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by detritus 988 days ago
Given Gibraltar dumps all of its sewage straight into the Med untreated, I don't really think it much cares.
4 comments

I was stumped when reading this. But it appears to be true!

https://www.yourgibraltartv.com/society/28113-tender-awarded...

Gibraltars population is 32K, which makes this less crazy than it sounds at first.
A shocking number of places in mainland UK do this too
I'm pretty sure there's nowhere in the mainland UK that just dumps all its raw sewage in the sea or in rivers - everywhere on the mainland was retrofitted with sewage treatment a while back. Now, those retrofits aren't perfect and sometimes raw sewage still overflows due to storms for example but we don't just routinely discharge all the sewage into the sea. There are still places in Spain, Ireland, and some other EU countries that haven't managed to build sewage treatment yet and actually do discharge all their raw sewage either into the sea or into rivers leading to it. (Yes, this is almost exactly the opposite of the narrative pushed by the British media.)

Gibraltar apparently doesn't have sewage treatment because they have some salt-water flush system for toilets due to fresh water historically being so expensive there and they seem to have had difficulty getting a treatment system that works with that.

Boil-water notices due to cryptosporidium and other nasties in drinking water are somewhat common in some places in Ireland. The difference in water quality and hardness between places that aren't very far apart is pretty striking.
This is probably fine for non-industrial wastewater tbh. Feces, urine and biodegradable toilet paper aren't putting anything in the ocean that isn't already there in vast quantities.
It's honestly not so wonderful an idea when you're downstream of it, which given the Med has a significant and continuous in-flow, means that people along the Costa del Sol swimming in the sea are probably having more than their fair allowance of Gibraltarian effluent.
It may or may no longer be the case but Santa Cruz, CA beaches on the boardwalk received raw sewage during storms due to overflow comingling.
This is the case across much of the US. Seattle dumped 100 million gallons of untreated storm & wastewater in 2022.