Jonah Fisher
Environment correspondent
Getty Images
About 3.5 million tonnes of sewage sludge, that’s enough to fill nearly 900 Olympic sized swimming pools are spread of farmers fields in England and Wales each year.
Successive governments have failed to deal with the threat posed by spreading sewage sludge containing toxic chemicals on farmers’ fields, a former chair of the Environment Agency has told the BBC.
About 3.5 million tonnes of sludge – the solid waste produced from human sewage at treatment plants – is put on fields every year as cheap fertiliser.
But campaigners have long warned about a lack of regulation and that sludge could be contaminated with cancer-linked chemicals, microplastics, and other industrial pollutants.
Emma Howard Boyd, who led the EA from 2016 to 2022, says the agency had been aware since 2017 that the sludge can be contaminated with substances, including ‘forever chemicals’.
“Forever chemicals” or PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals which come from things like non-stick saucepans. They don’t degrade quickly in nature and have been linked to cancer.
Documents seen by BBC News suggest the water industry is now increasingly concerned that farmers could stop accepting the sludge to spread and that water firms have been lobbying regulators and making contingency plans in case rules change.
Ms Howard Boyd says efforts to update rules, which date back to 1989, to include new contaminants were “continually frustrated by the lack of ministerial appetite to deal with this issue.” In a public letter signed by more than 20 others she called on the current Environment Minister Steve Reed, to act now.
The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told the BBC regulations around sludge spreading are being looked at. The water companies trade body Water UK told the BBC they were aware of the concerns but that no legal standards for contaminants had been set by the government.
BBC/Jonah Fisher
A pile of sewage sludge waiting to be spread on a field. Usually the sludge is provided either free or very cheaply to farmers as fertiliser.
Unlike the cleaned water that is discharged from wastewater treatment plants, the sewage sludge, or biosolid as the industry calls it, is considered “exempted waste”.
That means the treatment focuses mainly on killing bacteria and testing for heavy metals in the sludge.
There is no routine testing for chemicals, including “forever chemicals”, which have been developed over the last three decades and are getting into the sewage network from both from domestic and industrial users.
“I think the big concern is because these substances (forever chemicals) are so persistent they’ll stay around in the soil for hundreds, if not thousands of years,” says Alistair Boxall, professor of environmental science at York University.
“It may be in 10 years’ time that we start understanding that these molecules are causing harm,” he said. “Then we’re going to be in a bit of a mess, because we’ll be in a situation where we’ll have soils in the UK that will have residues of these molecules in them, and at the moment we have no way of cleaning that up.”
In 2022, the US state of Maine became the first state to ban the spreading of sludge contaminated with “forever chemicals” after high levels were found in water, soil and crops.
Reports and emails shown to the BBC by Greenpeace’s Unearthed investigation unit and obtained using Freedom of Information Act requests, reveal the water industry is acutely aware that attitudes are changing and is both lobbying government and making contingency plans.
The co
Read More