You’ve got to laugh. Today’s papers have Sir James Bevan, who is CEO of the Environment Agency - and I’m sure we’re all grateful for the job they’ve done for us - telling us we need to be ‘less squeamish’ about drinking water derived from sewage.
Quite right, make mine a double.
And, whilst we’re about it, ‘We need to treat water as a precious resource, not a free good’ which, for example, just falls from the skies.
This is the same Sir James Bevan who back in April was headlining a ‘crackdown on waste crime’ Here’s his rallying-call: “Six years ago, I called waste crime “the new narcotics”: A few decades ago it took a while for the authorities around the world to wake up to the damage drugs were doing and start to tackle the problem. As with drugs then, so with waste crime now. Today we are much clearer about the damage waste crime does to communities and to the economy, and we are now engaged in what will be a long struggle to nail the criminals.”
Many people might think that the most egregious waste-crime doing damage today is . . . illegal sewage dumping. Who’d be in charge of policing that? Er. . .
“Today we are much clearer about the damage waste crime does to communities and to the economy, and we are now engaged in what will be a long struggle to nail the criminals.”