Supporting appropriate sewage disposal

Dumping sludge at sea used to be the disposal method for about a third of the sewage sludge produced in the UK, but it has been steadily phased out. Rather than dumping the material at sea, water companies now use more beneficial methods, recovering value from the sludge as far as possible. These include: recycling into agricultural land to recover plant nutrients and organic matter; incineration or gasification with energy recovery where there is no ready access to agricultural land; and use for land reclamation schemes.