An "insider" at Britain's quasi-governmental Environment Agency is speaking out about an alleged cover-up involving contaminated water and farmland irrigation, The Guardian reports.
What's happening?
Like the United States' Environmental Protection Agency, the U.K.'s Environment Agency is broadly tasked with protecting the country's air and water, as well as monitoring threats like floods and pollution.
Unlike the EPA, the Environment Agency isn't strictly under the government's purview; it's designated as a non-departmental government body, operating with sponsorship by the government.
In 2020, a Greenpeace Unearthed investigation uncovered serious concerns around the practice of "landspreading" — distributing processed "sewage sludge" across farmland as fertilizer.
Landspreading is controversial, described in a 2009 peer-reviewed journal article as an "ominous conjunction of loopholes" between "water laws [and] hazardous waste laws."
In July, The Guardian spoke to an anonymous Environment Agency "insider," who alleged a "deliberate and ongoing cover-up" over the dubious safety of landspreading. According to the source, Agency officials and the U.K. government colluded with water companies and wastewater treatment facilities to conceal known dangers from the British public.
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Moreover, the Agency insider indicated the problem wasn't new when Greenpeace's investigation dropped over five years ago.
"This has been going on for decades. The sludge regime is still being run under guidance created by the water companies, and when the Environment Agency finally funded research that uncovered real dangers, they buried it," they asserted.
The individual said that guidelines known as the "safe sludge matrix" date back to 1998. Not only are those benchmarks voluntary, the insider said they were developed by private companies purportedly subject to oversight and "simply accepted by the Environment Agency."
Another unnamed expert in the industry called the guidelines an "exercise" in public relations, and a second Agency source said the only thing the matrix was engineered to protect was private businesses' "access to the land bank."
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Majorly 😥 Why is this story so concerning?
An idiom about a fox guarding the henhouse purportedly dates back to ancient Rome for good reason — even in antiquity, humans recognized the inherent dangers of a conflict of interest.
If the insider's claims are accurate, the issue goes beyond whether landspreading is safe and into potentially malfeasance.
The Guardian repeatedly covered the issue this month, noting that water quality tests drawn up in 1989 only mandate testing for a "narrow range of heavy metals."
However, the outlet cited scientists and insiders who say sewage sludge can introduce a nightmarish cocktail of "pharmaceuticals, pesticides, hormone-damaging chemicals, and microplastics" to the soil, along with PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals."
Again, if the whistleblower is correct, the problem isn't just environmental — it's regulatory.
What's being done about it?
In June, Greenpeace published a follow-up about the landspreading controversy, indicating that implicated companies had "no plan B" to dispose of their waste.
Greenpeace campaigner Reshima Sharma said nothing can change without enforcement, and private companies can't be trusted to self-regulate.
"The government must stop toxic sludge from being spread on farmland immediately and water companies must be made to pay for disposing of it safely, without passing the buck to bill payers," Sharma said.
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