“She was stopped by three enforcement officers”. Some fucking heros.
This is one of those times it pays to actually read the article. The fine has been thrown out. Whatever patrol men ran up and fined her for polluting waterways were clearly overzealous and the council threw the charge out when she appealed it.
The storm drains in my area all have prominent “no dumping” signs on them, because they do drain to sensitive waterways that would impact wildlife and the environment if they were polluted. But I think the main thrust of this is keeping people from dumping their anti-freeze and motor oil and old gasoline and paint and shit like that.
So on the one hand, I kind of understand the instinct to say “hey don’t dump your shit there, that’s a storm drain” but obviously a few sips of coffee isn’t going to hurt anything.
The article was updated a few hours ago but when it was originally posted and accumulated its first slew of upvotes, the fine hadn’t been rescinded yet and the only statement from the council was that their enforcement officers had acted appropriately and the fine was appropriate.
Also, in much of the UK, the surface water and foul water drains both go into a single combined sewer system, with areas that have been built up for centuries like this one being most likely to still use that old approach.
They clearly only rescinded it because of the media attention. The real story is that England’s councils are now so stripped to the bone on austerity that they’re hiring roaming enforcers to enforce fines on obscure regulations and instruments to raise money.
They must have run out of old ladies to arrest for tErRoRiSm
Seriously. If you wouldn’t fine them for littering by dumping the coffee on the pavement right beside the drain (which it would washinto on the first rainstorm) then they shouldn’t fine them for anything by dumping it directly into the drain.
No one is going to get fined for dumping coffee on the sidewalk. But they might get fined for dumping oil or paint on the sidewalk.
Yeah that’s a good point. Can you imagine getting a ticket because you spilled your coffee?
Reading this it feels like you people still live in the middle ages, dumping the contents of shitpans out the window. ^^
Who is “you people” and how do you get that? I just spent the whole comment talking about how we don’t allow dumping in the storm drains.
At least it’s organic shrug
Not the Onion…
This story is really poor and badly reported, as it doesn’t explain WHY the Environmental Protection Act 1990 has these fines in place and why what this women did was wrong. Instead it’s a clickbait story that implies the woman is a victim.
In the UK (and like many places) there are 2 systems of water drainage in urban areas - the surface water drainage (which is for rainwater) and the sewage system (which is dirty and drains toilets, home sinks, etc).
The surface water drainage runs eventually into fresh water such as lakes, rivers, and the sea, untreated. So if you pour coffee down a rain drain, it is contaminating the fresh water. It may seem ridiculous to fine someone for the dregs of one coffee, but if everyone were putting waste water in the rainwater drains / gutters it would have a detrimental impact on the ecosystem. It’s already a huge problem as people DO put contaminated water into these drains, probably due to widespread ignorance.
The sewage system is for contaminated waste; that water is collected and treated and either reused for drinking water or then released back into the fresh water system. Finish your coffee OR take it with you to a place where you can dispose of it into the sewage system.
She needs to pay her fine, educate herself and understand she is not a victim here. She did something wrong.
It’s already a huge problem as people DO put contaminated water into these drains, probably due to widespread ignorance.
You talk of ecosystems, but we’re talking about a beverage made entirely of natural biodegradable ingredients. It’s bean water. You may as well complain about the runoff coming out of a nature preserve.
What she did was right. It was safe. Your slippery slope would apply to bulk dumping or actually dangerous liquids. In reality, roads and roofs are covered with all kinds of dirt and things, all of which gets washed into the storm sewer every time it rains. But here you are pretending a quarter cup of coffee could possibly be problematic.
So all the diesel runoff from leaky lorries, tractors, badly maintained vehicles etc and, whatever else that gets spilt on the roads goes into our waterways untreated?
Plus Thames water has been releasing raw sewage into our waterways.
The fact that that happens is not a reason to allow free dumping into the storm drains though. There’s not a ready solution for motor oil drips that happen to leak from a truck. There is a solution to homeowners wanting to dispose of 4 quarts of oil after an oil change.
The dumping laws make sense, this was just a stupid application of them.
The solution was this…
Thanks for explaining
In the UK (and like many places) there are 2 systems of water drainage
Not necessarily, older systems tend to be combined systems where sewage and rainwater go down the same pipes and are treated before going into the river. London (where this story takes place) is like this as the system was built in the 1800s when they didn’t care about treating water before it went into the Thames. This becomes a problem when it rains too much and it overwhelms the treatment system so they just dump untreated sewage into the Thames like the good old days.
Then again maybe they’re building a parallel separated system to try and reduce the load during heavy rains. Ie. We were rebuilding this road anyway, might as well connect it to a new storm water drainage system instead of sending it to the old Victorian one, and that’s why they don’t want people dumping.
Your main point is correct for most people living in places that were developed in the 1920s or later, don’t dump shit in the storm drains.
This story is really poor and badly reported, as it doesn’t explain WHY the Environmental Protection Act 1990 has these fines in place and why what this women did was wrong. Instead it’s a clickbait story that implies the woman is a victim.
That has already been explained in the article. 👀
Section 33 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 makes it an offence to deposit or dispose of waste in a way likely to pollute land or water, including pouring liquids into street drains.
Thank fuck they’re cracking down on this rather than the water companies knowingly spilling raw sewage into our waterways.
They said she should have poured the coffee into a bin instead?! I think the garbage men disagree, they dont like liquids in the trash
Can confirm, binmen hate coffee bin juice
Based on the title alone I thought that she was a barista who poured hundreds of liters of coffee down the drain or something which might make sense. But no, just the last sip on her cup in order to prevent it from spilling in the bus or causing problems in the trash bin. Do they fine people if they accidentally drop their full cup too?
There are 9.8m people in London. If everyone was pouring the dregs of their coffee into the surface water drainage it’d be an environmental mess.
Contaminated fluids including dregs of coffee belong in the sewage system, not the surface water drainage system. This is literally the same as pouring coffee into a river or a lake - that’s where the surface water system is designed to run to directly, untreated. In London, that’s the Thames receiving that directly.
I throw leftover coffee into the yard by the car door when I find one, been doing it for 20 years and yard seems about the same, even with the recent drought.
In Florida, rain gutters that flow to open waterways are marked as such with special reminders / warnings. Perhaps that would be a decent compromise here. Then one can’t say they didn’t know.
The UK only has one type of sewer, so the storm drains flow into the same waste processing plants as the toilets. However, those waste processing plants then declare an emergency due to unexpected high volumes and just dump everything into open waterways if it’s rained within the past week, which, as it’s the UK, it almost always has. There are multiple issues at play here, and they’re all dumb and foreseeable if you assume companies will do whatever is most profitable without breaking the law, and none of them are this person’s fault.
Ooooo…RFK knows where to swim next.
Apart from the stupidity of the fine itself, why is it 150 but only 100 if you can pay it in 14 days? Thats insane. “You cant afford to pay this fine immediately so pay more”???
Fines are for the poor.
Yeah thats my point along with my never ending horror of the capitalist dystopia we live in
Makes people less inclined to fight or ignore it when there’s a time limit like that.
It’s the same with speeding fines and parking tickets, and the white collar criminals that call themselves car park management companies. Many folk just pay rather than appeal, thinking that the time it takes to appeal will mean they end up paying full price, but I’m pretty sure the clock is paused during the appeal process.
I’ve contested many a fine, I fucking hate those parking sharks. The clock is indeed stopped until a decision is made.
Then it’s usually back to the original terms of payment stated on the OG fine.
I’ve even contested friends fines as well, I’d rather spend the 30 minutes appealing than let any of those companies get more revenue.
This is in the UK at least…
I got a speeding ticket in France and to contest it you have to pay the full fine (€90) and if you were successful with the appeal then you’d get that money refunded.
That is what happens when policemen can already read to understand the law, but are still too stupid to understand why the law exists.
This wasn’t police, it was council enforcement officers. People too stupid to get into the police.
For the last bit of a single coffee? That’s a fully organic compound.
You’d probably get the same fine for emptying a drum of used motor oil into it.
I’m glad that someone in the system had a brain
This… this is the “world news” today?.. Just wasting our time… intentionally im sure.
to deposit or dispose of waste in a way likely to pollute land or water
Its not “likely” at all tho, because the drain leads to a water treatment plant that constantly deals with literal feces…
It’s the UK. It’s a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one’s broken any laws they haven’t already nominally been punished for, there aren’t any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.
Well thats fucking outrageous. That means the UK is constantly flooding the ocean with tire rubber, oil and gasoline, dropped trash, fecal matter from animals, etc
If you’re worried about animal fecal matter making it into the waterways, I have bad news about fish
“I don’t drink water, fish fuck in it.” - I forget who said this
Fish don’t actually fuck though.
Even worse, they spew it all into the water (in specific areas where they “spawn”). In this case “fuck” was used as a procreation term rather than the literal penetration.
Those arent filled up with antibiotics, but you are right.
Lol, this is not anything new or crazy - All of NA infrastructure is built the same way. I’d be surprised if there were many places in the world that weren’t built this way.
Removed by mod
We should nationalise them and don’t give them a penny. We can then fix this mess and then invest in our future.
Even if nationalised, our water infrastructure still needs hundreds of billions of pounds investing in it to bring it up to an acceptable standard, and the government doesn’t have the money and has other priorities to spend it on if they magically got a surprise pile of cash. The only financially viable way to fix the problem in a hurry would be to seize past dividends from water company shareholders to cover the cost of doing the things the water companies were supposed to be doing (which would conveniently tank the share prices and make nationalising the water much cheaper), but lots of pensions are propped up mostly by water shares, so doing that would plunge lots of pensioners into poverty, which isn’t politically viable as the government’s already in enough trouble for perceived being mean to pensioners, and they can’t afford to support more impoverished pensioners.
That is incorrect - there are 2 water drainage systems in the UK. Surface water / rain goes into the surface system and that flows freely into the water table untreated (rivers, lakes etc). It is not designed for dirty water.
The sewage system is totally separate - that is for contaminated water (toilets, sinks) and that goes to sewage treatment plants. It should be treated before it is released into the freshwater system.
So yes, it IS polluting the fresh water by putting things into the rain drainage system.
Yeah i have already learned from other comments that the UK is uncivilized but thanks for the clarification.
I’m not sure if it’s an admirable trait to double down on your ignorance, but I’m kind of impressed by your willingness to do it in front of everyone.
Is coffee even considered waste?
Folgers should be.
HEYOOOO
Yes, it is contaminated water and should not be poured into the surface drainage system. It doesn’t connect to the sewers, it is separate and drains freely into rivers, lakes etc.
I don’t know the situation in the UK but some countries have separate drains depending on if it’s waste water or just a regular rain water drainage. Rain water drainages are often not treated in any way (because why, it’s rainwater anyway) but waste water is processed in treatment plants.
It’s not just rainwater once it’s made it’s way from the streets and into the gutter though… i would hope there’s some sort of treatment
There is not. Obviously I can’t speak for every city in the world but any I’m familiar with either flow back to natural water sources, or to storm ponds to slowly evaporate/become ground water
They are supposed to, except that the water companies just chuck half of into rivers, untreated, to protect their profit margins, and until very recently got away with it scot free.
Is this a UK specific problem? In most countries water treatment are municipal services paid for by either taxes or levies.
It’s privatised. It’s paid for by taxes, but most local authorities put it out to tender and private companies bid for the contract. So, ultimately, some public money ends up in the pockets of shareholders.
That’s the most wicked shit.
