Sign in to save articles.
The week in brief · Week 45 · 2–8 November
The week's clearest verdict on how wastewater systems actually perform came from Ireland, where the Environmental Protection Agency reported that more than half of the country's licensed treatment plants failed to meet their discharge standards in 2025, and that poor operation and maintenance caused half of those failures. In England, the government announced eight regional water councils to give local leaders a say over how water companies spend on sewage, flooding and supply. And a review from Australia added to the evidence that some chemicals reach farmland with biosolids and stay there.
The EPA's Urban Wastewater Treatment in 2025 report, published on 4 November, found that discharges from 55% of the 505 licensed sites active during the year did not always meet the standards in their licences, down from 59% in 2024 (Environmental Protection Agency, 2026b). The breaches ranged from occasional short-duration discharges to frequent or continuous releases of raw or poorly treated sewage. The agency splits the causes almost equally between deficient infrastructure and inadequate operation and maintenance. Equipment breakdowns and poor maintenance alone led to more than 600 environmental incidents in 2025. Of roughly 1,350 one-off incidents, almost half traced back to plant equipment or its operation, and around a quarter were linked to bad weather such as Storm Éowyn in January; at the end of the year 262 longer-term or recurring incidents remained open. "Many of these failures could and should have been prevented," said Pat Byrne, a director at the agency, calling on the national utility, Uisce Éireann, to act immediately (Environmental Protection Agency, 2026a).
The scale of the system helps explain the stakes. Every day more than 1 billion litres of wastewater travel through about 26,000 km of public sewers to more than 1,000 treatment plants. The EPA carried out 287 enforcement inspections in 2025 and has secured 35 successful prosecutions against Uisce Éireann, seven of them in the past year.
