We hate the sewage smell – but that’s not the end of it…….
Sorry if this is depressing, but this needs to be more widely known……
We all know about the offensive stench that frequently blights the lives of us locals living near the Seafield Sewage Treatment Centre. (And our ongoing fight to stop or at least reduce it! There is some good news on that, by the way, as work has apparently FINALLY started on building new undergound storage tanks, using the ‘no regrets funding’ provided by Scottish Government some considerable time ago…..)
But what happens next to the sewage? At our recent Community Council meeting, we listened with horror to our visiting speakers, long time campaigners Jo Hirst and Doreen Goldie who talked about the dangers to human health, to animal health, and to the soil and the environment, when the processed sewage leaves the plant in the form of ‘sludge cake’ and is spread across local agricultural land as a fertilizer. There is growing research evidence that this sludge is toxic, and causes an extremely serious public health risk, but it seems that the Scottish Govenment does not want to hear that, nor do anything about it. The practice of dumping sewage sludge at sea is now banned, and a number of countries have also banned spreading it on farmland. But not here. In fact, the Netherlands, who have banned it there, actually export their sewage sludge to the UK for dumping here!
See this recent article which summarises the situation, and if you wish to follow up further, see this comprehensive reading list of links
A campaign has been launched to have this practice ‘paused’ until the full facts are made known. At the very least a much more stringent system of monitoring, testing, regulation and enforcement is urgently needed, as very little of any of those is currently done.
The Leith Links Community Council will continue to participate in the Seafield ‘stakeholder meetings’ and will be keen to add this issue to the list of important considerations facing SEPA and Scottish Water as the time for handing over running of the Seafield plant from Veolia to Scottish Water draws closer.
