[subscribed]

And, by the extension, of the UK.

Every single river is a sewage. Beaches have untreated human faeces, sometimes swimming in the sea is a risk to life because of sewage-borne illnesses.

Decades of capital extraction and the governments trying really really hard not to see it.

[sidewndr46]

I'm not really pro-UK or pro-anything in Europe, but most of Europe was built out before modern sewage treatment. Or for that matter the germ theory of disease. It's more than easy to understand why rivers have untreated sewage is dumped into rivers. At the time of construction, it was state of the art.

The US in unusual in that most of it's population boom happened after modern sanitation. Yet we still have areas that discharge sewage into rivers on and ongoing basis.