and sold an electrical product and we had to pay an amount based on weight sold per quarter from memory. I have no idea if it’s actually used to help with disposal of end of life electrical waste but we paid a decent amount of 8 years of sales.
nohup2[2 comments hidden]
In Madrid at least we have “Puntos Limpios”, where consumers can properly dispose of many different kinds of waste, including electrical appliances, for free.

In addition, once a month there is a “punto limpio móvil” on each neighbourhood: a small truck from the city parks on a reserved spot for 2h to get the special waste from the neighbours, also for free.

vidarh[hidden]
That sounds fantastic. I'm in London and the lack of easy waste disposal without a car is the only thing that makes me wish I was driving... It's such an own goal that you create an incentive to keep having a car if you want to recycle.
vidarh[4 comments hidden]
Norway has a tax on drinks containers, and an optional bottle returns scheme, but with a tax refund tied to return rates which means almost everywhere participates in the deposit/returns scheme because its cheaper than paying the tax. I wish that mechanism was extended to a lot more things.
dgrcode[3 comments hidden]
This sounds good until you have to wait 10 minutes on the local return point to get 30 cent back.

You really need to not value your time at all to be willing to participate on those schemes.

dpark[hidden]
Germany had a similar scheme for returning soda bottles when I studied there (no idea if they still do). I would save up a few bottles before bothering to return them. Took a couple of minutes max. Hardly a big effort.

No one is standing in line to return one bottle.

My local grocery store has a similar return system for glass milk bottles. You just turn them in at the register when you check out. Even simpler.

vidarh[hidden]
Huh? It typically takes about 10 seconds per bottle during your grocery shopping.
broabprobe[hidden]
this is the galaxy brain solution
kalleboo[hidden]
One example is here in Japan, PC manufacturers have a legal duty to collect and recycle any PC they sell https://www.meti.go.jp/policy/recycle/main/admin_info/law/02...

So if you have some old PC you need to get rid of, you just call the PC manufacturer and they send a pre-paid shipping label and box to your home and the mailman comes to pick it up at their expense.

cucumber3732842[hidden]
The more you try and "fix" the problem by piling on laws, the more you make it cost, and the more demand you create for illegal or questionably legal dumping and the more payoff you create to make it worth it.
bamboozled[hidden]
Japan is crazy like this, in the countryside it's almost impossible to dispose of things easily. All through the autumn after rice harvest the fields just smell like burning plastic because it's just the easiest / cheapest way to get rid of it all.

Construction waste is also a major issue, insanely difficult to dispose of.

bombcar[hidden]
Exactly - if it's important, make it easy. Our town has an electronics drop-off and the only thing they could do to make it easier is make it open 24hrs, but I understand why it isn't.

Having to take a dead TV 60 miles to pay Best Buy to dispose of it was a non-starter for basically everyone.

Aurornis[3 comments hidden]
> Where I am it costs $20 to properly dispose of an old can of paint.

That’s a good way to discourage proper disposal.

Modern latex paints are accepted in normal household garbage in most cities if allowed to dry out first, but oil based paints should be collected at proper locations. It’s actually getting hard to find oil based paints for sale, but you want to encourage people to dispose of them properly. When someone discovers 10 old paints in the basement of an old house it shouldn’t cost $200 to dispose of them.

All of the counties I’ve lived in (USA) long enough to have material to dispose of have provided free hazardous waste collection sites. The only hassle was maybe dealing with the government employee who didn’t want to help you do the mandatory sign-in and the minimal paperwork some required.

My current city also has annual hazardous waste pickup days. They’ll advertise in your neighborhood with flyers explaining what they will collect and where to take it. Very convenient to drop it off locally.

Charging people for small scale disposal is a very bad idea.

monknomo[hidden]
should be a like a milk bottle deposit scheme, pay $30 up front, get $10 back on disposal
fc417fc802[hidden]
> My current city also has annual hazardous waste pickup days.

One place I lived permitted placing small amounts (there were strict limits) of appropriately packaged hazardous waste (there were detailed instructions) on top of your bin at any time. It didn't apply to everything but it made safely disposing of batteries, fluorescent lights, and various other common household hazards quite convenient.

ambicapter[2 comments hidden]
The biggest contributors to waste are corporations by many, many orders of magnitude. If you added the tax on these materials at the point of sale then the people who are actually generating this toxic waste would be the ones paying for its (free) disposal.
card_zero[hidden]
It's a big waste disposal problem when you've got a magniturde. (I enjoyed the serendipitous typo while it lasted.)

I don't know, my mind turns to enormous flytipping sites like this one: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdew6j2lxplo

I guess it's a kind of business that's behind these, but I don't think they're run by corporations.

vidarh[3 comments hidden]
My pet peeve is that while disposal is free at recycling centres near me, they are all basically built with the assumption that you will have a car. Some won't let you enter on foot, and most are far from public transport.
gmac[2 comments hidden]
Yes, where I am in the UK hazardous/electronic waste disposal is free for individuals but you have to take the items to a waste site. I suspect that means many people never bother.
vidarh[hidden]
It probably won't surprise you to hear that I'm also in the UK then... And, yes, currently we're lucky enough to have a decent sized shed where things are just accumulating instead because neither of us drive.
amelius[hidden]
Of course, but that is common sense, so difficult for most people with authority.
craftkiller[3 comments hidden]
In NYC it is free to dispose of such stuff properly (paid for with taxes). Of the sites I've been to, both have been easily accessible without a car. They've been incredibly easy to use: you walk up and either hand your stuff to the employee or put it in the correct bin yourself based on the signs. I've never had to wait in a line, you just walk in, drop your stuff, and go. And yet every week I still see people disposing of their electronics improperly by putting their smashed televisions on the curb for regular trash pick up instead of taking it to a special waste site. Hell is other people.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/dsny/what-we-do/programs/special-wa...

SoftTalker[2 comments hidden]
Yes, any barrier is too much for some people. Accept that fact, and have the municipal collectors pick up the TV and do the right thing with it. Better than it getting dumped in the woods or an empty lot somewhere.
craftkiller[hidden]
That sounds pretty difficult. We would need a way to signal to the municipal collectors what each thing is, and they would need to be able to store each type of thing separately. For example, are these batteries lithium, lead, or nimh? Those go into separate bins. What type of paint is it? those goes into separate bins. How are we supposed to indicate that a container contains used motor oil?

The simple trash, recycle, compost stuff works because it is only 3 categories so you can have 3 different colored bags/bins. Adding in the special waste stuff is adding 10+ categories. We'd either need a full rainbow of bins or some special stickers to mark each item (which would be yet-another barrier).

While I'd love at-home pickup, what we really need is for people to just be better.

asdff[2 comments hidden]
They make it free and easy to do these things where I live. But, you have to take it someplace. So, people still improperly dispose stuff. They won't even properly sort things amongst the bins they have sitting next to eachother, labelled on side and lid with stickers showing what belongs in what, in english, spanish, and in picture form.
SoftTalker[hidden]
Yes, and you'll never get those people to do otherwise. So just deal with it, yes everyone has to pay a little more but the alternative is that they dump it somewhere even worse than in the wrong bin.
Nick9012[hidden]
Would this not in turn cause people to be more wasteful?
Eddy_Viscosity2[hidden]
If that's what it costs to dispose of it, then that paint should have cost $20 more when you bought it.
ShadowOfThePit[24 comments hidden]
Christ. What a quote. And how depressing it all is. The poor family...

> Eels are pretty hardy, says Alistair; they can even travel over land if they need to. To see them gasping and dying on the banks was heartbreaking. “It was apocalyptic.”

> The results found unusually high levels of heavy metals, ammonia levels that were “well outside acceptable limits for any freshwater life” and nitrogen levels that were “toxic to all aquatic life”.

It's quite a long article that deals with many problems the UK has regarding environmental protection, illegal waste dumping and so on. The lack of care and amount of damage is just shocking.

I really recommend a read.

pseudohadamard[9 comments hidden]
In Italy this sort of thing is usually run by and/or blamed on the mafia. It's scary to think that the UK can do this to itself without needing the mafia involved.
andai[hidden]
If I was dumping toxic waste, I'd blame it on the mafia, too.
sscaryterry[3 comments hidden]
When you say mafia, I believe you mean organised crime. The UK has loads of it.
mc32[2 comments hidden]
What’s the proportion of local crime syndicates having local roots vs Eastern European roots? Is it even or is it lopsided? I really don’t know but have them impression it’s anglos but also lots from other parts of Europe.
sscaryterry[hidden]
Criminals come in all ways, shapes and forms. Street thugs are just one type of criminal.
JdeBP[3 comments hidden]
There are those in the U.K. who are not beyond equating Thatcherism and the Mafia. It has had long-ranging effects like this for almost 4 decades. The Thatcher government was not truly a criminal gang, of course.

The water companies were privatized under Thatcher, for those missing the context.

Note that the waste dumping problems are not all caused by water privatization, either. But as with the comparison to criminals, that's often conflated when people talk about it.

card_zero[2 comments hidden]
By you right now apparently?
JdeBP[hidden]
By people in this country whenever river pollution comes up. It's very popular to blame the water companies for everything, and a common remark on something that is widely discussed. Count Binface's manifesto in the recent Clacton by-election, for example, had a point where the water company executives should be forced to swim in the rivers that they had polluted.

The reality is that it's not solely the water companies, even though if you put it to them many people would leap on the comparison to the Mafia.

asdff[hidden]
Organized crime just organizes the dumping operations. It happens in the US too. It's just lazy and easier to toss stuff on the side of the road knowing full well there's slim to zero chances of you ever getting dinged for it. It is less so major companies doing this these days (they did in the past) but more smaller outfits now you have to worry about who don't want to pay associated fees for proper disposal of environmental hazards. Always random piles of tires and construction crap to be found in certain areas. But even something so innocuous as your neighbor changing motor oil and just pitching it in the trash after is technically against the rules.
Oarch[8 comments hidden]
It's a long, meandering read never comes close to a clear claim or conclusion.
happytoexplain[hidden]
What on earth are you even referring to? Everything written in the article seems relevant. Isn't the claim that this entire lake was killed due to negligent pollution from an upstream farm, and is one of many cases? Isn't the conclusion that these cases are caused by a lack of regulation/enforcement?
boesboes[2 comments hidden]
Did you even read it? It's a pretty deep dive yes, but it does have some real background and makes clear claims on what is going on.
Oarch[hidden]
I guess I was hoping for concrete evidence, charges brought and consequences. Given the length of the read I'd wanted some payoff...

Yes I found there was some suspicion. The rest read to me as related thematic padding.

CharlesW[3 comments hidden]
You should read TFA. Among it's many unambiguous claims is that the root cause was extensive dumping at Morgans Farm by Robins of Herstmonceux, and that fixing it could be model for how to fix similar problems throughout Britain.
Ariarule[2 comments hidden]
I do not, in fact, see such an unambiguous, unhedged claim in OP. Can you quote it?
happytoexplain[hidden]
An unhedged claim can't be quoted because there isn't one, but nobody claimed otherwise. Absolutist claims are, of course, an unrealistic bar for journalism. It's unclear why you are writing ominously/non-colloquially. I'm guessing you have some kind of unstated bias here, and are falling into the internet trope of speaking as though something doesn't even exist unless it is proven in a court of law or via formal math or something.
CursedSilicon[hidden]
Here, let me surmise it for you at your level

"concerning!"

schiffern[5 comments hidden]
[never trust The Guardian to keep out the off-topic non-sequiturs...]
didntcheck[2 comments hidden]
> In the case of Furnace Brook, the water companies were not to blame.

TFA

kergonath[hidden]
Don’t let reality get in the way of a good (?) rant.
missinglugnut[2 comments hidden]
The privatized water companies were not the ones responsible for the Furnace Brook pollution.

Morgan Farms is burying waste on their property and failing to contain it while the EA (government regulators) are unwilling/unable to stop it.

schiffern[hidden]
True, but based on the quote it seems privatized sewage companies are also turning England into a failed state, so that's not much comfort.

As always The Guardian never met an irrelevant off-topic non-sequitur it didn't like! Can't delete, but I blanked the off-topic post. Thanks

steve_adams_86[hidden]
If you're familiar with aquatic biology and chemistry, the levels of ammonia and nitrogen required to cause harm to fish like this is staggering. These animals have evolved (in many cases, not all) to tolerate some pretty gross conditions. Killing fish this acutely takes incredibly poor conditions. Especially carp.
myrmidon[8 comments hidden]
Cases like this are exactly why every populist claim of "cost savings through deregulation" should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, always.

Not only were many environmental regulations "written in blood" (and are well justified by observed damages before they existed), the average citizen would typically gain little from scrapping them. Allowing some industrialized chicken farm to dump their waste into the next river is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper. "Socialize (external) costs, privatize gains" is often the actual play instead.

Tadpole9181[2 comments hidden]
> is not gonna make your eggs that much cheaper.

Any. It's not going to make your eggs any cheaper.

The market is already bearing the existing price, so all that saved money is going in an executive's pocket.

missinglugnut[hidden]
Absolute statements like this are just nonsense. Companies really will undercut each other on price to get customers. How much this happens depends on how competitive the market is. And one of the ingredients of a competitive market is not having high compliance burdens making it hard on new entrants.

If any idiot with a chicken could enter the egg business, eggs would be cheaper and more plentiful, but also less safe. Cheap importers would take over and probably start faking expiration dates and making people sick, but golly it'd be cheap. And contrary to you claims, it would also cause the richest execs in the business to lose their bonuses while the sketchy importers took over on slim margins.

I don't want that, but come on, you gotta admit the cost tradeoff is real.

cucumber3732842[5 comments hidden]
The populists are right on this one if only out of dumb luck.

If you wanted to dump shit on the riverbank in 1950 you'd just bribe/threaten officials with discretion or call in a favor from a friend of a friend to get approved and there weren't a ton of strings or hoops or recurring cost once you got it going.

To do it in 2026 you have to continually pay a bunch of middle men and compliance parties diffusing responsibility far and wide enough in the process that no one party can be held responsible because the lawyering it would take to drag that across the finish line would be more than you could recoup from said party, often helped by statutory limits to liability for all these middle men and compliance parties.

Focusing on the legality or compliance with rules of any one of the myriad of parties listed in the article or whining about the inaction of the enforcement agencies funding level is basically a red herring to rile up the useful idiots to clamor for more of all this. The more you pass rules that drive up cost the more you create room for additional middle men to diffuse responsibility if operating above the table and the more payoff you create for those who are willing to operate below the table.

Garbage disposal one of those areas where the modern regulatory state is an abject failure by anything other than the definitions of success cooked up by the regulatory state peddlers themselves. I don't know what the solution is. The paradigm it replaced was pretty bad too.

bamboozled[2 comments hidden]
Respectfully, what a load of shit?

In Australia all the regulations exist and the waste management is top notch, insanely easily and fairly cheap.

The solution is electing a decent government.

cucumber3732842[hidden]
You're like 10-15yr behind the UK on this same path.

Landfilling has been intentionally regulated into being non-viable in the UK and in many other places. They simultaneously regulate incineration which sets a high minimum price there (whether this is intentional depends on who you ask). This creates all your economic demand for "if we engage in a complex regulatory compliance scheme we can dump obviously bad but technically compliant from the POV of any one party dirt on a farm for a decade before we get shut down and all walk away pocketing an X% ROI" type crap like in the article comes from.

The northeast US and wide swaths of europe have the same problems too.

myrmidon[2 comments hidden]
I think you are being deceptive; the no-regulation alternative/cost to "setting up a middlemen network for responsibility diffusal" is not "bribing officials", it's nothing; companies just used to pump their toxic tailings slurry into the next lake/river/barely secured ditch at basically zero cost.

Having to pay those middlemen is a sign of the regulation working (because the cost for creating superfund sites is no longer zero), and all society has to do is increase enforcement rate/liability limits until the middlemen are more expensive than proper disposal.

cucumber3732842[hidden]
You misunderstand. The "middlmen" I'm talking about are the firms regulation has brought into existence and/or drive work to. If you say that some firm that lab tests dirt samples is now on the hook for more money, or perhaps has more business driven to them. In any case cost for who's hiring them goes up and the "zero regulation" solution becomes that much more lucrative.

Like I said, going back to the pre-regulation ways isn't a solution, that was pretty bad too.

clcaev[hidden]
The burden of proof seems backwards; how about we maintain list of approved safe materials and their threasholds?
jauntywundrkind[2 comments hidden]
Not particularly relevant, but do the younger generations these days know about Captain Planet? It's kind of wild that that strong ethos on TV feels missing. Or at least, I have no idea what similar type shows there would be.

I hear problems like this and I think of that Ministry for the Future answer. The strong no, in the most absolute terms.

palmotea[hidden]
> Not particularly relevant, but do the younger generations these days know about Captain Planet?

Given they haven't made an episode in more than 30 years, they almost certainly don't.

> It's kind of wild that that strong ethos on TV feels missing. Or at least, I have no idea what similar type shows there would be.

IIRC, Captain Planet was pretty preachy and not actually that fun to watch. But oh my does this article sound like it describes a literal Captain Planet plot, I can just imagine that yellow guy laughing about how he's going to dump toxic waste in a stream.

andai[hidden]
Also in the toxic sludge lake department, a mini documentary on Geamăna, Romania:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIR8vd-bi8I

pvaldes[hidden]
European eel: critically endangered
laweijfmvo[hidden]
It’s not surprising. The people voting for these regulation cuts spend their whole lives in air conditioned boxes (be it their mass built houses, their massive cars, or the office), and their idea of nature is a well manicured golf course. the people they vote on only care about enriching themselves and their corporate donors.

at some point we’ll be living in a dust bowl eating barely nutritious food and people will think “man, how could the liberals have done this to us?”