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ShadowOfThePit 2 days ago [-]
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 2 days ago [-]
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.
sscaryterry 29 minutes ago [-]
When you say mafia, I believe you mean organised crime. The UK has loads of it.
andai 43 minutes ago [-]
If I was dumping toxic waste, I'd blame it on the mafia, too.
schiffern 38 minutes ago [-]
>The story of Furnace Brook could be Britain in microcosm... River pollution has become a national scandal. The release of sewage by privatised water companies – illegal but persistent and apparently unpoliced – has devastated landscapes throughout England.
TL;DR, privatization is the quickest way to turn your nation into a failed state.
42 minutes ago [-]
Oarch 54 minutes ago [-]
It's a long, meandering read never comes close to a clear claim or conclusion.
CharlesW 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
CursedSilicon 10 minutes ago [-]
Here, let me surmise it for you at your level
"concerning!"
palmotea 49 minutes ago [-]
> It's a long, meandering read never comes close to a clear claim or conclusion.
So is your life.
You should probably have just used Claude to summarize it into some bullet points than complain it wasn't what you wanted.
happytoexplain 45 minutes ago [-]
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 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 28 minutes ago [-]
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 21 minutes ago [-]
> 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 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
bamboozled 3 minutes ago [-]
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 was is also a major issue, insanely difficult to dispose of.
cucumber3732842 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
andai 42 minutes ago [-]
Also in the toxic sludge lake department, a mini documentary on Geamăna, Romania:
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 5 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
cucumber3732842 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
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 1 minutes ago [-]
Respectfully, what a load of shit?
In Australia all the regulations exist and the waste management is top notch, insanely easily and fairly cheap.
laweijfmvo 42 minutes ago [-]
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?”
jauntywundrkind 39 minutes ago [-]
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 17 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
> 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.
"concerning!"
So is your life.
You should probably have just used Claude to summarize it into some bullet points than complain it wasn't what you wanted.
"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.
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.
Construction was is also a major issue, insanely difficult to dispose of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIR8vd-bi8I
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Australia all the regulations exist and the waste management is top notch, insanely easily and fairly cheap.
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?”
I hear problems like this and I think of that Ministry for the Future answer. The strong no, in the most absolute terms.
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.